Amtrak Joe announces $16 billion in rail spending

What does a railroad enthusiast who is sinking in the polls do to boost sentiment? On Monday, President Joe Biden will make the short drive from his Delaware beach house to an Amtrak maintenance facility, where he will announce $16 billion in rail investments from his infrastructure bill.

Officials believe they have a good news story to sell. The money will go toward repairing bridges and tunnels, as well as improving tracks on Amtrak’s busy northeast corridor. But it comes as Biden faces new headwinds from his faltering 2024 presidential campaign, with a New York Times/Siena College poll showing him falling behind former President Donald Trump in five of six key battleground states.

If the results are repeated a year from now, Biden would likely be dumped from the White House after one term. Polls show voters feel they are doing worse in a Biden economy than under Trump, following a period of strong inflation following the pandemic. Take a day trip to an Amtrak maintenance center. Monday’s visit to Bear, Delaware, marks at least the third time the president has held an event to highlight spending on the Northeast Corridor, a line Biden walked daily when he was a senator.

Biden says he has traveled more than a million miles on Amtrak and his local station now bears his name. “Amtrak wasn’t just a way to get home to family,” Biden said during a speech in Baltimore earlier this year. “The conductors, the engineers, they literally became my family.”

Some of the major projects being raised include $3.8 billion to repair and expand the Hudson River Tunnel between New York and New Jersey, and $4.7 billion for the Frederick Douglass Tunnel connecting Baltimore to Washington, D.C. Virginia connects, eliminating one of the biggest bottlenecks on the line. . “The bottom line is that these improvements will reduce travel times and improve reliability for the more than 200 million passengers who travel on this rail corridor annually,” said U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

Officials say the bipartisan infrastructure bill of 2021 was one of the Biden administration’s most significant legislative successes, proving it was possible to navigate Washington’s gridlocked partisan politics to deliver a trillion dollars in investment. Polls show they are having a hard time selling the idea to voters.

The latest New York Times/Siena College poll shows Trump with a whopping 10 percentage point lead among voters in Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Biden has a two-point lead in Wisconsin. In 2020, he won all six states. A second survey found that “Bidenomics,” the White House nickname for the president’s economic policies, failed to impress.

About 51 percent of swing-state voters said they felt the national economy was better off during the Trump years, according to the New Morning Consult/Bloomberg survey.

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