While most presidential campaigns produce strategists and operatives who become high-profile political characters in a yearslong drama, you’ve probably never heard of the Joe Biden brain trust.

Pete Buttigieg has Lis Smith, the frenetic operative who single-handedly bulldozed the unknown mayor onto the cover of magazines and into the chairs of late-night talk-show hosts. Cory Booker has Addisu Demissie, who became a social media celebrity running a telethon-like fundraiser to get his candidate qualified for a debate. Warren has made minor stars out of her policy nerds.


But Biden’s team, a group of people who arguably navigated him through 2019 better than any of his opponents, keeping the candidate at the top of national polls for the entire year, has been largely invisible.

Since the start of Biden’s campaign, he’s relied on a core group of half a dozen people. Like any presidential campaign, Biden’s is sprawling—more than 400 people across the country—and it includes key advisers with ideological and racial diversity and is outfitted with all the accoutrements of a modern enterprise. But when the upper echelons of the Biden operation assemble at campaign headquarters in Philadelphia’s Center City, the group looks a lot like Biden: old and white and with long experience in Democratic party battles of a bygone era.

The average age of those six—Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon, Ron Klain, Valerie Biden Owens, Bruce Reed and Anita Dunn—is 62.

They are the key to understanding the big things about the Biden campaign: its centrist ideology, its old-fashioned view of the Democratic electorate, how the campaign came together and how Biden might govern.


Like Biden, those advisers came up in politics during the Reagan revolution, when Democrats were often taught that they needed to be ideologically cautious to win. Like Biden, they are contemptuous of the revolutionary left. Like Biden, they like to think of the Democratic coalition as still anchored in the white working class.

And a lot of smart people thought they, like Biden, would fail.

A year ago, Biden’s retro campaign, with its retro staff and retro view of who Democratic voters are, was predicted to have a swift demise. It didn’t happen. And it if it succeeds in the coming months, Biden and his team will have challenged everything people thought they knew about the Democratic Party in the age of Trump.

Top: Biden greets the staff at the Tasty Cafe during a quick campaign stop at the Eldridge, Iowa, restaurant in June. Bottom: At a Nov. 30 campaign stop in Council Bluffs. | Getty Images

Biden aides divide Bidenworld in half: There’s the inner circle, which is sometimes defined to include a few other longtime political allies, and there are the “new people,” which means anyone who joined the Biden operation since about 2007.


When a “new” person graduates into the inner circle, which is largely older and male and white, it’s notable.

For instance, Biden’s traveling chief of staff is Annie Tomasini, who started with him in Iowa 12 years ago during his second ill-fated run for president in 2007 and 2008, which means she’s “new.” “She’s one of the only ones from the new era of people who has been able to break into that almost family level of affinity,” said a senior Biden staffer.

Several aides said it is difficult to be welcomed into Biden’s inner circle, but once there people tend to stay. Signs of disloyalty are widely noted. According to aides, Biden was disappointed when Klain, a Biden lifer who had stints as a top Gore and Obama staffer, joined the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in 2015 before Biden had officially ruled out a run. “He’s back in the inner circle now,” said a former White House colleague.

As his rivals mount a contest to define the new era of the Democratic Party, the Biden campaign is, in many ways, a home for the refugees of all its other eras.

Some of the key figures in "Bidenland" (clockwise, from top right: Ron Klain, who served as chief of staff to Vice President Biden; Valerie Biden Owens, the former VP's sister and longtime political strategist; media strategist Mike Donilon, who served as an adviser to Biden in the early years of the Obama administration; and Steve Richetti, who was Vice President Biden's chief of staff from 2013–2017. | AP/Getty Images

There are the lifers who have been with Biden since the 1980s:

There’s Ricchetti, 62, the campaign chairman, former vice presidential chief of staff, former lobbyist and longtime Biden political adviser who is virtually invisible not only to the public, but also to people who work inside the campaign. “Most people don’t really know who he is,” said the senior Biden campaign staffer.

