Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to Kenosha County, Wisconsin, on Thursday while President Joe Biden vacations in Delaware.
Harris’s last trip to Wisconsin came just weeks before the 2022 midterm elections. On Thursday, she will join Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to discuss the administration’s attempts to expand broadband access to all communities across the nation, yet the trip comes nearly three years after a police officer shot Jacob Blake seven times, paralyzing him and causing widespread rioting outside of Milwaukee.
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Back in 2020, then-vice presidential candidate Harris declared that, based on her experience as a prosector, she believed that Rusten Sheskey, the police officer who shot Blake, should face criminal charges for the incident.
“I think that there should be a thorough investigation and, based on what I’ve seen, it seems that the officer should be charged,” she said in an August 2020 interview with NBC. “If he was not armed, the use of force that was seven bullets coming out of a gun at close range in the back of the man, I don’t see how anybody could reason that that was justifiable.”
The following month, Harris met with Blake’s family in Milwaukee and said, “They're carrying the weight of a lot of voices on their shoulders."
In 2021, county prosecutors declined to bring charges against Sheskey. White House officials did not say if Harris plans on addressing the Blake shooting and subsequent riots that destroyed much of the city during her visit.
However, Thursday’s trip comes as the administration is making a concerted effort to address Biden’s waning support among black voters, a critical component of his 2020 winning coalition.
White House officials have stressed that core pillars of the president’s economic platform center on advancing communities of color across the country, including massive infrastructure projects such as the "Internet for All" domestic broadband expansion plan, the focus of Harris's Tuesday trip to Kenosha.
Wisconsin also represents a critical state for Biden's expected 2024 rematch against former President Donald Trump. Biden won Wisconsin by a slim margin in 2020. Trump carried the swing state in 2016 after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton neglected to visit it in the homestretch of the campaign.
Biden has made a concerted effort since entering office to fulfill past promises he made to this crucial voting bloc, including placing black women in top administration posts and on the Supreme Court bench. However, the president has largely failed to keep some of his other campaign promises, such as police reform and signing voting rights legislation into law.
Biden still enjoys roughly 70% support among black voters, but that number marks a more than 10% decrease compared to when he entered office in January 2021.
A May poll from Ipsos and the Washington Post showed that just 34% of black people believe that Biden's agenda has helped their community. Nearly a majority of black respondents said his policies have had no impact, and 14% said the president's agenda is harming black people.
And a poll conducted by YouGov and the Economist found that only 46% of black respondents wanted Biden to seek a second term, compared to 56% of all Democrats.
The president is starting his August recess vacationing at a family home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and Harris has spent recent days fulfilling many of Biden's forward-facing duties.
The vice president delivered remarks at the African Methodist Episcopal Women's Missionary Convention in Florida on Tuesday and hosted a bilateral meeting with Mongolian Prime Minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene at the White House on Wednesday.
In addition to her remarks in Kenosha on Thursday, Harris will stop by two campaign fundraisers in Milwaukee and will deliver Jobs Day remarks at the White House on Friday.
Democratic officials familiar with the Biden team's thinking say this slate of appearances was likely scheduled with two purposes in mind: giving Harris a chance to rehab her own approval ratings and reassuring black voters that the Biden administration has their best interests in mind.
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Her Tuesday remarks in Florida took particular aim at Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), a top 2024 Republican presidential candidate, for his attempts to "bury history" with education reforms. Harris rejected DeSantis's invitation to discuss the state's new standards for teaching black history.
"I'm here in Florida, and I will tell you there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact. There were no redeeming qualities of slavery," she said during her Tuesday remarks.