President Joe Biden will visit Milwaukee on Wednesday, underscoring the Democrats’ focus on the battleground state ahead of 2024 election.
His visit will come the week after the State of the Union and a week after Vice President Kamala Harris visited Madison to tout the administration’s work to gain support among blue-collar workers.
A brief statement from the White House said Biden will travel to Milwaukee on Wednesday to participate in “political events.”
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Biden was last in Wisconsin for a Milwaukee appearance in December. He also followed up his last State of the Union address in February 2023 by visiting DeForest to focus on unions’ role in building the country’s economy
The visit comes as the presidential race shifts to a general election matchup between Biden and former President Donald Trump, after Trump’s last remaining significant challenger, Nikki Haley, dropped out last week.
The president’s campaign announced Friday that he and Harris will visit every major swing state in coming days, while launching a $30 million, six-week advertising campaign on TV and digital platforms designed to highlight key themes from the State of the Union address to Black, Asian and Hispanic communities.
That push will include buys during the NCAA basketball tournament, as Biden’s camp attempts to leverage high ratings, like it says it did when airing an ad promising to defend abortion rights during the recent Grammy Awards.
By the end of this month, the Biden campaign expects to expand from 100 staff members in seven battleground states to more than 350, while also opening more than 100 field offices. Trump’s campaign is targeting essentially the same areas, looking to flip Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona after 2020 defeats there, while fending off Biden’s efforts to make inroads in North Carolina and Florida.
Biden’s campaign is seeking to hit Trump hard at one of his most vulnerable moments, when the former president may be struggling to consolidate his party after the primary — and as more potentially persuadable voters begin coming to terms with the fact that November really will be a 2020 rematch.
“We know that he lost in 2020 and so, in order to win, he’s got to expand his base of voters to find new people to be with him, and that is not something that he’s shown that he’s really focused on,” Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said on a conference call with reporters on Friday.
Biden and Trump remain deadlocked in Wisconsin, according to a Marquette Law School Poll released in February, although the poll was taken when Haley was still a candidate for the Republican nomination.
The poll found both Trump and Biden receiving support from 49% of registered voters, with 2% saying they had not yet decided. The results mark a slight shift from Marquette’s November poll, which found Biden holding 50% support among registered Wisconsin voters to Trump’s 48%, well within that poll’s margin of error.
Of respondents who are very enthusiastic to vote, Trump holds a 19-point lead over Biden. However, Biden has more support among respondents who said they were somewhat enthusiastic, as well as those who are not very and not at all enthusiastic to vote.