There’s Donilon, 60, Biden’s most trusted confidant and strategist since 1981, whom a colleague describes as Biden’s “alter ego” and the “soul of the campaign.”

There’s Klain, 58, Biden’s first chief of staff in the Obama White House, who leads Biden’s debate prep and has been with him since 1986, when he joined his team in advance of Biden’s first presidential run. “This is my third presidential campaign rodeo with Joe Biden,” he told me.


Valerie Biden Owens, 74, managed all seven of her brother’s Senate campaigns and his two previous presidential campaigns. “This is the first time I haven’t managed the campaign, and I want to tell you, it’s damn frustrating!” she recently told a crowd in South Carolina. But she remains one of the most important entry points to the Biden world. “All of these outside people are used to going to her so they still do it,” said the senior Biden staffer.

Others have shorter histories, but have been Biden-adjacent for many years and are now core to his 2020 operation.

When Biden is on the road, he is usually accompanied by Bruce Reed, 59, a Bill Clinton campaign and White House veteran who led the Democratic Leadership Council, the now-defunct centrist think tank that helped elect Clinton and was the bête noire of the Democratic left for more than two decades. Reed later led Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, another target of liberal angst, and then replaced Klain to be Biden’s second chief of staff. (Ricchetti then replaced Reed in advance of a possible 2016 run “because he was perceived by Biden to be a little more political,” a former White House colleague said.) Reed, who along with Donilon frequently travels with Biden, now serves as Biden’s main policy expert briefing the candidate on the road. “Bruce and Donilon are there to be his personal team,” said one Biden staffer.

Top: President Bill Clinton with domestic policy adviser Bruce Reed (center) and Education Sec. Richard Riley (right) in May 1999. Bottom: Anita Dunn at her office in Washington in 2008. | Getty Images/AP

On foreign policy, Tony Blinken, 57, who has been with Biden almost continuously since 2002, when he became Biden's staff director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, plays a similar role. The policy operation is overseen by Stef Feldman, an Obama veteran who has been with Biden since 2011.

The one newcomer at the top is Anita Dunn, 61, whose history in presidential politics is with progressive candidates: Bill Bradley in 2000 and Barack Obama in 2008, when she was his communications adviser during the general election campaign then in the White House. Like Biden himself, the Biden campaign sometimes has a chip on its shoulder about the lack of respect it receives from the press and the larger universe of Democratic professionals. Dunn is the best articulator of the campaign’s anti-liberal elite wrath.

“Anita is the go-to person on both, ‘How do we go on offense and dominate the news cycle?’ and ‘How do we clean this mess up?’” said a former colleague. (Dunn’s husband, Bob Bauer, Obama’s former White House counsel, is also a key member of the larger Biden brain trust.)

With the exception of Dunn, most of these advisers are unseen to the public and the press. The public faces of the campaign are Dunn, Kate Bedingfield and Symone Sanders. For instance, on debate nights, unlike most of his opponents, Biden doesn’t visit the spin room. Instead Biden’s trio of top spokeswomen handle the scrums of reporters and cable news hits. Sanders, who worked for Bernie Sanders—no relation—in 2016 has become close to Biden. “They have a great relationship and no one expected that,” said a senior Biden adviser. “He adores her.”

Day-to-day the Biden campaign is managed by Greg Schultz, an Ohio political operative who joined Biden in the White House in late 2013, when Biden was building his political operation for a planned run for the presidency in 2016. Schultz helped Biden navigate his post-vice presidential political activities, including his work in the 2018 midterms, as head of Biden’s PAC, American Possibilities.


Arriving in Biden world in 2013 also makes Schultz “new,” and many of the 200 or so staffers who only recently joined the Biden campaign consider him their point person. “Most people wouldn’t have any interactions with the Ricchettis and the Anitas of the world,” said a senior Biden staffer. “If you’re not senior staff, you probably wouldn’t know who some of those names are. If this is your first time on a campaign, Greg’s your guy.”

