The Blue State That Biden Voted: 2020 Democratic Governor Candidate Tina Kotek (Denver, Or, Where the Blue Stars Meet)
At a union hall in Portland, Ore., the volunteers were sitting shoulder to shoulder with long tables, calling voters on their cellphones, when Biden walked in with a box of doughnuts.
Biden’s Western swing was his longest of the campaign and it was low key. There were no rallies, just small audience speeches about his accomplishments thus far, and a couple of fundraisers.
Pennsylvania’s senate and gubernatorial contests are the sole marquee races of this year’s midterm cycle Biden has stumped in repeatedly. In other high-profile races, candidates have maintained their distance from a president with underwater approval ratings.
“The history books show that an incumbent president is not a boost to their party in their midterms. If Jesus Christ were president, members of his own party would probably try to block him in the election, said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist.
But Oregon is a very blue state that Biden carried handily in the 2020 presidential election. The volunteers were gathered on a Friday night to help Tina Kotek, the Democratic candidate for governor.
Democrats are nervous about the race for governor two years later. There is an independent candidate who can win over enough Democratic voters to allow the first Republican governor of Oregon in a long time to be elected.
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The next day, Biden attended a grassroots fundraiser for Kotek and the pair stopped at a Baskin-Robbins for some ice cream. There, as he waited for his double scoop of chocolate chip in a waffle cone, Biden said he was confident Kotek would win.
That’s a shift from his predecessors, former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, who held more traditional rallies ahead of the midterms in their first terms, said Brendan Doherty, a politics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy who tracks presidential travel.
With less than three weeks to go until the election, Mr. Biden’s strategy is clear: He will help Democrats raise money and will keep talking about infrastructure, negotiated drug prices, student debt relief and investments in computer chip manufacturing. It shows how little the president can do when it comes to helping his fellow Democrats in rallies, even with the megaphone of the Oval Office.
He’s had high demand at events to raise money for his party. A private home in Los Angeles was the site of a Friday night event in which Biden helped raise five million dollars for congressional candidates all over the country.
Some Democratic candidates have claimed scheduling conflicts when Biden comes to town, conflicts that preclude joint appearances. Republicans have mocked Biden and his party. Smith is a Democratic strategist who wrote Any Given Tuesday.
“This is not Joe Biden’s first rodeo. In the 2010 election, having Barack Obama in the picture hurt Democrats, according to Smith. He’s trying to learn from his past mistakes so he puts his ego in the back seat. And it’s the best thing for the party as a whole.”
There are some places where Biden can help the Democrats, where Democrats have the advantage in voter registration. In Colorado, Biden designated a World War II training site as a national monument. He gave extra love to Sen. Michael Bennet, who’s running for reelection in a tougher than expected race.
Biden said he wanted Michael to come back up here a second, after telling the crowd about the hard sell that was made to get him to designate the monument.
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In Los Angeles, local officials lined up on the tarmac to welcome the president after he arrived on Air Force One. The congresswoman ran for LA mayor and got a hug with the blue plane in the background.
Biden referred to Bass as the “soon-to-be Ms. Mayor” in his speech on the next day where he delivered the core of his message.
“We’ve got an election in a month. Voters have to decide,” Biden said. Democrats are working to lower the cost of many things, including prescription drugs, health insurance, and energy bills.
The press secretary told reporters that they were always getting incoming requests. “Of course. Of course. There are a lot of good things to talk about.
The Rebuke of Biden: Washington, DC, Milwaukee and Las Vegas during a Low-Key Campaign for a New Republican Party
WASHINGTON — There is nothing like having a president at a campaign rally. And Democrats in four cities — Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee and Las Vegas — will get that chance this month, in the final days of voting that will decide who controls Congress, governors’ offices and statehouses.
It is a remarkably low-key campaign effort by a president facing what could be among the biggest rebukes of his political life: Republicans are poised to retake control of one or both houses of Congress, an outcome that would reshape politics in Washington and likely end any hope that Democrats have of making progress on abortion rights, gun control, police reform, voting rights or tax fairness.
