White House tries to rally Democrats in battleground states with economic optimism

WASHINGTON — The 40 elected officials and community leaders from Michigan who showed up to the White House on Wednesday were feted by Vice President Kamala Harris, infrastructure czar Mitch Landrieu and Keisha Lance Bottoms, director of the Office of Public Engagement.

Dutifully, they listened as top White House officials reminded them of the investments that have been made in their state. To underscore the point, two large screens behind the podium outlined the day’s theme: “Building a Better Michigan.” Implicit in that message, just weeks before Election Day, was the argument that it was Democrats who were doing the building, with White House help.

“Everybody likes everything that we’re doing,” Landrieu quipped with more than a little hyperbole. “Even those people who voted no, they want the dough,” he said, eliciting a few chuckles. In a few cases, staunch administration opponents like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have bashed White House spending plans, only to turn around and use federal funds to make state-level investments they claim as their own.

“I don’t know why some folks are having trouble saying, ‘You know what, that’s pretty good,’” Landrieu said, in what might pass as the White House message ahead of the Nov. 8 midterms, which will decide whether Democrats keep control of Congress.

The event was a small part of the White House’s effort to boost Democrats’ morale, which has been battered by intractable challenges — the coronavirus, war in Ukraine — and exacerbated by ominous Republican messaging on crime and inflation. If the White House can’t exercise as much influence as it would like on Moscow or Riyadh, it can at least remind Democrats in Ann Arbor and Lansing of the trillions of dollars the Biden administration has invested in economic initiatives, particularly those related to green energy, drug prices and physical infrastructure.

On Wednesday, that message was delivered to a room full of Michiganders. The White House has held similar policy pep rallies with officials from Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina — all states with key congressional and state-level races — as well as with representatives from Southwestern states. The meetings are part of the administration’s “Communities in Action” plan, intended to spell out how federal dollars are translating into real-world projects, with the hope of earning goodwill from voters who have grown accustomed to thinking of Washington as incapable of anything but infighting.

“Folks are inspired; they are energized,” White House senior policy adviser Julie Chávez Rodriguez told Yahoo News.

It is the kind of effort the Obama administration never undertook after its $787 billion economic stimulus passed in 2009, instead allowing Republicans to define the plan as profligate. Biden, who was Barack Obama’s vice president, resolved not to make the same mistake when it came to his own accomplishments.

“We can always do a better job of connecting people to the ways in which government works for them,” Rodriguez said.

While hardly an inveterate pitchman in the Trumpian mold, Biden is not above touting — and, as is a politician’s wont, exaggerating — his accomplishments. “Name any president in recent history that has gotten as much done as I have,” Biden told Jake Tapper’s CNN in an interview that aired Tuesday night. “Not a joke. They may not like what I have gotten done, but the vast majority of the American people do,” he said in reference to his Republican opponents, whose ideas he has described as unpopular and destructive.

Biden’s low approval ratings, however, suggest that many Americans are either unaware of his accomplishments or unconvinced of their significance, which may explain why the White House is turning to local officials — and the outlets that cover them.

The Communities in Action meetings are held in person, in an airy conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which adjoins the White House, in an effort to underscore that the United States is returning to its pre-pandemic life. The option to use Zoom to join Wednesday’s event was, as far as it was possible to tell, nonexistent. Almost nobody was masked.

Nor is it lost on the White House that local officials are likely to be far more impressed with a presidential or vice presidential encounter than Washington legislators accustomed to the halls of power. When officials from Pennsylvania visited in late September, Biden himself dropped into their Communities in Action summit. When, on Wednesday, Bottoms and Harris addressed the Michigan delegation, smartphones came out for the obligatory photos.

And coverage at such affairs tends to come from regional press outlets, which can otherwise have a difficult time gaining meaningful White House access. Visits by state delegations offer an obvious opportunity for Biden to score easy points with the kinds of local outlets Americans tend to trust more than they do national ones.

As the summit on Wednesday concluded, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan conducted back-to-back television interviews with two Michigan-based stations. Most national media were absent from the White House grounds, since the president was en route to Colorado and California, with his press pool in tow.

“Michiganders feel that we’re heading in the right direction,” Duggan told Yahoo News afterward, pointing to a $2.4 billion investment by a Chinese electric vehicle battery company in a Big Rapids, Mich., plant expected to create nearly 2,500 jobs in the region. “That was inconceivable five years ago.”

The question is whether optimistic Democratic messaging on the economy can counter unrelenting Republican warnings on crime. Although violent crime is, as Duggan notes, down in Michigan’s biggest cities, the issue tends to exercise outsize power on voters’ imaginations. In a recent debate between Michigan’s current Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and her Republican challenger, Tudor Dixon, public safety proved a predictable point of contention.

A similar dynamic emerged earlier this week during a debate between the nominees for a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio, with Republican candidate J.D. Vance accusing his Democratic opponent, Rep. Tim Ryan, of endorsing “BLM riots” in the summer of 2020.

Democrats had long relied on support in Midwestern states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where labor unions and big-city political machines reliably delivered votes in election after election, including for Obama in 2008 and 2012. But the so-called Midwestern firewall collapsed on Nov. 8, 2016, allowing Donald Trump to reach the White House despite winning fewer total votes than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Since then, Democrats have struggled to win back Midwestern voters, only to find themselves frustrated by culture wars, economic travails and their own muddled messaging. As a result, states like Ohio and Iowa have largely been forsaken to Republicans, while even bluer Michigan requires a spirited defense against GOP candidates looking to harness varieties of cultural discontent.

As the Democratic rebuilding effort has faltered, the desperation has grown. “If things continue to get worse for us in small and midsize, working-class counties, we can give up any hope of winning the battleground states of the industrial heartland,” an internal Democratic Party assessment warned last year.

Communities in Action can be seen as part of the rebuilding effort, both in the Midwest and elsewhere, to make an updated case (with a new green-energy tint) that it is Democrats who have middle-class interests at heart. In cheerleading sessions like the one that Michigan legislators attended on Wednesday, White House officials exhort state and local Democrats to publicly (and loudly) own the administration’s economic successes, most notably the coronavirus relief plan, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

In all, those initiatives amount to a little more than $4 billion in new government spending. “This is a series of legislative wins that we haven’t seen in this town for a very, very, very long time,” Landrieu told the Michigan delegation on Wednesday. “The money’s real, and the money’s coming down the pike.”

Critics say that more government spending at a time of intense inflationary pressure is irresponsible and will only lead to further economic troubles. Meanwhile, some within the party want Democrats to more forcefully engage the Republicans on culture war issues instead of retreating from such fights.

But since Biden himself has never been much of a culture warrior, White House efforts are bound to remain, for the most part, focused on economic renewal, especially in Midwestern states where the ravages of deindustrialization remain a visceral reminder of empty political promises and failed efforts at renewal.

It could not have been lost on any of Wednesday’s attendees that many of the federal and corporate dollars being invested in Michigan are intended to galvanize the automotive industry that once powered the state, with both General Motors and Ford investing billions in new electrical vehicle plans — investments the Biden administration says are the direct result of incentives it has created.

“Nobody doubts that Joe Biden is behind the American car industry,” Duggan said of the president, who years ago was mocked with a satirical headline about washing his hot rod in the White House driveway.

“And I think that appreciation is going to be shown.”