Schultz has also said his job isn’t to worry about strategy but to “execute” it. The Biden strategy was developed by Donilon, Ricchetti, Klain and the rest of the core brain trust.

At an April 2019 rally in Pittsburgh, Biden supporter Mason St. Clair dons a t-shirt covered in images of the former vice president. | Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo

In January, as Joe Biden planned his 2020 presidential campaign, he summoned a prominent Washington Democrat to meet with him and discuss policy. The party’s new House majority was being sworn in that month, and Democrats were engaged in one of their regular debates over their party’s ideological future.

Two dominant storylines had emerged from the 2018 midterm elections. In several safe districts, mostly in in urban areas, a number of younger, more left-wing candidates had defeated incumbent Democrats in primaries and then retained the seats for the party in the general election. The most notable example was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the then 28-year-old former Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer who defeated Joe Crowley, a 20-year incumbent twice her age, in a New York City primary. AOC beat Crowley by 4,100 votes. She now has almost 6 million Twitter followers.

At the same time in 2018, in a number of Republican-held swing districts, moderate Democrats defeated liberal primary opponents and went on to flip the seat for Democrats. Perhaps the best example was Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer from Northern Virginia who first beat a progressive challenger in the primary, then defeated Dave Brat, one of the most conservative House Republicans and a Tea Party celebrity.

Two prominent freshmen House Democrats who mark very different paths for the party: Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger (top), who represents a congressional district that Trump won in 2016, and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (bottom), whose Queens-based seat is one of the most heavily Democratic districts in the nation. | Getty Images

Both AOC and Spanberger represented a major political disruption, but in the media, and especially on Twitter, which is not used by 78 percent of Americans, AOC came to define the purported direction of the Democratic Party. The issues of the AOC left soon defined the early months of the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination as candidates outbid each other with calls to abolish ICE, decriminalize the border, embrace the most robust version of the Green New Deal and, most of all, support “Medicare for All.”

For the Biden campaign this was an especially alarming development. Biden was then 76 years old and had spent 36 years in the Senate and eight years as vice president. He had a long record and a well-known philosophy, and it didn’t look much like AOC’s. It wouldn’t be credible to jump into the race with a left-wing makeover, which is what some aides were urging.

Biden had campaigned around the country in 2018. Spanberger was one of his major primary endorsements that year. Not only could he not AOC-ify himself, he was convinced he didn’t need to.


He had what now seems like a profound insight. “Everyone is misreading the electorate,” he told his guest. “I campaigned in swing places, and the candidates who are winning are people who can get the middle.”

What Biden confronted is hardly a new debate. In the late 1980s, when Republicans had won five of the previous six presidential campaigns, the centrists had the upper hand; Bill Clinton’s election and presidency, assisted by Bruce Reed and the early DLC, was seen as an almost complete vindication for them.

After George W. Bush’s two terms, the Clinton approach was challenged by Barack Obama, who, while actually running to the right of Hillary Clinton on policy, defeated her in the 2008 primaries by successfully tapping into liberal frustration that Bill Clinton’s presidency had been insufficiently progressive. In Iowa, he attacked Clinton for “triangulating,” the word for Bill Clinton’s centrist governing style that became an epithet on the left.

Trump’s victory added gasoline to this always-burning left-right debate among Democrats, with both sides insisting that the other was to blame for Trump’s rise. The Democratic left sees Trump as requiring a radical response. Though they would no longer use the T word, the moderates, like Biden and his longtime advisers, see the moment as calling for a new kind of triangulation, one that co-opts much of the left’s modern agenda, but sands down its most electorally unpopular edges—decriminalizing the border, banning private health insurance, eliminating all college debt—which they see as key to winning over those Democrats who defected or didn’t vote in 2016.

But to Biden’s top advisers, the strategy is even simpler than that.

