CHICAGO — With his blessing, confidants to Vice President Joe Biden have begun strategizing about travel to early primary states and identified potential donors who could bankroll a campaign even as he remains undecided about whether to pull the trigger on a late-entry 2016 run for president.

The moves are a sign that after months of speculation, Biden is taking a few significant if small steps toward a presidential campaign, according to sources familiar with the discussions. Biden’s strategy, the sources say, would be to focus on South Carolina while almost writing off New Hampshire, where both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have considerable footholds.


Biden proxies have also homed in on rich supporters who could help finance a run through a super PAC — in particular, Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos, a past top donor to both Joe and Beau Biden, whom Democratic operatives noted has not yet given to the Hillary Clinton-backing Priorities USA Action despite previous support for the former secretary of state. Biden allies also have set their sights on Geocities founder and tech investor David Bohnett, a longtime Democratic donor. Angelos didn’t return a call for comment.

News reports in recent days have focused on a handful of more casual conversations Biden had while on vacation earlier this week on Kiawah Island in South Carolina. Meanwhile, there is significant operational planning going on around him. He still has not set a time frame for a final decision — though it could come within weeks, or he may yet stretch the “end of summer” deadline he talked about earlier this year.

Biden’s aware of the pressure to make a decision, the sources say. The final call — as well as a discussion on particulars, like chatter about making a pledge to limit a presidency to one term — is expected to be made at a meeting of the vice president’s closest circle of advisers at his home in Wilmington, Delaware; they are likely to include chief of staff Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon, former Sen. Ted Kaufman, Larry Rasky and Tom Donilon, along with Biden’s son, Hunter, and his oldest and closest political adviser, his sister Valerie Biden Owens. Ricchetti and Mike Donilon have been involved with many of the discussions going on already. Notably, Ron Klain — the former Biden chief of staff who’s attended meetings like these in the past — is already working with the Clinton campaign on debate preparations.

So far, that meeting has not been scheduled.

“People dismissed it for reasons I don’t really truly understand, but he has a core following of people,” said one former Biden staffer who is in contact with the vice president and his team. “He has support out in the community. He relates to people.”

Meanwhile, Biden’s circle has identified what they see as their potential voting blocs: Reagan Democrats, Jews, an LGBT base that largely credits him with pushing President Barack Obama into supporting gay marriage, and Rust Belt voters. They believe he’ll benefit from better stump skills than any of the other candidates running.

And there’s an emerging primary state calculus: while Clinton and Sanders duke it out in New Hampshire, where Biden barely played in either of his two previous presidential runs, his main focus would be on South Carolina — where he could draw on his connections to former Sen. Fritz Hollings, former state Democratic chair Dick Harpootlian and black voters, as well as the relationships of his 2012 political director Trip King, who lives in Columbia and was his state director for the 2008 run.

South Carolina, goes the thinking, would be the first real open primary and the first with a diverse electorate, and that would power the argument they’re making about Biden’s appeal to broader constituencies.

“If he decides to go, he will win in South Carolina,” said Columbia-area state Rep. James Smith. “It’s not happened quite overnight, but we’ve got very, very strong support from all across South Carolina, from all communities — faith, business, elected and community leaders who have been long-standing Biden supporters and are ready when he and [wife] Jill decide they’re ready to make a run for it.”

After being in touch with Biden’s inner circle through the week, Smith said, “I think he’s getting closer to saying yes, I really do.”

South Carolina supporters feel they’ll be able to flip the switch on the organization almost overnight if Biden gets in.

A Biden campaign would also lean hard into Nevada, drawing on his decades of ties to labor.

In Iowa, where Biden drew only 1 percent in the 2008 caucuses, there’s a feeling that enough goodwill and support exists that he’d be able to capitalize on that quickly for a stronger showing, though he’d be well behind Clinton organizationally.

The anxiety over Clinton’s failure to catch fire so far is less a factor than Biden’s own emerging view that passing on the 2016 race would be another loss to compound on the death of his son earlier this year, the sources said. And if he does go forward with the run, the Biden orbit is counting on tapping into an Obama-specific base reenergized by the president’s recent run of victories — people who will be more interested, they think, in an extension of Obama’s presidency through Biden than what they’d view as more of a Clinton restoration by a candidate that many die-hard Obama-ites still view with suspicion lingering from the 2008 primary.

The read on Biden has changed enough in almost a matter of hours that a level of anxiety has set in among the Obama orbit, who out of personal affection for Biden are hoping he won’t run a race they feel certain he’ll lose, only to get pummeled along the way. There’s also some worry about the position that a Biden run would put Obama in, spending the next few months tangoing around questions of picking sides between his vice president and former secretary of state.

Several Obama campaign alumni, meanwhile, say they believe there would be a rush of their former colleagues to a Biden campaign — including possible defections from staffers currently working for Clinton in Brooklyn in a mix of Obama-Biden loyalists and junior staffers who’d until now seen her campaign as their only chance to work on a presidential race.

Biden’s advisers have locked into public silence — Kaufman, among others, declined comment on the speculation. And Biden hasn’t come close to any kind of official moves, like reaching out directly to potential supporters: one Democratic senator said Friday that no call from Biden had come into that office or any others that the senator knew of.

An early focus would be trying to get a fundraising network in place. He never needed much of one running for Senate in Delaware, and that was among the many areas in which his previous presidential runs fell short.

Draft Biden, a group, formed by a number of very junior operatives and run out of a collective office space in the Loop in downtown Chicago, is trying to make up for some of that. But they remain tangentially connected to the candidate himself; when it was first formed, a number of Biden insiders joked that they wanted to ask reporters for the phone number of founder Will Pierce, whom they still haven’t had contact with.

However, Draft Biden raised its profile in July when it installed former Obama bundler Jon Cooper of Long Island as national finance chair, and its group of longtime Democratic contributors grew with the addition of Los Angeles doctor Howard Mandel. Both Mandel and Cooper had been heavily courted by Martin O’Malley before committing to Biden. And Harpootlian gave the group $10,000 after Beau Biden’s top political aide Josh Alcorn signed on as an adviser, a person close to the PAC said.

Still, the closest contact that any of the Draft Biden staff has had since the launch is the cardboard standee they keep in a corner of their small office.

But working off of a list of donors that they compiled from going through the publicly available campaign finance filings from Biden’s previous run, they say they’ve started to make serious headway.

When they first started calling big donors a few months ago, “we would get the gatekeepers,” Pierce said Thursday afternoon, sitting at a metal picnic table in the common area of the office space in Chicago. “Now, it’s like we’re getting the phone calls back from people who are closer in the Biden community.”

Pierce said he feels like things are about to break.

“We’ve almost done the impossible,” he said. “We’ve almost drafted the vice president.”

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