Meet the trio leading Biden’s 2024 campaign to win Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania is shaping up to be the center of President Joe Biden’s presidential reelection campaign — and now three Pennsylvania political operatives are in charge of winning it for him again.

The Biden campaign will bring on two senior advisers and a state campaign manager to run Pennsylvania operations, the campaign said Wednesday. The trio will be charged with boosting Biden’s support in a state where tiny margins can have huge consequences. Biden won Pennsylvania by about 80,000 votes, a little more than 1 percentage point, in 2020. Former President Donald Trump won it in 2016 by 44,000 votes, less than 1 point.

Nikki Lu, a Biden appointee at the Department of Labor, who previously worked as deputy state director for Biden in Pennsylvania, will be his state campaign manager.

Lu is currently the Women’s Bureau chief of staff in the U.S. Department of Labor. She also worked as state director at SiX, a progressive governance nonprofit and as the Western Pennsylvania political director of SEIU Local 32BJ, which represents janitors, security guards, and food service workers.

Brendan McPhillips, who led Biden’s campaign in Pennsylvania in 2020 and Sen. John Fetterman’s U.S. Senate campaign in 2022, will be a senior adviser. McPhillips was also Iowa State director for Pete Buttigieg in 2020 and is an alum of President Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns in Pennsylvania. He headed Fetterman’s first run for Senate in 2016 and former City Councilmember Helen Gym’s 2023 primary campaign for mayor in Philadelphia.

Kellan White joins the Biden campaign as a senior adviser for Philadelphia, while also working as a senior adviser to Sen. Bob Casey’s reelection campaign. White is an alum of Katie McGinty’s 2016 U.S. Senate campaign and Judge Timika Lane’s successful race for the Pennsylvania Superior Court. He was the first deputy city controller under Rebecca Rhynhart and managed her primary campaign for mayor last year. His father, John F. White Jr., is a former state representative.

Both White and McPhillips live in Philadelphia and have found themselves at opposite ends of several Democratic primary match-ups in the past — working for opposing campaigns in the 2023 mayoral race and the 2016 Senate race. Now they’ll be on the same team.

White will focus specifically on Philadelphia, where the Democratic vote share has dropped relative to other parts of the state in recent elections. Biden has made frequent trips to the city since becoming president and based his 2020 presidential election campaign here. This year’s campaign is based in Wilmington.

“In a vacuum the trend is obviously concerning,” White, 38, who lives in Brewerytown, said. “But there is a significant amount of potential to increase the vote share in Philadelphia and there’s opportunities to engage with voters early and get them fired up.”

The hires follow staff announcements in other battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and North Carolina, with less than nine months to the general election.

The campaign had faced some scrutiny over staffing levels at this stage of the race, and as Trump has appeared to lock up the Republican nomination early. In 2020, Biden named his top Pennsylvania aides in July after sealing the Democratic nomination in early April.

“We are thrilled to announce the hiring of these battle-tested and trusted operatives to lead our campaign in the all-important Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement. “This team includes members of our 2020 state leadership team who brought home Pennsylvania and have years of experience winning statewide.”

McPhillips, 40, who lives in East Passyunk, called Pennsylvania “ground zero,” in the general election campaign. “2020 was a fight for the soul of the nation,” he said. “And we’re very much fighting to preserve all of the important gains the president has made and once again, fighting to preserve our democracy.”

Trump and Biden have been polling neck and neck in the state. In a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of six swing states released Wednesday, Biden lagged Trump 42% to 48% across all states. He trailed in every state but lagged by the smallest margin ― 3 points ― in Pennsylvania.

More than half of swing-state voters in the poll said they wouldn’t vote for Trump if he were convicted of a crime.

Both Trump and Biden were frequent visitors in 2020 and Trump has his first scheduled trip to the state next week in Harrisburg.