The Big GuyBiden
...46th president of the U.S. S You're a lyin' dog-faced pony soldier...
's three-state swing out West this week will capture, in a nutshell, the White House's midterm strategy for a president who remains broadly unpopular: promote his administration's accomplishments and appear where he can effectively rally the party faithful — all while continuing to rake in campaign cash.
Biden's first stop Wednesday is near Vail, Colorado, where he is to designate his administration's first national monument at the behest of Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, the state's senior senator who finds himself in a competitive reelection bid. Then the president will head to Caliphornia, an impregnable bastion of the Democratic Party,, where he will hold a pair of events promoting two of his most significant legislative achievements and headline a fundraiser for the House Democrats' campaign arm.
Finally, Biden will stop in Oregon, where Democrats' grip on the governor's mansion in Salem is being threatened by an unaffiliated candidate who has captured double-digit support in polling, giving an opening for a Republican to win the race outright in November.
"We've been very clear that the president is going to go out, the vice president is going to go out," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday. "They're going to talk about the successes that we have seen in this administration in the last 19 months."
It's all part of a campaign blueprint fine-tuned over the last several months for Biden, who has been eager to travel the country but is facing the traditional midterm headwinds against the political party in power, an unsettled economic outlook and presidential approval ratings that have remained stubbornly underwater.
To counter Republican criticisms over the economy and inflation, Democratic candidates have highlighted accomplishments such as bipartisan infrastructure, manufacturing laws, and a sweeping climate, tax and health care package. Those achievements also helped prompt a late-summer uptick in Biden's own job performance ratings earlier this year.
Democratic candidates have also been far more likely to appear with Biden if it's an official White House event underscoring their achievements, such as the groundbreaking for a computer chip facility in suburban Ohio that was aided tremendously by the law that bolsters domestic semiconductor production.
That's the approach in Colorado, where the White House says Biden will speak about his administration's efforts to "protect, conserve, and restore some of America's most cherished lands and waters for the benefit of future generations."