President Biden will deliver remarks at a trio of events focused on key themes and voting blocs for his reelection bid during the week of the Republican National Convention, the White House announced Sunday.
The series of speaking engagements, which includes travel to the battleground state of Nevada, is the latest indication it’s full speed ahead for Biden even as a growing number of Democratic lawmakers urge him to step aside as the party’s candidate in November.
“Next week, President Biden will continue traveling the country to discuss the extraordinary progress the American people have made in the past three and a half years, lay out his vision to ensure the promise of America reaches all communities, and make clear that we must resist attempts by Congressional Republicans to take us backwards,” a White House official said in a statement.
Biden will deliver remarks on July 15 in Austin, Texas, at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. The landmark legislation outlawed discrimination based on race, religion or sex.
The president’s speech will take place on the opening day of the GOP convention in Milwaukee, Wis. Republicans will gather there that week to outline their policy platform, deliver speeches and formally nominate former President Trump.
Biden will deliver remarks in Las Vegas at the 115th NAACP national convention on July 16.
The president will speak on July 17 in Nevada at the UnidosUS annual conference, which is described as one of the largest gatherings of Latinos and allies in the country.
While all three speeches are official White House events, they are directly connected to key themes of Biden’s campaign. He has aggressively pushed back on Republican efforts to roll back basic rights on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and affirmative action, and the president and Vice President Harris have courted Black and Latino voters who helped put them in the White House in 2020.
The president has ramped up his travel schedule in the wake of a disastrous debate performance in late June that triggered calls from some elected officials for him to step aside out of concern that he can’t beat Trump in November.
Biden visited Wisconsin last week and spent Sunday in Pennsylvania, both key battlegrounds he will likely need to win in order to secure reelection. The president will spend the upcoming week attending events for the NATO summit taking place in Washington, D.C.
But his more active schedule may not be enough to assuage Democrats who are concerned he can’t effectively make the case against Trump over the next four months and convince voters he’s up to the job for another four years.
A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll of battleground state voters, published Saturday, showed Biden leading Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin. Trump leads Biden in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, though the races remain close in all states.