Biden on the campaign trail






With an eye on a 2024 reelection bid, President Joe Biden takes his economic message to union workers in Wisconsin

If President Joe Biden wants a second term, the path could start in Wisconsin where his tiny victory in 2020 over former President Donald Trump sparked a two-year war in this evenly split battleground state over the state's system of elections.

Now, following his State of the Union address and ahead of a potential 2024 announcement, Biden made his first stop in Dane County — a voting powerhouse for Democrats that also is one of the only areas of the state with consistent population growth — to promote his economic plan that he argues will address the challenges of an aging population and a stagnant workforce.

He arrives at a time when most of Wisconsin voters don't approve of the way Biden is handling the presidency and as voters nationally are sour on the idea of a 2020 rerun between Biden and Trump, according to recent polling by the Marquette University Law School that showed 34% wanting Biden to run in 2024 and 29% backing a Trump campaign for president.

On Wednesday, Biden pressed an economic message in an appeal to blue-collar workers who have in recent years diverted their support to Republican candidates.

"A typical middle-class family for decades was the backbone of America. The middle class has been hollowed out — it's been hollowed out," Biden said at the Laborers' International Union of North America training center in DeForest, 14 miles north of Madison.

"You saw it Janesville," he said, referring to the 2008 closure of a General Motors plant that had employed 7,000 workers at the peak of its 89-year lifespan.

"Once-thriving cities and towns became shadows of what they used to be. When those towns were hollowed out, something else was lost: pride, self-esteem, a sense of self-worth. But now we're going to turn that around and build an economy where no one's going to be left behind."

To a crowd of Democratic officials, donors, and dozens of union workers, Biden touted the hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs under the American Rescue Plan, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act. He spent hours afterward meeting with workers at the facility honing those skills.