Mark Gettleson

Is Joe Biden making the same mistake as Hillary Clinton?

Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton (photo: Getty)

In the final week of her presidential campaign, with victory seemingly all but assured, Hillary Clinton visited Arizona – a state that had only once voted Democrat since 1948. The trip was later taken as an example of Clinton’s hubris, after she failed to visit Wisconsin thinking it was in the bag, only to end up losing the state by 0.77 per cent.

In the end, Wisconsin proved to be the ‘tipping point state’ which took Donald Trump past the 270 electoral votes needed to take the White House. Fast-forward four years and you would think that Joe Biden’s campaign would be relentlessly focusing on the three ‘tipping point’ states forecasted to have more than 10 per cent chance of determining the outcome of the US election: Pennsylvania (33 per cent), Florida (13 per cent) and Wisconsin (11 per cent).

The campaign schedules say otherwise. Although both campaigns have made numerous trips to these states, Tuesday saw Joe Biden make two stops down in Georgia, a state that FiveThirtyEight suggests has a 2 per cent chance of deciding the election – and he will be in Iowa on Friday (less than 1 per cent).

Written by
Mark Gettleson
Mark Gettleson is a campaigns and communications strategist. He has written extensively on American and British politics, focusing on long-term electoral trends

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