Democratic officials are under no illusions that Biden’s visit to Florida on Tuesday will drastically change the dynamics of a Senate and gubernatorial race that appear to be heading Republicans’ way, but they see a chance to nationalize the stakes of the midterms in the final stretch.
He has drawn on Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott’s policy proposals and on threats of Republican brinkmanship over the debt ceiling to argue the GOP will hurt the economy and put popular entitlement programs at risk. With senior-heavy Florida as the backdrop, Biden will hold an official event before the rally to highlight the Republicans’ Social Security and Medicare proposals.
Among his chief foils is Scott, the head of Republicans’ campaign arm who had laid out a policy agenda that would put Medicare, Social Security and other government programs up for a vote every five years. The state is also home to former President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis, both likely 2024 presidential candidates whom Democrats have been eager to cast as the faces of a new, more extreme Republican Party.
The senior Biden adviser argued that the contrast argument of Biden is even more relevant in the last week of the election.
Two Democrats familiar with the decision say that Biden is holding the rally in Florida largely at the urging of Crist.
Crist was effusive in his praise for the president’s willingness to campaign with him during the final stretch of the election, as he hopes to win back the governor’s mansion.
“He’s the most important man in the world,” Crist said. “The fact that he’s coming down to Florida with a week to go until the election says everything you need to know about how important Florida is.”
When the president headlines the event, Crist said he hoped Biden would zero-in on the issue of abortion rights. Crist said that abortion rights is the number one issue in his race and that Gov. Ron DeSantis records on the issue speak for themselves.
When Biden visited Florida last month to tour damage from Hurricane Ian, the president and DeSantis put aside their political differences to emphasize an effective response.
But a few weeks later, the governor made clear Biden was still in his sights as a potential rival, even as he demurred about a potential national run during a debate with Crist.
The Democratic candidate campaigning for the chairmanship of the Senate would benefit from having Biden in the picture, as he will be a factor in the race for the Democratic nomination for president in 2024. In a debate last week, DeSantis would not commit to a full four-year term if he were to win reelection.
The first and last question of DeSantis is: What do I need to do to succeed? “That is the same discussion that Trump has with himself,” said a senior adviser to the Democratic National Committee.
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Biden told reporters that more than a dozen different campaigns had asked for him in the final stretch of the campaign, and he was in demand.
“That’s not true. There have been 15. Count, kid, count,” he said last week when a reporter suggested he hadn’t been holding many rallies in the final stretch.
But he has grown frustrated at coverage suggesting he is political albatross, according to people familiar with the conversations, arguing his policies – when properly explained – are widely popular with voters.
Biden isn’t in demand from the campaigns that are most competitive. They said rallies are less valuable now than they used to be.
The most sought after Democrat appears to be the former president. He held rallies in Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin over the weekend, and will visit Nevada and Arizona this week.
One place where Biden has been welcomed is Pennsylvania, where both Biden and Obama will be campaigning next Saturday.
In the final days of the campaign, he has begun drawing larger crowds. Six hundred people had to be turned away from an event in Southern California on Friday, according to the White House. In New Mexico, Biden addressed an overflow crowd that was too big to fit in the main arena where he was holding the rally.
While Biden may be talking at cross purposes with the electorate on these issues, they are linked, in a fateful way, that he did not mention in his speech at Union Station on Wednesday evening. The president failed to control inflation and the worry of a nation that was already demoralized by a once-in-a-century epidemic made for an electoral environment that looked likely to restore Trumpism to power.
The speeches Biden delivered on Wednesday and January 6th were strong election-closing arguments. Next week there’s an election but for other things.
“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said. The president is right – the essence of democracy depends on the loser in an election accepting the verdict of the people. This is why Trump’s behavior was so noxious in 2020 since his refusal to admit defeat did not just ruin one election. It ripped at the fundamental principle of America’s political system which made America great two-and-a-half centuries before Trump’s political career and caused damage that will last for years.
The fate of the soul of America lies with the people and they have the power, according to Biden.
Elections should be about more than one thing. People can chew gum at the same time. The threat to democracy is felt in Washington because of a view of the Capitol dome.
