Biden Noticeably Absent From Campaign Trail as Obama Hits the Stump for Harris

As Democrats across the country activate for the final sprint to election day, one man is noticeably absent from the swing states and from the airwaves — the sitting commander in chief, President Biden. His light schedule for his own vice president’s national campaign is a stark departure from past campaign events. Compared to President Obama’s schedule for the 2016 race when he was stumping for Senator Clinton, Mr. Biden has stayed out of the limelight. By mid-October 2016, Mr. Obama had done half-a-dozen rallies for Mrs. Clinton in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, and other must-win states. He was also recording radio interviews for stations located in those very battleground states, urging people to get out to vote for his first secretary of state. Mr. Biden has just one campaign event on his schedule so far for October, and it isn’t even for Vice President Harris. It’s a rally for Senator Casey, locked in a tight race in Mr. Biden’s native Pennsylvania. Before that rally, he spoke for 20 minutes at an official White House event in Wisconsin where he touted infrastructure investments made by his administration. While speaking in Wisconsin, he only mentioned Ms. Harris in passing about her role in replacing lead pipes. On August 31, Mr. Biden told reporters that he would be “on the road” for Ms. Harris from Labor Day through the November election. Since then, he has appeared at zero campaign events with his vice president or with her own running mate, Governor Walz, and he has no Harris–Walz rallies on his schedule from here until election day. Neither the White House nor the Harris campaign immediately responded to a request for comment. Mr. Biden was once heralded as a fantastic booster of swing-district candidates. In 2017, he was well-received by voters in Alabama when he rallied for then-Senate candidate Doug Jones, who later won his special election. Before the 2018 midterms, he criss-crossed the country for House and Senate candidates as one of the most in-demand surrogates of the cycle. Now, he has quietly been relegated to the back benches. Mr. Obama will hit the trail for Ms. Harris on Thursday at a rally in Pennsylvania. He is expected to ramp up his campaign travel in the remaining weeks of the 2024 campaign, just as he did four years ago for Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, though the former president’s office did not immediately respond to an email to confirm such plans. This year, Mr. Biden’s campaign schedule — or lack thereof — resembles more of President Bush’s in 2008, when Senator McCain was trying to distance himself from a deeply unpopular administration. That year, in a sign of just how toxic he was, McCain did zero joint rallies with Mr. Bush. The only joint appearance they had campaign-wise was a Rose Garden handshake shortly after McCain became the presumptive Republican nominee. Not only is Mr. Biden not campaigning for the vice president, but he appears to be accidentally undercutting her with his hurricane preparedness meetings. Just in recent days, Mr. Biden’s official schedule as president has cut into Ms. Harris’s airtime twice. The first time it happened was on Saturday as Ms. Harris was rallying in Michigan. During that speech, Mr. Biden walked into a White House room briefing unannounced, marking the first time in his presidency that he had stood behind that podium. On Tuesday, he did it again when he delivered brief remarks from the Roosevelt Room at the White House about hurricane preparedness. At that same moment, Ms. Harris was being interviewed on ABC’s “The View.”

Biden Noticeably Absent From Campaign Trail as Obama Hits the Stump for Harris

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