President Joe Biden told Democrat National Committee members Thursday they can win the House and gain Senate seats, in November.
He told fellow party members at their Winter meeting in Washington, D.C. they have a record to be incredibly proud of and an agenda the public strongly supports.
The president said his Build a Better America is a message that resonates with Americans but the party has to put in the work to translate that into votes.
“I’ve seen what you can do,” President Biden said, adding he saw they didn’t let anything stop them in 2020 and the party can’t let anything stop us now.
Biden said the party needed to bring real determination, along with the same work ethic and enthusiasm in 2020 to this year’s midterm election.
“And, if we do that, we’re going to keep the House and keep the Senate and add seats,” Biden said to applause.
“And by the way, if we don’t do that — if we don’t do that,” he cautioned, “it’s going to be a sad, sad two years.”
The president took credit for vaccinating the majority of people in the United States.
“When I took office, only 2 million Americans had been fully vaccinated,” he said. “Today, we’ve vaccinated the nation — more than 215 million people fully vaccinated.” He gave no credit to former President Donald Trump for getting a vaccine available by December 2020. In September 2016, candidate Joe Biden threw shade at any vaccine that Trump might deliver, especially if it was out as quick as he promised.
“Let me be clear: I trust vaccines, I trust scientists,” Biden said as a candidate. “But I don’t trust Donald Trump.”
“And at this moment, the American people can’t either.”
Biden claimed credit for a vastly improved economy at the partisan dinner.
“Twenty million people were out of work just months before I took office,” he said. “Job growth was anemic, 60,000 jobs a month leading up to January ’21 — 2021.” Biden said his administration took action that resulted in the creation of 6.5 million jobs last year. He added that was more jobs than was ever created in one year in the United States of America.”
“More jobs,” he continued, “and people got pay increases.”
It’s hard to make real comparisons since many jobs were lost during COVID-19 lockdowns of major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. It’s not clear from his remarks if the job increases are on top of the workers who returned to jobs they lost during the pandemic.
He also expressed optimism of the public’s support for his administration’s handling of the events unfolding in Ukraine. The president seemed to believe support for Ukraine will erase memories of the evacuation from Afghanistan.
As he said, the Democrats will either hold their control of the Legislature, or they will endure two very sad years.
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