But in the heartlands of Pennsylvania, the suburbs of Arizona and cities everywhere, the gut check issue is less the somewhat abstract and age-old concept of self-government. It’s the more basic one of feeding a family. This election isn’t about the founding values of America but about the cost of a grocery cart or a gallon of gas.
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As Scottsdale, Arizona, retiree Patricia Strong told CNN’s Tami Luhby: “The price of everything was better during Trump,” adding, “We were looking forward to retirement because everything was good.”
The Federal Reserve raised its borrowing rate by just over a percentage point on Wednesday, the same day that the stock markets plummeted and Americans with credit card debt took another blow. The low unemployment rate is a great aspect of the Biden economy but some are worried that the Fed could ruin it by making the economy into a recession.
Biden thinks that the current election might cause political damage that is beyond repair due to the anti-democratic nature of the Republican candidates.
It is hard to make a case for Democrats in a doom-laden environment. The millions of Republicans who believe Trump’s falsehoods about the last election don’t listen to Biden and his call for national unity anyway. His low approval ratings don’t help. In a survey published on Wednesday, more than half of Americans said the economy and inflation were driving their vote in the elections. The only other issue in double figures was abortion, with 15% of likely voters saying they were concerned about it. Voting rights and election integrity were the focus of the president’s speech on Wednesday night.
While Mr. Biden excoriated Republicans who deny the legitimacy of elections, he once suggested that he too might not accept the results of this year’s vote if policies he deemed restrictive of the right to vote were enacted by Republican states. He said at a news conference in January that it was up to him whether or not he could convince the American people that some people were trying to alter the outcome of the election.
Biden has been talking about high prices. His pitch is that the billions of dollars of spending in his domestic agenda will lower the cost of health care, lift up working families and create millions of jobs. That may be the case, but things that could happen in the future can’t ease the pain being felt now.
Inflation has been a political force that breeds desperation in an electorate and can result in a response that is called extremism. The Biden White House insisted that the surge of prices was a transitory problem and it is curious that they did not take it seriously.
The president has talked about what he perceives as the threat to democracy posed by Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election in previous campaign speeches, but he decided to devote a televised nighttime address to the subject just six days before Election Day to bring more attention to it.
He abused his power by placing his loyalty to himself before to the constitution. Biden said he didn’t insult every Republican voter as he did when he referred to “semi-fascism”, but he made the big lie an article of faith for the minority of GOP voters.
He has stayed away from such a formulation since then, recognizing that it provided ammunition to Republicans looking to justify their continued adherence to Mr. Trump’s lies about 2020. During his speech on Wednesday night, the president said that he expected the elections to be legitimate, so the White House Press Secretary was reminded of that. She said that it was a yes.
Biden also hinted at a lack of understanding of Trump’s MAGA supporters, who have embraced his anti-democratic, populist, nationalist appeal to mainly White voters, which grew out of a backlash to the first Black presidency of Barack Obama. The 44th president has been making his own repudiation of Trump on the campaign trail in recent days.
Republican tactics may intimidate voters in the name of election monitoring, as indicated by Mr. Biden. A federal judge in Arizona this week restricted a group that had been planning to operate near polling places from taking photos of voters, openly carrying firearms and posting information about voters online.
He said the election will be the first since the events of January 6. “I wish, I wish I could say the assault on our democracy ended that day. I can’t.
According to the New York Times, more than three dozen Republican candidates have questioned and denied the election results, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Mr. Trump admits that his false claims are a litmus test for his support for Republican candidates.
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The stakes in one of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races are underscored when three sitting and two former presidents descend on Pennsylvania Saturday.
For President Joe Biden, who will hold a rare joint appearance with former President Barack Obama in Philadelphia meant to boost the Democratic candidate Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, Pennsylvania will amount to a political stress test in his home state, where he’s traveled 20 times since taking office.
While Donald Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by a narrow margin in 2020, a win by Mehmet Oz could prove that he is still alive in the state.
The consequences extend well beyond next week’s election. Biden’s aides are taking their first steps towards mounting a reelection campaign as Trump prepares to announce a third presidential bid. For a several-hour stretch on Saturday afternoon, the dynamics of a potential 2020 rematch will be laid bare.
