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SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.—President Biden's campaign manager was picking at the last of her egg-white omelet and thinking about what it would mean for the November election to go wrong. In a word, what does she think would happen if Trump won?
"In one word. Wow. It's hard," said Julie Chavez Rodriguez. She mulled it for a while. "For me, it's like, either damage or devastation. Those are the two that I kind of go back and forth on. I think it would be devastating for our communities. And I think it would be damaging for our politics and for the policies that we have enacted."
Chávez RodrÃguez was sitting for breakfast at the resort where Biden and his entourage were staying, a tony stucco palace where the cheapest of its 750 rooms went for $800 a night. The Biden campaign was here, in the fiercely contested state that the president won by only 10,457 votes four years ago, as part of a Western swing through Nevada, Arizona and Texas. The previous night, President Biden had stood in front of a crowd of about 50 supporters at a modest Mexican restaurant in a barrio near the Phoenix airport, for the launch of a campaign arm called "Latinos con Biden-Harris."
"I need you," Biden told his supporters at the event. "I need you badly. I need the help. Kamala and I desperately need your help."
He touted three of the Latinos in his Cabinet and the policies that, in his view, his administration was enacting for the community: abating prescription-drug costs, easing student debt, lowering unemployment rates.
He had also recognized his campaign manager. The Organizer.
"It's a little bit in her blood. Cesar Chavez is her grandfather," he said, raising his eyebrows as he alluded to the venerated labor and civil rights leader - who was also here, sort of, staring at the president from a large, framed print of a mail stamp bearing his portrait on the opposite wall.
Chavez Rodriguez is here in part because Black and Brown voters are essential ingredients in the victory recipe, and they've been souring on Biden. In 2020, Black voters chose Biden by 81 percentage points, according to an average of exit polls and other voter surveys; in a Post average of recent polls, Biden was up by 49 points among Black registered voters. Biden won Latino voters by 29 points, but recent polls find Trump running about even with Biden among this group, though there are fewer high-quality polls of Latino voters.
Chavez Rodriguez hopes to remind Latino voters that Trump, in the last year of his term, presided over a pandemic economy that saw high Latino unemployment and small businesses struggling. But Trump's persistent image among some Latinos as "a successful businessman" makes him a unique challenge as an opponent. "I think that there's some sense and affinity to someone who is, kind of, in their minds, they see a self-made man," Chavez Rodriguez said at the resort.
"Which we know is not the case," she added, alluding to Trump's not-so-humble origins as the son of a New York real estate tycoon.
She is the heir to a much different American legacy. She grew up partly at Nuestra Señora Reina de la Paz, a 187-acre warren of buildings and homes Cesar Chavez chose to serve as the headquarters for United Farm Workers. Chavez lived next door to her family's small house. Her father, Arturo RodrÃguez, who almost missed her birth because Chavez had dispatched his son-in-law 150 miles away from home to organize citrus and strawberry farmers, went on to become head of UFW. From an early age, Chavez Rodriguez's life was surrounded by protests, boycotts, marches, meetings. She'd later recall being in the back of meetings, going on rides to Los Angeles, getting arrested at age 9 for leafleting in New Jersey.
These days, Chavez Rodriguez, now 45, speaks more like a Washington operative than an activist - an effect, perhaps, of an adult life spent working for professional Democrats (a Colorado senator, the Obama administration, the Kamala Harris campaign, then Biden). Her duties, as she described them, include running the day-to-day operations, spending the campaign's bucketloads of money, and "building out" the headquarters and state offices. Just last week, new offices sprouted in North Carolina and Florida and Michigan - Chavez Rodriguez said the campaign is trying to get to 350 staffers by mid-April.
Despite the fancy lodging and egg-white omelet, "It's not an easy job," she said. "It's not, you know - the day-to-day isn't glamorous."
Still, she may be one of the campaign's more credible emissaries to parts of the Democratic base that don't feel connected to Biden himself. After the crowd emptied out of El Portal, Chavez Rodriguez sat for an interview with Enrique Acevedo, the Univision anchor who recently took heat from Latino Democrats for his sit-down with Trump. (The network is working on a special on Biden.) In an effort to try to win over Black voters, the campaign is highlighting new funding for historically Black colleges and universities under Biden, the appointment of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and upticks in Black health insurance enrollment. Targeting Black media is also part of a $30 million ad campaign announced in March.
Part of the job is talking, but another part is listening, a skill she's been honing for a while. When she got her public-engagement job at the Obama administration, she asked the president and CEO of Voto Latino, Maria Teresa Kumar, to meet her for coffee by Lafayette Square to talk about working together. "My impression of her was that she was a very great listener, and she asked a lot of questions," Kumar said. She added: "In D.C. that's rare, because people always want to opine on how to fix things."
