Vice President Kamala Harris is looking to puncture negative perceptions about President Joe Biden‘s handling of the economy with an “economic opportunity” tour.
Harris, who is on a tour across the country highlighting abortion access following visits to college campuses last year, will launch this series of trips next Monday with a moderated conversation in Atlanta and another event in Detroit the week thereafter. Georgia and Michigan are both battleground states for November’s general election.
“President Biden and I are committed to creating an economy in which every person has the freedom to thrive,” Harris said in a statement Thursday. “That is why we have taken historic steps to advance economic opportunity by increasing access to capital, investing in small businesses, addressing housing costs, forgiving student loans and medical debt, investing in infrastructure, and championing additional policies that put money in people’s pockets and build wealth.”
The White House and Biden’s reelection campaign have increasingly relied on Harris, 59, to travel, while the president, 81, deals with official business in Washington, D.C., though his schedule is picking up as well after the State of the Union in March. Since the start of this year, she has made more than 35 trips to 16 states.
As the country’s first black woman to become vice president, much of Harris’s outreach has focused on minority voters, whom polls indicate are cooling on Biden. Simultaneously, Harris’s favorability rating is net negative 17 percentage points to Biden’s net negative 14.5, according to RealClearPolitics.
Harris’s economic opportunity tour coincides with polling that underscores how the economy could be Biden’s biggest political challenge six months out from Election Day. Biden’s overall average job approval is net negative 16 points, compared to his economic approval of net negative 17, according to the same polling aggregator.
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Last month, Harris became the first sitting vice president to visit an abortion provider when she dropped into a Planned Parenthood in Minnesota as part of her earlier tour.
“I’m here at this healthcare clinic to uplift the work that is happening in Minnesota as an example of what true leadership looks like, which is to understand it is only right and fair that people have access to the healthcare they need and that they have access to healthcare in an environment where they are treated with dignity and respect,” she said at the time.
