Advisers say President Biden plans 'robust' campaign trail schedule next 2 months to help Vice President Kamala Harris and 'plans to leave it all on the field' in battle against former President Donald Trump
Six weeks after he ended his re-election campaign amid rising calls from his own party to drop out of the race, President Biden returns to the campaign trail for the first time on Monday.
It will be the first of a "robust" schedule of campaign appearances by the president on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris over the next two months, a White House official tells Fox News.
"President Biden will be leaning in heavily over the next several months to finish the job," White House communications director Ben LaBolt said.
Biden will team up with Harris, whom he endorsed and who replaced him atop the Democrats' 2024 ticket, at a Labor Day event in Pittsburgh, a union stronghold and the biggest city in the western half of the key battleground state of Pennsylvania.
It is part of a full court press by the Harris campaign on Labor Day in some of the seven key swing states that will likely determine the winner of the vice president's election showdown with former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee.
Biden's disastrous performance against Trump in their late June debate turned up the volume on existing concerns from Americans that the 81-year-old president would have the physical and mental stamina to handle another four years in the White House. It also sparked a rising chorus of calls from top Democratic Party allies and elected officials for Biden to drop out of the race, which he did on July 21.
Biden was showered with chants of "thank you, Joe" as he teamed up with Harris on Aug. 15 in Largo, Maryland, for their first joint appearance since his departure from the 2024 race. While it was billed as an official White House event to announce that the federal government had negotiated lower prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies that will likely save Americans billions of dollars, the gathering had the feel of a political rally.
Additionally, while Harris repeatedly works to portray herself as a leader who will chart a "new path forward," Biden is a reminder to voters of the present and the past.
Sources in the Harris campaign confirm that going forward the president and vice president will campaign together at times – and that Biden will focus on Pennsylvania, as well as Michigan and Wisconsin, the two other Rust Belt states that make up the Democrats' so-called “Blue Wall.”
The party reliably won all three states for a quarter-century before Trump narrowly captured them in the 2016 election to win the White House.
Four years later, in 2020, Biden carried all three states by razor-thin margins to put them back in the Democrats' column, as he defeated Trump.
