BOW, N.H. — Former second lady Jill Biden, the wife of former Vice President Joe Biden, made headlines on Monday for her comments on electability at an education roundtable in Manchester, New Hampshire.
"Your candidate might be better on, I don't know, healthcare than Joe is, but you've got to look at who's going to win this election," she told voters at the roundtable. "And maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, ok I personally like so-and-so better but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump."
And while she did not return to the subject in her next appearance — a house party at the home of former New Hampshire Congressman Richard Swett and his wife Katrina Swett, a three-time congressional candidate — her hosts did. One of the most high-profile power couples in the state, the Swetts, who officially endorsed Biden earlier in the week, introduced the former second lady before an outdoor crowd of 50-100 voters on their property.
"I talk all the time to my friends and we have one topic of conversation, which is the race, the campaign, the state of the country, who are you working for, how can we bring about positive change," Katrina Swett said.
She told the audience that her friends support many different candidates, but said she often reminded them that President Donald Trump "didn't have a narrow Electoral College victory" and the eventual Democratic nominee "can't win without flipping states that were carried by President Trump." She named Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida, an expanded map beyond the former blue-wall battlegrounds, as fertile territory for Biden and then she reached her point.
"I sometimes say, 'Do you think fill-in-the-blank can flip that state?'" Swett said. "And very often, they'll pause and they'll be giving me the gung-ho script and so-on and so-forth and they'll say, 'No, actually I don't think they can flip that state.'"
A recent poll showed that only Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders led Trump in a hypothetical general election matchup. The Biden campaign also launched a television advertisement on Tuesday that showed him leading Trump. "We have to beat Donald Trump," the narrator said. "And all the polls agree: Joe Biden is the strongest Democrat to do the job."
Richard Swett, who also served as Ambassador to Denmark in the Clinton administration, was not as direct, but stressed that Biden would connect with people in rural areas.
"I think if you have seen over 25 years, you have seen Washington not pay attention to the people in the hinterlands," he said. "And you continue to talk a little bit about people that have felt left out, left behind. Well Joe Biden is someone who really believes in serving these people. He understands that those people, all of you here, are the soul of this country."
Even with the two introductions, only an hour after the education roundtable, Jill Biden stayed away from the argument. She talked about her upbringing — she grew up in a middle-class Philadelphia suburb watching the Phillies and waitressing at the Jersey Shore — and told the story of meeting her husband, then a young widower with two children and a freshman senator.
"I wore my hair down to the middle of my waist and so did most of the men I dated," she said about her young adulthood in the 1970s. So when she agreed to a blind date with a buttoned-up senator, "I took one look at him and I said, "Thank God it's only one date," she laughed. "Well one date turned into a marriage proposal and if I'm being honest, it was five proposals."
She said she turned him down at first because of her fear of disappointing his two young children, who had survived the car accident that killed their mother and baby sister. "I couldn't stand the thought of them losing another mother through divorce. I knew that I had to be 100 percent sure," Biden said.
One voter said after the event that she had never heard the tragic story of the car accident before and gained a new appreciation for the Bidens from the day. The grief from the deadly car accident has long shaped the former Vice President's worldview and helped him connect with people who have suffered similar trauma, like the families of mass shooting victims.
Biden told the crowd that, after eight years in the Obama administration, her husband "didn't really plan on running for office again." But, after the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, people begged him to reconsider. "There was an urgency," she said.
While she said that she can barely sit through the morning news anymore, she ended on a positive note. She praised communities for coming together to stand up to Trump and gave a shout out to several of key constituencies that Biden is working to win endorsements from. "It's the little miracles that restore my faith," she said. "The teachers, the first-responders, the volunteers. Everyone that shows up, like all of you."
Karen Cox, a teacher with retired military and retired police officer husband, said after the event that she had been swinging back and forth between Biden and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. "Now I've made up my mind," she said. "We have to flip those states. That's the thing that convinced me." She added her husband also supports Biden.
Dave Farr, a supporter of New York entrepreneur Andrew Yang who wanted to hear from the frontrunner, was less impressed. "She didn't say anything compelling for me," he said. He said he wanted "an outsider" with specific policies and "fresh ideas" and complained before the event that "some of these guys have been so entrenched in government."
For voters like Farr, the strategic calculations of longtime power couples and the stories about working with Biden on Capitol Hill in the 1970s and 1980s are not persuasive. "It's a little bit of Hillary all over again," he said.
Ahead of a weekend trip to the Granite State, where the former Vice President will hold town halls in Hanover, New Hampshire and Keene, New Hampshire, the Biden campaign will have to work to overcome that perception, while underlining their new poll numbers and the stakes of the 2020 election, to close the summer before the first-in-the-nation primary.
This work is made possible by the Russell H. Bostert Memorial Fellowship at Williams College.
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