The morning after his lackluster debate performance, President Biden appeared at a campaign rally but then disappeared, retreating to Camp David to avoid political damage control.
Among those pushing Trump to be more aggressive in pushing back against public doubts about his health is his campaign chair, Jen O'Malley Dillon. Within days, Democratic governors were convening at the White House for a meeting and a rally was scheduled in Wisconsin.
O'Malley Dillon is not one of the innermost members of the Biden team — a space reserved for family members and aides who've spent decades with the president — but she has emerged as a central figure in keeping the Biden campaign on track and moving forward amid this political crisis.
She is involved in every element of the campaign's strategy and tactics, but not the most important question: Should Biden continue to campaign?
“She has no question about whether Biden should continue,” said Ron Klain, Biden's former White House chief of staff who returned to the campaign to lead preparations for the presidential debates. “Her advice is focused on how to run the campaign effectively.”
While the title of campaign manager remains with Julie Chavez Rodriguez, who helped launch Biden's reelection effort last year, O'Malley Dillon has served as Biden's de facto head of campaign management since the beginning of this year, acting as a conduit for big donors and political allies. Dillon and White House chief of staff Jeff Zients were the only two staff members to attend Biden's meeting with Democratic governors last week.
Mr. O'Malley Dillon, who despises the press and focuses on the inner workings of his campaign, has long been known as a man who values loyalty and competence and doesn't confuse the two. He declines to be interviewed and rarely gives public interviews.
In her only extended interview since taking over Biden's campaign, she told news site Pac just days before the debate that she had little doubt about the outcome of November's election.
“Joe Biden wins, that's it,” she said.
Since the debate, O'Malley Dillon has had her name included in the daily morning email sent to all Biden campaign staff, which provides day-by-day instructions to campaign leaders in battleground states and updates on the thinking of senior leadership at the campaign's headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.
In emails last week, she and Chavez Rodriguez told campaign staff that the polls for Biden were not as bad as reported, highlighted the campaign's latest fundraising numbers and urged staff to promote its latest television ads.
“She's making sure that everyone on her staff has a clear understanding of what's expected of her right now,” campaign communications director Michael Tyler said. “She understands that everyone needs to be on the same page right now.”
O'Malley Dillon, a rare voice of optimism amid political turmoil, is not the type of person to offer Biden any other path than staying in the race, former colleagues said.
Michael LaRosa, a former press secretary for former first lady Jill Biden, said O'Malley Dillon would have been aware of Biden's political decline and his family's push for him to stay in the presidential race.
“She understands the gravity of the situation,” LaRosa said, “and she also knows how he and his family see the reality.”
O'Malley Dillon, 47, is a Boston-born veteran of Democratic politics who has worked for every Democratic presidential candidate since Al Gore in 2000 except for Hillary Clinton, and briefly volunteered in New Hampshire for Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign.
She worked on Barack Obama's two presidential campaigns but only joined Biden's team in March 2020, when she was brought in to professionalize the patchwork operation that was on the brink of winning the Democratic nomination. After Biden won, she became deputy chief of staff in the White House.
At the start of the 2020 campaign, she moved her husband and three children to El Paso to run former Rep. Beto O'Rourke's presidential campaign.
There, she clashed with the candidate and tolerated little internal dissent as the campaign struggled, according to people involved in the campaign. She tried to persuade Mr. O'Rourke to dress more presidentially and to give speeches that were less extemporaneous than the sort he had become accustomed to during his House and Senate campaigns in Texas.
“She's one of the hardest working people,” O'Rourke said in an interview Monday. “She's incredibly dedicated, extremely loyal and once she gets involved she gives it her all.”
Fully endorsing Mr. Biden at this point would mean forging ahead with the campaign despite calls from Democratic lawmakers to end Mr. Biden’s campaign and recognize someone else as the party’s nominee to challenge former President Donald J. Trump.
But few know better than O'Malley Dillon the details of the party rules that make it nearly impossible to oust Biden, who won nearly all of his delegates during the primaries, without his consent.
Dillon is also a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee. After Trump's 2016 victory, when party leaders split into factions supporting Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, O'Malley Dillon was tapped to lead the committee charged with rewriting the presidential nominating rules, which ultimately curtailed the power long held by superdelegates at the party's convention.
Larry Cohen, a Sanders stauncher who co-chaired the committee with O'Malley Dillon, said Dillon probably understands by now that Biden will have to wait until July 19, the date when the Democratic National Convention's rules committee meets to set a date for the party to formally nominate Biden by Aug. 7, two weeks before the convention opens in Chicago.
“She knows the rules, she knows the procedure,” Cohen said Monday. “She knows that if the president doesn't step down this week, even a week from now it will likely be too late, and the president will get through it.”
After helping President Obama win reelection, O'Malley Dillon founded a political consulting firm in Washington called Precision Strategies, which worked for companies such as General Electric and IBM, as well as major labor unions.
She was the chief strategist for the Liberal Party of Canada when Justin Trudeau was first elected prime minister in 2015.
In October of that year, O'Malley Dillon wrote a triumphant summary of her office's work for Trudeau's party, headlined “Lessons for 2016 from North of the Border.” She wrote about the organizational structure and voter contact campaigns that had been brought to Canadian politics from the Obama campaign.
But she also spoke of the importance of running an optimistic campaign that doesn't just focus on the negative aspects of her opponents.
“Donald Trump, remember,” she wrote, “while mean-spirited and pessimistic rhetoric may initially appeal to your supporters, optimism almost always wins out in the end.”
largely.
Rebecca Davis O'Brien Contributed report.
