Biden returns to campaign trail with speech to NAACP in Nevada
2024.07.16 17:35
By Nandita Bose and Jarrett Renshaw
LAS VEGAS (Reuters) -President Joe Biden returned to the campaign trail on Tuesday in the battleground state of Nevada with an address to a major gathering of Black voters, his first political speech since the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
“I am all in,” Biden told the NAACP national convention as members of the audience chanted “four more years.”
Biden said he was grateful that Trump was okay after Saturday’s incident and that “it’s time for an important conversation in our country. Our politics got too heated.”
After the shooting of Biden’s Republican rival, the Biden campaign immediately pulled its television ads, called off verbal attacks on the former president and focused instead on a message of unity.
The campaign’s strategy previously was to focus on tough criticism of Trump as a threat to U.S. democracy and to highlight his failure to admit his 2020 election loss and his felony convictions.
Now, it is trying to calibrate a less pugilistic message that still strikes a stark comparison between the two candidates.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the oldest and largest U.S. civil rights organization, represents a key constituency for the Democratic Party. While Black voters turned out heavily for Biden in 2020, polls have shown waning support for him from the constituency in this election.
Derrick Johnson, the NAACP president, told Reuters on Monday that he hopes Biden lays out a plan to help Black Americans who are struggling economically and fearful that their rights are under threat.
“People are concerned about the price of gas, price of bread, but they’re also concerned with their growing knowledge around Project 2025,” Johnson said, referring to a set of conservative policy proposals that have become a lighting rod for Trump critics.
On Sunday, Biden used the formal setting of the White House Oval Office to ask Americans to lower the political temperature, recommit themselves to resolving their differences peacefully. He said the Nov. 5 presidential election will be a “time of testing.”
In an interview with NBC News, Biden said on Monday it was a mistake for him to use the term “bullseye” in reference to Trump during a recent donor campaign call.
The president postponed a trip to Texas on Monday, where he was expected to speak on the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act at the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library.
White House officials hope the Trump assassination attempt might ease pressure on Biden to step aside as his Democratic Party’s candidate in response to concerns about his mental acuity and stamina to govern for another four-year term.
On Wednesday, Biden is scheduled to speak to Latino leaders at the UnidosUS Annual Conference also in Las Vegas.
Meanwhile, Trump and Republicans are gathered in Milwaukee for the party’s nominating convention that kicked off Monday with the selection of U.S. Senator J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate.
