JOE BIDEN, BOX OFFICE POISON. Remember when President Joe Biden visited Georgia and the state’s Democratic star, gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, did not appear with him? Abrams said she had a “scheduling conflict,” which nobody believed.
Now, the “scheduling conflict” problem has spread to Pennsylvania. Biden is set to visit Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University to “discuss strengthening the nation’s supply chains, revitalizing American manufacturing, creating good-paying union jobs, and building a better America,” according to a White House press release.
The White House invited John Fetterman, the Democratic lieutenant governor now running for Senate, Josh Shapiro, the Democratic attorney general who will run for governor, and Conor Lamb, the Democratic representative from the Pittsburgh area, to appear with Biden. Only Lamb, who gave Biden valuable support in the state in 2020, said yes. Fetterman and Shapiro both begged off, citing those “scheduling conflicts.” Like Abrams, they did not say precisely what those “scheduling conflicts” were.
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“The high-profile absences come as Democrats in other states have begun taking modest steps to distance themselves from the first-term president, whose approval ratings have fallen sharply in recent months,” writes the Associated Press. “And while Fetterman and Shapiro indicated that politics had no bearing on their schedules, their decisions to avoid Biden, particularly in his home state, could fuel further questions among anxious Democratic candidates elsewhere as they decide whether to embrace the struggling president.”
That’s being nice. A visit by the president of the United States to your state is a big deal. If you are of the president’s party, and you are running for office, and he invites you to attend, it’s an even bigger deal. If you have a scheduling conflict, you cancel whatever it is you were going to do in order to appear with the president. That’s the way it works.
Except for Biden in 2022. This week a poll came out in Georgia that did a lot to explain Stacey Abrams’s no-show. A University of Georgia survey for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed just 34% of Georgians approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 61% disapprove. Those are terrible numbers for a state that Biden won, albeit very narrowly, in 2020. No wonder Abrams found something else to do when the president came to town.
There are no recent poll numbers in Pennsylvania, but we do know that Biden has been on a downward trajectory. A Franklin & Marshall College poll in late October 2021 found that only 32% of Pennsylvanians said Biden was doing an excellent or good job, while 20% said he was doing only a fair job, and 47% said he was doing a poor job. That was a significant fall from the same poll last August, which was down from a poll in June. And this was also in a state that Biden won in 2020.
So the decision from Fetterman and Shapiro is no mystery. They’re running for office this year, and this is not a good year to appear with Biden. By the way, officials who are not running said yes to the president. “Leading Pennsylvania Democrats who are not on the ballot this year did not have the same scheduling conflicts,” the Associated Press noted. “Those who will appear with Biden include Gov. Tom Wolf, who is term-limited, and Sen. Bob Casey, whose current term runs through 2024.”
One last bit of bad news for Biden. The trip to Pennsylvania is supposed to be the beginning of a new strategy for 2022. At his recent news conference, Biden was asked what he plans to do differently in the coming year. “No. 1, I’m going to get out of this place more often,” the president answered. “I’m going to go out and talk to the public. I’m going to do public fora. I’m going to interface with them. I’m going to make the case of what we’ve already done, why it’s important, and what we’ll do if — what will happen if they support what else I want to do.”
The White House thinks that is a good plan. But reality is already intruding. Pennsylvania and Georgia are important states. They will be critical to Biden if he runs for reelection, which he says he intends to do. But not only are the polls sending Biden a message from those two states — leading Democrats are sending a message, too, with their absence.
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