Paul Begala, one of Bill Clinton’s earliest and most loyal strategists, offers a metaphor to explain how the Biden team views the ideological divides in the 2020 race—or, more precisely, why they barely think about those ideological divides. He calls it “the steaming pile of shit theory.”

“You’re sitting down for breakfast and there’s a steaming pile of shit on your table and you say, ‘Can we get this shit off of my table?’” he told me recently. “And Elizabeth says, ‘I’m going to build you a new house!’ And Bernie says, ‘I’m going to build you a new city!’ And I’m like, no, just get this fucking shit off my kitchen table and we’ll get back to normal life!”

Klain, who has the unenviable task of helping make Biden a more rhetorically disciplined debater, put it more diplomatically. “His candidacy,” he said, “is driven by a desire to remove Trump and to remove the direction that Trump has put the country in and the things that are unique to Trump.” He added, “This seems kind of obvious now, but if you go back and look at the time Biden was getting in the race, the emerging conventional wisdom in our party at that moment was it was a mistake to make it about Trump. Voters wanted to kind of get beyond Trump.”


At the outset, they bet the race was unlikely to be settled mostly on policy issues or the liberal-moderate divide among Democrats. “I didn’t think this was going to be a very heavy issue-based choice,” said a top Biden adviser. “I didn’t think of this in terms of ideological lanes or any of that. The threat that Trump was posing was qualitatively different.”

The campaign developed a three-pronged message: that the election was about the “soul of the nation”; that the threatened middle class was the “backbone of the nation”; and that what was most needed was to “unify the nation.” Only Biden could restore the nation’s soul, repair its backbone, and unify it.

Donilon and Biden loved it. The only problem? A lot of other Biden advisers hated it. It seemed corny and tone-deaf. “Biden was totally in on it at the outset of this campaign and no one else was—no one,” said the adviser. “They said that’s not where people’s heads are at, because obviously there’s a big debate swirling on the left.”

Ignoring the noisy activist left and its megaphone on social media was perhaps the most consequential decision Biden made at the start of the campaign.

Biden talks with Iowans during his 650-mile "No Malarkey" bus trip through rural Iowa in December 2019. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

“Sanders is saying we need a political revolution. Warren was saying we need to overhaul America, big structural change, big money,” said the same adviser. “You had this whole dynamic on the left, very populist, a lot of anger, and very strong feelings about the need for reshaping America, the whole Warren-Sanders message. That is what is dominating the conventional thinking about the coming campaign: that the Democratic Party is becoming a party of the hard left and you must be responsive to that. That grew out of the rubble of the ’16 election. Then you draw a line through to Ocasio-Cortez winning in New York and you have a whole throughline: This is what the Democratic Party is. This is a kind of revolutionary moment, and we have to meet it with that sort of thinking. And it mattered because Sanders was already there and Warren moved in that direction. And that’s where Harris went. And that’s where Booker went. And the truth is that’s where Buttigieg went at the outset. He’s executing a pretty quiet retreat to the center now. But previously it was, ‘I’m all in with the new progressive world’ for a long time. So the whole party moved hard left. That’s where it went. That’s not how Biden was looking at the race.”

The adviser added, “He understood there was a rising tide in terms of a vocal, energized left. He’s not blind to it. But he didn’t see it as swamping the whole party. There was still a pretty broad swath of Democrats who hadn’t just decided to reject the Obama-era Democratic Party theory.”

Klain said, “It would be preposterous for him to stand up and say, ‘I’m the furthest to the left candidate in the field,’ or for him to stand up and say, ‘I’m a complete outsider and I have no experience doing things.’ We’re running the kind of race that is him.”

When most political observers watch Biden in a debate or at a diner interacting with voters or delivering his stump speech, they tend to have two main impressions: Biden looks very old and he rambles, sometimes to the point of incoherence. They—we!—wonder how it is that this seemingly flawed candidate has remained at the top of the national polls for the entire year.


