Biden heads back to Wisconsin and Michigan as he looks to shore up Democratic ‘blue wall’

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is becoming a familiar face around the Great Lakes — and with a rematch against Donald Trump looming in November, that’s no coincidence.

Biden will depart from Wednesday for a two-day trip through Wisconsin and Michigan, looking to build momentum for his re-election campaign after a fiery State of the Union address last week in which he targeted Trump as a serious threat to the country’s core ideals of democracy and freedom . On Tuesday night, he secured a second straight Democratic nomination, winning enough delegates after a decisive victory in Georgia. The president visited Pennsylvania, Georgia and New Hampshire ahead of his latest trip to the Midwest.

Michigan and Wisconsin are part of the “blue wall,” along with Pennsylvania, where Biden was born and has made more campaign trips than to any other state. Trump flipped all three to win the White House in 2016, but Biden took them back four years ago and will likely have to hold on to them if he wants to secure a second term.

Biden also plans to travel to North Carolina and other battleground states in the coming weeks. He has overseen field office openings as his campaign hires and trains organizers and begins gathering volunteers.

That’s meant as a show of political organizing power — an area in which the president has so far surpassed Trump, who is already months into a competitive primary and four ongoing criminal cases in which he faces 91 felonies.

Biden’s re-election campaign hopes the grassroots organizing can neutralize the president’s low approval ratings, and polls show most voters — even a majority of Democrats — don’t want him re-elected.

“This particular president is a really impressive retail politician. He doesn’t just rally and leave,” said Jim Paine, the mayor of Superior, Wisconsin, a port city on the Minnesota border. Biden has been there twice, including in January to promote a bridge built as part of the infrastructure bill.

“He really spends time with people, listening to individual stories, talking one-on-one about his own life,” Paine said.

Biden will first go to Milwaukee to announce that he has allocated $3.3 billion for infrastructure projects in underserved communities. The projects, funded through the bipartisan infrastructure bill of 2021, should help regenerate neighborhoods in Black, Hispanic and Chinese communities that were cut off from their surroundings by major highways and roads years ago. The president will allocate $36 million to reconnect parts of Milwaukee’s 6th Street, as freeway construction in the 1960s created high-speed traffic that physically divided the area.

“This is a historic example of what it looks like to deliver to people in a way that makes everyday life better for everyone,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on a call with reporters.

The grants cover a total of 132 projects, including in Atlanta, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, as well as in Birmingham, Alabama, Syracuse, New York and Toledo, Ohio. Buttigieg said some of the projects are “relatively modest” and can be completed in “short notice,” while others are “huge and ambitious undertakings that will take many years.”

Biden will also oversee the opening of his campaign headquarters in Milwaukee, where nearly 40% of residents are Black, instead of in Madison, the state capital that typically serves as a base for Democratic campaigns.

It is Biden’s ninth visit to Wisconsin as president and his fifth visit to Milwaukee, where Republicans will hold their national convention this summer. Chris LaCivita, an adviser to Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s successful 2022 re-election campaign in Wisconsin, is also one of Trump’s top campaign aides — another signal that the state is a top GOP priority.

On Thursday, the president heads to Saginaw, north of Detroit, where high concentrations of black and union voters live. Once a reliably Democratic country, it switched to Trump in 2016 and only narrowly supported Biden four years ago.

Biden and top advisers, both from the campaign and the White House, have recently made regular visits to Michigan amid criticism of his administration’s handling of the war in Gaza in places like Dearborn, a Detroit suburb with the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country. the country.

His challenge was vividly demonstrated last month during Michigan’s Democratic presidential primaries, when activists promoted an “uncommitted” movement that received about 13% of the vote.

Thursday’s visit will not take him to Dearborn but will instead help Biden connect with key constituencies in other parts of the state. The campaign promises to open more than 15 field offices in Michigan, adding to the 44 the state and the Democratic Party have in Wisconsin.

Early polls have shown Biden doing better against Trump in Wisconsin than against Michigan. Richard Czuba, a longtime Michigan researcher, said in November that many more potentially decisive voters than supporters of the “uncommitted” movement during the Democratic primaries are many “doubly disfavored” voters. He described them as state residents who plan to vote in November but don’t vote. I don’t like Trump or Biden.

“If they are persuaded to vote for Joe Biden, Joe Biden will win the state of Michigan,” Czuba said. “But for Donald Trump, I think it’s an easier task to make sure those double unfavorable points are distributed.”

One way Biden could win over such voters could be by making the race on issues like abortion rights, rather than himself, Czuba said. He noted that the president’s criticism of a suggestion by Trump that he would allow Russia to “do whatever they want” to some NATO allies appealed both to Michigan’s large Polish-American population and to immigrants from the Baltic states could resonate.

Biden’s campaign moved quickly to highlight these comments in a three-week, six-figure digital ad campaign that targeted about 900,000 Baltic Americans in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Still, that may not be enough for some voters in Michigan, where apathy over the Trump-Biden rematch is palpable. Saginaw resident Jeffrey Bulls said, “I’ll probably skip that first spot on the ballot.”

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Associated Press writers Joey Cappelletti in Saginaw, Michigan, and Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.