Biden campaign adds staff in three battleground states

Presumptive Democratic nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden is making new hires in three battleground states as his White House campaign seeks to seize on new polls showing him leading President Trump nationally and in key swing states.

The campaign is bolstering its staff in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Nevada. The campaign is eager to flip North Carolina and Wisconsin back to blue after Trump won both states in 2016 and is fighting to maintain its edge in Nevada, which Hillary Clinton won by just over 2 points.

The campaign is tapping L.T. McCrimmon, who previously served as deputy legislative director for North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D), to be its state director in the Tarheel State. McCrimmon also served as political director on Deborah Ross’s failed Senate bid against Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) in 2016 and a legislative assistant for former Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.). 

Maggie Thompson, the North Carolina state director for Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) unsuccessful presidential bid, will be Biden’s new adviser and chief of staff in the state. And Scott Falmlen, a Democratic strategist and former executive director of the state Democratic Party, will also join the North Carolina team.

North Carolina, which went for President Obama in 2008 and for Mitt Romney in 2012, voted for Trump by about a 4-point margin in 2016.

The campaign is also making four hires in Wisconsin, one of the most hotly contested swing states.

Danielle Melfi and Scott Spector, who both held high-level positions in Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s (D-Wis.) successful 2018 reelection campaign, will be Biden’s new state director and senior adviser, respectively. Garren Randolph, who served as political director for Gov. Tony Evers’s (D) successful bid to oust former Gov. Scott Walker (R), will be Melfi’s deputy, and Shirley Ellis, an adviser to Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), will join Biden’s campaign as a strategic adviser with a focus on Milwaukee.

Wisconsin voted for Obama in both 2008 and 2012 but went for Trump by the narrowest of margins in 2016, setting itself up to be a key battleground this year. Baldwin’s campaign drew plaudits from Democrats after winning by double digits in 2018, outperforming Clinton by about 90,000 votes.

In Nevada, the campaign tapped Alana Mounce, the executive director of the state Democratic Party, to serve as its state director and state Sen. Yvanna Cancela (D) to come on as senior adviser.

Clinton won Nevada in 2016 by a smaller margin than Obama’s wins in 2008 and 2012.

The hiring in the trio of states comes after the Biden campaign tapped Andrew Piatt as senior adviser in Arizona and Jessica Mejía as its state director there. Piatt managed Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (D) successful 2018 Senate campaign, and Mejía previously ran Biden’s primary campaign in California, where Biden performed stronger than expected. 

The North Carolina and Nevada hires were first reported by Politico, and the Wisconsin hires were first reported by The Associated Press. All were confirmed by The Hill.

The campaign’s ramp up in the battleground states has been a priority of campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, who has boasted that Biden is set up to expand the electoral map in November to states like Arizona, Georgia and even Texas.

“This is something we are very, very focused on,” O’Malley Dillon told reporters at a digital briefing last month. “We believe there will be an expanded map in 2020. We believe there will be battleground states that have never been battleground states before.”