Many reporters also initially thought that George W. Bush’s inability to communicate effectively was a major liability and that Donald Trump’s erratic behavior would almost certainly be rejected by Republican primary voters. Most of these observers also happen to be writers or TV analysts, people who place a high value on polished communication skills. That is the prism through which Biden’s longevity in politics is generally viewed by the media: age and possible mental decline. Whether Biden’s decades of experience is ultimately processed by voters as “too old” or “presidential” is key to his fate.

Biden’s top aides have insisted all year that Biden brought major assets to the race that were deeply misunderstood by the largely New York-based media elite who had similarly underestimated Trump in their coverage of the 2016 Republican primary. Biden was the only candidate in the field who unquestionably could be president on his first day in office. He had high favorability ratings among Democrats, was seen as empathetic, and he had a glowing Obama halo.

Biden’s experience “was always baked into the candidacy,” Klain said, “on the negative side his age, on the positive side the fact that he’s been around a long time and done a lot of things would be an asset for us not a liability. We just elected someone with no experience, look how that worked out.”

In a speech at the White House Rose Garden in October 2015, Vice President Biden announces that he will not run for the 2016 presidential nomination. | AP

So far they’ve been right. In addition to experience serving as a proxy for presidential qualities, it has served as a useful contrast to his opponents who are senators. “Sanders has his veterans thing he did with McCain, but otherwise he’s kind of just been talking about what he’s going to do,” said the top Biden adviser. “Warren obviously has the Consumer Finance thing, but just look on paper in terms of the achievements and there isn’t a close call.”

The final insight from the Biden brain trust was about demographics. Biden dominates among African American voters and does well with white working-class voters. According to data compiled for POLITICO by Morning Consult, which conducts a weekly national tracking poll of the Democratic primary, Biden’s support among African Americans has hovered around 40 percent (the low point was 31 percent and the high point was 47 percent). Biden’s support among white working-class voters has averaged about 35 percent (the low point was 28 percent and the high point was 41 percent). But Biden is weaker with white college-educated voters. His standing with white-collar white voters has been around 28 percent (the low point was 24 percent and the high point was 37 percent).

Across every category of race and education Biden does much better with older voters. He is very weak with young voters. Biden’s older working-class white and African American base has been incredibly stable. There has been only one day when another candidate overtook Biden in national polling averages. (It was Warren on October 7, and she then began her precipitous decline.)

But the media narrative of a more volatile race has been skewed by the influence of college-educated whites, who now represent the largest group in the Democratic electorate. This group is over-represented in the two early voting states where Biden has been overtaken in the polls. And this group has been the most volatile, fueling the surges of Kamala Harris, Warren and Buttigieg. Not surprisingly, this is also the group that is most represented in the media and online. When this group suddenly becomes enamored of a candidate, it is loud on Twitter and on MSNBC, it shows up in polling in Iowa, and it can seem like the whole race has shifted. The Biden campaign argues that this is a driving force for why many political pundits have misunderstood the race.

“What people basically look at is where is the race among very liberal whites,” said a top Biden adviser, describing why he believes the media, especially the young and liberal Cambridge-Brooklyn-Shaw axis of news professionals, underestimated the former vice president.


Another top adviser said, “What happens in campaigns—and it’s been exacerbated by Twitter and social media—is that you get a cool-kid conventional wisdom, and then at some point, voters get read into the process and voters quite often behave differently than the cool kids do.”

Exciting liberal candidates fueled by college-educated whites have a long history of disappointment in Democratic presidential primaries: Gary Hart in 1984, Jerry Brown in 1992, Bill Bradley in 2000, Howard Dean in 2004. All of those candidacies were defeated by a more establishment Democrat who put together a coalition of the white working-class and African American voters. Biden’s advisers have long insisted that those were useful models for understanding 2020, while advisers to Warren have often scoffed at the idea that that bygone era of politics has much to teach in the new Democratic Party.