In January, she traveled to Dearborn, Mich., for a planned meeting with some 10 to 15 Arab American leaders amid a major backlash in that battleground state against the Biden administration's support of Israel's military campaign in Gaza. But Arab American leaders canceled the meeting after community members urged participants to skip it. The feelings of personal connection to the war among some members of that community were "deeper than I could fully understand," Chavez Rodriguez said.
"We want to continue to work with and engage these communities, if and when they're ready," she added, noting that she met with other Arab American leaders during that Michigan trip. The campaign is seeing some "important openings," she said: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), one of two Muslim women in Congress, "has really started to outline what's at stake in this election."
The stakes of the November election put her and the rest of Biden's campaign brain trust under enormous pressure. There are abundant signs that a second Trump administration could be driven by vengeance toward his perceived enemies and a radical remaking of the federal government. It could also mean mass deportations and, if Republicans take control of both the White House and Congress, a national abortion ban.
"You have to be an idiot not to be nervous," said James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist. "It's uncomfortably close, and the alternative would be to end the Constitution."
"As my great-grandfather used to say, ‘I'm as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.' Yes, hell yes," said John Morgan, a top Democratic fundraiser and Central Florida attorney, reached at his winter home in Maui.
"I believe if we do not reelect the president, then all the things that we believe in as a country, and for our kids, and for the reason all of us are here, will fall apart right in front of our very eyes," said Jen O'Malley Dillon, chair of Biden's reelection campaign.
"And I think that it is a burden she carries," O'Malley Dillon continued, referring to Chavez Rodriguez. "And she carries it with grace."
It's a shared burden. The president has long relied on an inner circle of strategists and allies when making high-level decisions - people like O'Malley Dillon, Mike Donilon, Annie Tomasini, Steve Ricchetti, Cedric L. Richmond and others.
O'Malley Dillon did not want the title of campaign manager she'd had in 2020, according to multiple people familiar with leadership conversations last spring who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about those discussions. After multiple interviews with other candidates, O'Malley Dillon said, she and the other advisers told Biden that Chavez Rodriguez, then a White House senior adviser, should get the job. She did in April. By January, former president Barack Obama was urging Biden to move his closest aides to Wilmington more swiftly, noting the success of his 2012 campaign's structure. Later that month, O'Malley Dillon and Donilon decamped from their official White House positions to the campaign headquarters. O'Malley Dillon took the title of "campaign chair" and Donilon became "chief strategist."
Asked whether she was equal to or below those advisers, Chavez Rodriguez demurred. "We all have sort of strategic conversations as we need to, and then I'm able to also operationalize what that looks like in the day-to-day within our campaign apparatus," she said, adding she got along fine with the senior advisers, and that she leans on their experience.
The campaign manager projects a calm confidence about November - saying Biden can win "no matter who's on the ballot," in reference to third-party candidates - while also saying that the campaign isn't taking anything for granted. Here in Arizona, for example, a March Fox News poll found Trump with four point-edge over Biden in a two-way contest.
"The tradition that I came from, you've kind of always worked like you're five points behind and make sure that we're reaching out and delivering for our community," Chavez Rodriguez said over breakfast.
The difference these days: money.
"In some of the organizing that I've done, right, they - folks had more money than we did. Fortunately, we have way more money than Republicans right now," she said, cracking up a bit and adding, "I can't help but laugh."
She's hopeful that Republican attempts to curtail abortion rights and access - a "globalizing and motivating" issue that helped Democrats stave off major losses in the midterms - could buoy turnout in November. Although when it comes to Biden's own rhetoric on that front, some pro-abortion rights activists recently criticized him for deviating from his prepared remarks at the State of the Union and avoiding the word "abortion." "I wasn't aware that that was even an issue," Chavez Rodriguez said of the criticism. "Sorry."
On immigration, Biden recently pushed for legislation that would've given him greater power to, as he described it, "shut down" the southern border if necessary. But Chavez Rodriguez was adamant that "the president doesn't talk about shutting down the border" and is "not advocating for shutting down the border," saying instead that "what people want to see is order and humanity in our immigration system." (At the "Latinos Con Biden-Harris" event in Phoenix, the president didn't talk about immigration except to criticize Trump's rhetoric about immigrants.)
And what about Trump's legal problems? Would Biden be talking about those any time soon? "For us, it's really focusing on more of what a second-term Trump agenda would look like," Chavez Rodriguez said.
The "damage of devastation" she was talking about. What if Biden's campaign manager can't manage to keep it at bay?
"No matter what, I don't think people are going to blame Julie like people blame Robby Mook for Hillary. Because Hillary was supposed to win this," said Morgan, the fretful donor, referring to the last candidate and campaign manager to lose the presidency to Trump.
"We all know this is a jump ball," he continued. "In 2016, we were reading Nate Silver, and we weren't worried at all. When we woke up, we realized we've never been to Wisconsin and we've never been to Michigan and then all the Monday-morning quarterbacks are out. That won't be the case for Julie," he said. "Because we all are prepared to lose."