The moment marks a historic anomaly. Former presidents have typically only waded sparingly into daily politics, mostly avoiding direct criticism of the men occupying the office they once held. After a defeated one term president returned to win the White House again in 1892, it has not happened since.
The presidents who have convergence in Pennsylvania each warn of dire consequences should the opposing party fail, reflecting how Trump changed his approach when he took office six years ago.
Still, his events haven’t generated the same electricity as Obama’s. The former president has laid into Trump and his acolytes who are running for office during his string of rallies across the country over the past weeks, using stinging humor and an air of bemusement to ridicule Republicans.
Obama, meanwhile, has issued his harshest criticism to the cast of candidates backed by Trump, many of whom deny the 2020 election results and have modeled themselves after the 45th president.
“It doesn’t just work out just because somebody’s been on TV. Turns out, being president or governor is about more than snappy lines and good lighting,” Obama said in Arizona last week of the Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, a former local news anchor.
Their joint appearance Saturday will only serve to highlight their different styles and political abilities, a comparison some Democrats say ultimately favors Obama.
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“I know you don’t think it, but I think we have pretty good crowds. They’re fairly enthusiastic. You don’t write it that way, but they are,” Biden said as he was departing California on Friday.
As he campaigns for his endorsed candidates this fall, Trump has made little attempt to conceal his larger intentions: to buttress his own likely presidential campaign he hopes will return him to the White House.
Top Trump aides have discussed the third week of November as an ideal launch point for his 2024 presidential campaign if Republicans fare well in the midterm elections, sources familiar with the matter said.
It might take a little more time for Biden’s decision. He pointed out that family discussions were around the holidays when he was asked about his own timelines. The preparation for his campaign was made under the assumption that he will run again.
LATROBE, Pa. — Former President Donald Trump is predicting America’s destruction if his fellow Republicans don’t deliver a massive electoral wave on Tuesday. Democrats, led by President Joe Biden and two other former presidents, are warning that abortion rights, social security and even democracy are at stake.
The last weekend of the upcoming election was marked by dire messages from the living presidents, but with millions of Americans voting, their words echoed throughout the country. The polls will close on Tuesday but more than 39 million people have already voted.
“If you want to stop the destruction of our country and save the American dream, then on Tuesday you must vote Republican in a giant red wave,” Trump told thousands of cheering supporters as he campaigned Saturday in western Pennsylvania, describing the United States as “a country in decline.”
Before Biden arrived in Pennsylvania, he faced a political mess because of his opposition to shutting down fossil fuel plants in favor of green energy. The fossil fuel industry is a major employer in Pennsylvania, even though he made the comments in California the day before.
The president owes coal workers an apology, said Sen. Joe Manchin, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. He said Biden’s comments were offensive and disgusting.
The White House said that Biden’s words were twisted to suggest a meaning that wasn’t intended, and that he was commenting on a fact of economics and technology.
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Democrats are deeply concerned about their narrow majorities in the House and Senate as voters sour on Biden’s leadership amid surging inflation, crime concerns and widespread pessimism about the direction of the country. History suggests that Democrats, as the party in power, will suffer significant losses in the midterms.
Trump’s weekend travels were part of a late blitz that will also take him to Ohio. He wants a strong GOP showing on Tuesday to propel him into the contest in the days or weeks after the polls close.
Over and over on Saturday, Trump falsely claimed he lost the 2020 election only because Democrats cheated, while raising the possibility of election fraud this coming week. Federal intelligence agencies warned of the risk of political violence from far right extremists because of such rhetoric.
“In the very next, very, very, very short period of time, you’re going to be happy,” Trump said of a White House bid. Republicans will have an historic victory on Nov. 8.
While highlighting his major legislative accomplishments, Biden warned that abortion rights, voting right, Social Security and Medicare could be in jeopardy if Republicans take control of Congress.
The president highlighted the Inflation Reduction Action, which provides health care provisions popular among older adults and the less well off, such as a $35 monthly cap on prescription drugs and a $2,000 cap on out of pocket medical expenses. Companies are required to pay a Medicare rebates if they raise prices faster than overall inflation.