Biden Looks to Expand Staff as Bloomberg Weighs How to Help Him

Biden is looking to broaden his communications and political teams and reorder some of the senior-most roles in the operation, according to multiple people familiar with the campaign’s outreach.

Most significantly, Biden’s advisers are in discussions with Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who last year managed Beto O’Rourke’s presidential bid, to take a senior role alongside Anita Dunn, the chief strategist.

A top aide in former President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, O’Malley Dillon helped Biden in the run-up to the Nevada caucuses and worked to arrange O’Rourke’s endorsement of Biden on the eve of the Texas primary Tuesday.

She declined to comment, as did an aide to Biden.

Presidential campaigns often build out larger organizations as primaries go on and when the general election nears. Biden has been particularly understaffed, holding off on hiring because of financial constraints and day-to-day uncertainty about his prospects until this week. Nowhere was that more clear than in the states he competed in Tuesday, when he won 10 contests with little to no on-the-ground infrastructure.

But with his leading moderate rivals all exiting the race and endorsing him, Biden, the former vice president, is enjoying a financial windfall as he wages a head-to-head contest with Sen. Bernie Sanders. Since his victory in South Carolina on Saturday, Biden has raised more than $20 million. His super PAC has also raised millions of dollars and is going on the air in Michigan and Missouri, the largest states to vote next week.

Biden received a new burst of support this week when Michael Bloomberg, the wealthy former mayor of New York City, endorsed him and conveyed in a private phone call that he intended to be helpful to Biden’s campaign.

But advisers to Bloomberg cautioned that they were still at an early stage of determining how he would redeploy elements of his campaign apparatus now that he is no longer a candidate. While they intended to target President Donald Trump for defeat in a number of swing states, it could be a while before the details of those plans come into focus.

Biden has already shaken up his campaign operation, installing Dunn, a longtime adviser, at the top of his organization shortly before the New Hampshire primary last month. Aides to the former vice president had previously sought out O’Malley Dillon for a senior role and in fact made her an offer even before Iowa, according to a Democratic official familiar with the conversations.

Her role has not been finalized, in part because she is weighing family considerations, but it is expected to be arranged in the coming days, according to Democrats familiar with the discussions.

Biden has long had a sort of bullpen-by-committee approach to his senior staff, and longtime advisers like Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and his sister, Valerie Biden Owens, are expected to continue playing important roles along with his original campaign manager, Greg Schultz, and deputy manager, Kate Bedingfield.

Addisu Demissie, who managed Sen. Cory Booker’s campaign, said the timeline of a presidential contest required any major candidate at this point to start building out the staff and making plans for the general election. A veteran of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Demissie said that it was too late for Biden to develop a robust operation in big March primary states like Florida but that there was still time to strengthen his campaign in later-voting states and lay the groundwork for a national race against Trump.

“You cannot scale up a presidential campaign in any less than five months,” Demissie said. He suggested that a candidate in Biden’s position should be “bringing in as much talent as they can and, I assume, not taking the primary for granted but also realizing that the real battle is coming in November, and it’s coming pretty damn quick.”

In some regards, Biden and his top aides have been overwhelmed by his sudden, and unexpectedly broad, success. They are attempting to be sensitive to the staff members who, with little money at their disposal, helped resurrect his candidacy but are also eager to tap into the enormous pool of Democratic talent now available, people close to the campaign said. Hundreds of aides to Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Bloomberg are now available for hire.

A day after Bloomberg’s exit, his top advisers were beginning to map out how to repurpose his sprawling campaign organization to support Biden and other Democrats in the general election. The former New York City mayor has pledged for months to use his personal wealth to fund efforts against Trump even if someone else became the Democratic nominee.

Talking to Biden on the phone Wednesday, Bloomberg made clear that he would be supportive, but the two did not get into details, according to a Democratic official familiar with the conversation.

Indeed, the mechanics of Bloomberg’s plans are partly in the hands of lawyers who are weighing how best to convert different aspects of a political campaign into something that could be legally deployed on behalf of other Democrats. Several people close to Bloomberg said there was nothing resembling a grand plan in place.

While wealthy candidates like Bloomberg are permitted to spend unlimited sums of money on their own campaigns, there are strict limits on how much they can directly contribute to other candidates. As a result, Bloomberg cannot simply continue paying his campaign staff and direct them to work on Biden’s behalf instead.

An email sent out to Bloomberg’s campaign aides Wednesday assured people that everyone would receive pay and benefits at least until the end of March.

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Bloomberg’s senior advisers told Democrats for months that they intended to keep field operations in half a dozen battleground states regardless of whether Bloomberg became the nominee, and people close to Bloomberg said Thursday those plans were still in effect. The targeted states included five traditional swing states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and North Carolina — and the emerging battleground of Arizona.

Dan Kanninen, a senior aide on Bloomberg’s campaign, was planning to travel to Michigan and Wisconsin next week to talk to the staff members there about the best path forward, according to a former campaign official.

While Democrats speculated hopefully about how much Bloomberg might spend for the party in the presidential race and other elections, people close to him said no budget had been drafted. One person briefed on Bloomberg’s plans said there would be a detailed review of the tactics employed by his campaign, which spent more than half a billion dollars on advertising.

Some prominent Democrats outside Bloomberg’s orbit have lobbied his top aides to move swiftly, arguing that he can more quickly erase memories about his expensive campaign flop if he makes clear he will help the party up and down the ballot.

But there appeared to be some debate among Bloomberg’s advisers about whether to back Biden in the primary contest against Sanders, with one faction emphatically contending that an intervention against Sanders by one of the wealthiest men on the planet could backfire badly at a moment when Biden does not appear to need urgent assistance.

Bloomberg does, however, have an arsenal of anti-Sanders material at his disposal: Before Bloomberg dropped out of the race, his advisers produced a number of negative advertisements targeting Sanders, as they did for several other candidates. Bloomberg declined to run the ads.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .