Former Vice President Joe Biden on Monday, talking up his chances of beating President Trump in several Southern states next year, pointed to his role as a surrogate for the first Democratic candidate to win a Senate seat in decades.
As the kick-off speaker at the Poor People’s Moral Action Congress, in Washington, D.C., Biden contrasted his role as a campaign surrogate for Doug Jones with the mostly black group of politicians who also campaigned in Alabama for Jones. That included Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and civil rights hero, and Rep. Terri Sewell, Alabama’s only House member who is a black or a Democrat.
“I’m the only person who went and campaigned for the senator in Alabama,” Biden said at the event, a forum focused on social justice and eliminating poverty in the United States. “I was the only person invited down there to speak, not the only one, the only one not a person of color.”
The Jones campaign did keep a distance from many Washington, D.C.-based figures, calculating that would backfire against his emphasis on local issues in a special election triggered by the resignation in early 2017 of Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions to become attorney general under President Trump.
Jones is a former staff member for Biden on the Senate Judiciary Committee, a panel the then-Delaware senator chaired for eight years during his 36-year tenure on Capitol Hill.
In his allotted 27 minutes on Monday, Biden spoke with moderators and audience members in a gymnasium at Trinity Washington University. Monday’s event was also the first time Biden shared a venue with his other Democratic rivals since announcing his presidential run in April after skipping out on two prominent Democratic “cattle call” events in Iowa and California.
[Read more: Biden vows to campaign more in the South, says he will win South Carolina and other states]
