By Jeff Mason
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris travels to Wisconsin on Wednesday to trumpet White House economic policies as she and President Joe Biden struggle to convince voters to give them more credit for U.S. economic strength.
Harris will make a stop in Madison, a college town filled with young voters critical to Biden and Harris’s re-election efforts, to talk about apprenticeship programs and “good-paying union jobs,” the White House said.
Wisconsin is a political battleground state that the Biden team wants to win in November to get to the 270 state electoral votes required to be reelected. Biden won the state of nearly six million people in 2020 by less than 1% of votes; in 2016 Wisconsin supported Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Democrats have been frustrated by polling that shows voters unhappy with the economy and giving higher marks to former President Trump on the issue, despite robust job growth, low unemployment and record high stock markets under Biden’s tenure.
Harris’s visit shows the Biden campaign plans to continue to tout the president’s ‘Bidenomics’ platform – without always using that moniker – while highlighting what Biden and his supporters see as a threat to democracy posed by Trump, the Republican presidential frontrunner and Biden’s likely opponent.
Harris’s trip comes after a high-profile visit on Sunday to Selma, Alabama, where she made a sharp call for Israel to do more to allow aid in to Gaza, which she said was experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe.
U.S. officials and other allies are seeking to negotiate a six-week ceasefire in Israel’s war with Hamas, which was sparked by the Palestinian militant group’s Oct. 7 attack that killed some 1200 people.
More than 30,000 people in Gaza have died as a result of Israel’s military response, according to Palestinian authorities, and the war has angered some of Biden’s core group of voters, including young people and left-leaning progressives.
Harris’s remarks calling for an immediate ceasefire echo demands from some of those supporters, who are staging ‘uncommitted’ protest votes in Democratic primaries across the country.
Harris, whose early tenure as vice president did not win over the Democratic establishment in Washington, has become the administration’s leading voice to promote abortion rights, an issue that resonates with women and young voters.
The issue has helped fuel Democratic successes in Wisconsin, including the election of a liberal judge to the state Supreme Court last year.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason; Editing by Heather Timmons and Deepa Babington)
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