The 2022 midterm elections are more than 16 months away, but President Biden's Illinois visit this month offered a glimpse at the White House's plan to try and protect razor-thin Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.
WASHINGTON — When Rep. Lauren Underwood's first congressional campaign was looking for a shot of momentum in the closing days of her uphill race in 2018, Joe Biden was one of the few brand-name Democrats who showed up, rallying more than 1,000 voters in the exurbs of Chicago.
The 2022 midterm elections are still more than 16 months away. But Biden's visit to the district this month offered a glimpse at the Biden White House's plan to try to protect the razor-thin Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, even as it works to implement the president's agenda now. With plans for an active travel schedule to promote policy proposals tailored to the middle-class voters Biden has long considered his base, the administration is laying the groundwork to continue to help vulnerable Democrats make a case for extending one-party control of Washington with the mantra that “good governance equals good policy, and good politics,” as Emmy Ruiz, the White House director of political strategy, put it to NBC News in an interview.
When Democrats secured an expansion of the child tax credit as part of their $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill, Gene Sperling, the man Biden tasked with overseeing its implementation, said he held meetings three times a week with IRS officials to ensure that credit could be paid directly to beneficiaries monthly, rather than as an end-of-year deduction.
On Wednesday, Biden will visit a union training facility in Cincinnati, Ohio, a state with a key Senate race in 2022, and just across the river from another represented by Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader from Kentucky. In 2010, vulnerable Democrats largely kept Obama at arm’s length as Republicans campaigned against the Affordable Care Act and debt and deficits. And four years later, it was again more often Biden paying a visit to battleground races — he held more than 114 events for 66 different Democratic candidates, committees and parties.
Cornell Belcher, a former Obama pollster, said he was struck watching a group of Republicans last month join Biden for a chummy news conference at the White House to discuss a bipartisan infrastructure deal they had just struck.
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