In 2008, Obama made history by winning with a coalition of white-collar whites and African Americans. For the first time, the cool-kid candidate of liberal elites won. In 2016, Clinton beat Sanders with this same Obama-style coalition. College-educated whites are now a large and ideologically diverse group in the Democratic electorate, so Biden could end up enjoying a sizable share of their support. But if Biden wins the nomination, his campaign will be a restoration not just in terms of its Clinton-Obama era advisers, or in terms of his policies, which eschew what’s currently fashionable on the coastal left, but also in terms of its voters. It would be a return to the working-class and black coalition that dominated Democratic politics for three decades before 2008.

Will it work? Biden’s demise has been endlessly predicted, and yet going into the new year he is in the same spot he was in at the end of 2018: the frontrunner and slight favorite to win the nomination.

For all of their eye-rolling about the press and their occasional gloating about Biden’s durability, Biden’s top aides know he could still lose.

“I do feel like the bottom on this whole thing could fall out at any minute,” said a senior staffer.

“I still think it’s very volatile and very wide open,” said an adviser noting how Biden’s ups and downs in Iowa have been nerve-wracking. “If he comes 10 or 15 points behind in Iowa then you worry about what happens in South Carolina.”

Biden at the the Iowa Democratic Party Liberty & Justice Celebration on November 1, 2019 in Des Moines. | Joshua Lott/Getty Images

There are also lingering managerial issues. Biden can be a micro-manager. He approves op-eds written in his name and the scripts for videos sent to Democratic groups around the country, and, despite his reputation, the fine print of big policy proposals. During planning for the recent bus tour of Iowa, he reviewed and approved every detail, from what towns to visit to the slogan on the side of the bus. (“No Malarkey!” beat out finalist “Ridin’ with Biden” after an initial list of dozens of options was generated in campaign brainstorming sessions).


The Biden universe is not as expansive as the multigalaxy Clinton network. “There’s just one planetary system,” Anita Dunn said. But as is common for politicians who have been around a while, there are lots of outside advisers, and there’s always conflict between the official campaign and the concentric circles of outside advisers.

In 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign became defined by people associated with John Podesta, the campaign chairman, and people associated with Robby Mook, the campaign manager. It was a bug, not a feature, and one warning sign for Biden’s campaign, according to numerous staffers, is that he could be creating a similar divide.

Biden’s brain trust—Donilon, Ricchetti, Dunn, Klain, Owens—floats above the official campaign org chart. “Donilon probably couldn’t name some of the senior staff,” said the senior staffer. “It’s just not his job. I don’t even know what his title is.”

But other top-heavy campaigns of the establishment suffered from a lack of a well-defined message and strategic focus. That’s not Biden’s problem. Despite Biden’s reputation for straying off message, his campaign has been extremely clear about why it exists and what its strategy to win is.

“There’s not a lot of tension about ‘What does the electorate look like?’ ‘What does our goal look like?’ Surprisingly, the campaign is pretty unified on that. There’s nobody sitting around on our team saying, like, ‘We need to win college voters!’” said the senior staffer. “The tension is that there’s not clear direction about what people do and who’s in charge of certain things. That’s very real.”

There are plenty of other looming threats. Biden’s weakness with young voters, college-educated whites, and, in some polls, Hispanics, a sizable portion of whom have gravitated to Bernie Sanders, all suggest he is beatable.

But a lot has been thrown at him. He’s been smeared as a sexist and a racist. The flaws of his Senate voting record have been minutely dissected. His gaffes have been endlessly mocked.

And yet he’s still standing. He and his advisers can be excused if they sound like they’re gloating.


“The whole theory of this race has been that Joe Biden is going to announce and then he’s going to collapse,” said a top adviser. “ ‘We’re gonna run him out of the race. He’s going to have to pay a price for 40 years of votes. He may look strong, but that’s just because he has high name recognition but there's nothing there.’ And that has just been a fundamental miscalculation.”