Joe Biden promised to be “a president for all Americans” during his acceptance speech last fall, yet the trips he has made since moving into the White House suggest he is mostly focused on keeping battleground states blue.
Biden, first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and second gentlemen Doug Emhoff, along with a cadre of Cabinet officials and Democratic lawmakers, will fan out across the country, starting next week, to promote the administration’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus spending package.
But the president’s planned stops next week in Georgia and Pennsylvania are raising eyebrows given those states’ electoral significance. And they will come after the president’s earlier visits to Michigan and Wisconsin, two Rust Belt battlegrounds, to tour a COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing plant and participate in a nationally televised town hall.
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Biden sweeping the Electoral College votes of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin last November returned the presidency to Democratic hands, rebuilding the so-called “blue wall” former President Donald Trump tore down in 2016. After multiple recounts, taking Georgia, a Republican stronghold since 1992, decisively handed Biden the 2020 Electoral College.
Those states will be battlegrounds again in 2024. Yet, Georgia and Pennsylvania are hosting crucial Senate races in 2022, with Democrats hoping to hold on to Sen. Raphael Warnock’s Peach State seat while flipping Republican Sen. Pat Toomey’s in the Keystone State. Those contests will determine the balance of power in the evenly divided chamber, which is now controlled by Democrats only because of Harris’s tiebreaking vote.
However, White House press secretary Jen Psaki has dismissed any connection between Biden’s schedule and the next election cycle.
“He did win a lot of states, so I will say that,” Psaki told reporters on Thursday.
“He also visited Texas, which is certainly not — not yet a blue state,” Psaki said after Biden toured Houston with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to survey damage caused by last month’s winter storms.
“When we’re addressing crises, whether it’s a weather crisis, or COVID, or the economic downturn, he’s going to govern for all,” she added.
But it is difficult not to draw lines between Biden’s itinerary and the coming elections. And it is a perception he himself helped create when he criticized how former President Barack Obama marketed his own 2009 spending package, or failed to, to the public before Democrats were shellacked during the 2010 midterm elections.
“We didn’t adequately explain what we had done. Barack was so modest; he didn’t want to take, as he said, a ‘victory lap.’ I kept saying, ‘Tell people what we did.’ He said, ‘We don’t have time. I’m not going to take a victory lap.’ And we paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility,” the president told House Democrats this month.
Biden signed his spending package into law on Thursday before launching his publicity tour on Friday with a Rose Garden celebration. He is expected to be near Philadelphia, in Delaware County, next Tuesday before flying to Atlanta with Harris three days later.
On Monday, first lady Jill Biden will be in Burlington, New Jersey, which shares a media market with neighboring Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Harris and Emhoff will be in Las Vegas after Biden clinched Nevada by roughly 2 percentage points and days of vote counting.
The second couple will remain out West for a stop in Denver on Tuesday. There’s a Senate race in Colorado, too, next election cycle. Emhoff will then make a trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Wednesday, coinciding with the first lady’s jaunt to Concord, New Hampshire. New Hampshire has a 2022 Senate contest and is a pivotal presidential election year state.
Eric Schultz, a deputy press secretary under Psaki during the Obama administration, shrugged off travel “as a shortsighted metric.”
“The question will be, ‘Are all 50 states doing better because Joe Biden is president?’ He pledged to be a president that serves the entire country, and even in the first 50 days, we’ve seen marked improvements across the board,” he said. “Let’s see the American Rescue Plan in action.”
Political analyst Dan Schnur, a Republican-turned-independent now at the University of Southern California, was more candid, saying presidents typically spend more time in battleground states.
“Biden’s travel schedule is pretty standard,” he said. “It’s worth assuming that over four years, he’ll get to most states, but there’s nothing unusual with him starting in purple places before he goes to deep-blue and deep-red America.”
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Costas Panagopoulos, a Northeastern University political scientist, agreed it was “premature” to argue Biden was “overlooking any particular states or groups of Americans with his initial travel decisions.”
“He made a strong commitment to represent all Americans throughout his presidential campaign, and I suspect he will not backtrack on that pledge, at least not in the long run,” he said.
Here’s a round-up of Biden’s “Help is Here” dates and places so far:
Monday
First lady Jill Biden in Burlington, New Jersey,
Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentlemen Doug Emhoff in Las Vegas
Tuesday
President Biden in Delaware County, Pennsylvania
Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentlemen Doug Emhoff in Denver
Wednesday
First lady Jill Biden in Concord, New Hampshire
Second gentlemen Doug Emhoff in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Friday
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in Atlanta
