Politico

BOSTON — Top Massachusetts Democrats fed up with federal inaction on immigration are beginning to lash out at President Joe Biden.

“The guy’s running for president. He better start paying attention to this,” an audibly frustrated House Speaker Ron Mariano said Wednesday. He had just been asked by POLITICO whether the White House should designate a point person to coordinate states’ responses to the migrant surge, as Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker suggested in a letter to Biden this week.

“We need to put a framework around this from the feds,” Mariano told reporters. “We need someone to take charge of this and say ‘this is what you can expect.’”

Massachusetts Democrats used to be careful not to name-drop Biden when talking about immigration issues even as they publicly pleaded with his administration for more money for the state’s emergency shelter system and expedited work permits for migrants. They instead made nonspecific references to the federal government and directed their concerns toward Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

But Biden is safe no longer as frustrations with his administration’s response — or lack thereof — to the deluge of new arrivals overwhelming Democratic strongholds begin to outweigh the potential political consequences of publicly berating the president.

“We need two things from the Biden administration: We need federal funding and we need expedited work authorizations,” Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat who sits on Biden’s national campaign advisory board, reiterated on Wednesday at the State House.

They’re not confident they’ll get it. Healey and top legislative leaders met with Massachusetts’ federal delegation Thursday morning to amplify their calls for help. Mariano walked away from the virtual confab just as frustrated as he was the day before.

“The hope is — and it’s only a prayer — that cold weather slows the flow of the families coming over the border. But we’re not even sure if that will work,” Mariano told reporters late Thursday morning. “Unless we get help, we are going to have some difficulties.”

Massachusetts Democrats’ exasperation with the Biden administration comes as state lawmakers weigh Healey’s request for $250 million in additional funding for the emergency shelter system that’s now housing more than 6,700 homeless families, about half of which the state estimates are migrants.

The Healey administration is burning through existing state money for the shelter program at a rapid clip. If families continue to flood the system at the current rate (about 25 per day), the Healey administration predicts it will exhaust the $325 million the state budgeted this fiscal year for the emergency shelter program in January — a full six months early.

Money could run out even sooner for the administration’s “family welcome centers” and temporary emergency shelters at Eastern Nazarene College and Joint Base Cape Cod, and to pay the state’s contracts with hotels housing homeless families. That’s all according to the administration’s responses to House leaders’ questions about the cost and mechanics of the shelter system that were provided to POLITICO.

The extra $250 million “would fund our current caseload through the end of the fiscal year,” the administration said. It includes $130 million for shelter and associated services, $33 million for the temporary emergency shelters and $87 million for “wraparound services and community supports” like school district reimbursements.

But lawmakers are taking their time with this one as they work to understand the scope of the rapidly worsening shelter crisis. And the process could be further dragged out if they separate out the shelter funding from the rest of the $2 billion supplemental spending bill Healey filed to close out the last fiscal year.

Shelter aid is “really not part of the closeout discussion, because that is fiscal ’24 dollars that we’re supplementing,” Senate Ways and Means Chair Michael Rodrigues said. “My first priority is closing the books on fiscal ’23.”

Kelly Garrity contributed to this report.

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The Bidens’ dog Commander is “not presently on the White House campus,” the White House said, after it was revealed the dog had bitten Secret Service agents on several occasions.

“The President and First Lady care deeply about the safety of those who work at the White House and those who protect them every day. They remain grateful for the patience and support of the U.S. Secret Service and all involved, as they continue to work through solutions,” Elizabeth Alexander, the first lady’s communications director, said in a statement to POLITICO. “Commander is not presently on the White House campus while next steps are evaluated.”

The German shepherd is the second Biden pup to leave the White House after incidents of biting. Major, the Bidens’ other dog, was sent to live with friends after two biting incidents, according to The Washington Post.

Commander’s departure comes after CNN reported that the number of biting instances between Commander and White House staff was above the 11 incidents the Secret Service confirmed in July.

In July, emails obtained by a conservative watchdog agency revealed that Commander had bitten several Secret Service agents — sending one to the hospital — and exhibited “aggressive behavior” in at least 10 incidents since he took residence in the White House in December 2021. The White House said Commander would be receiving more training following that report.

From Mitch McConnell on down, the Senate’s pro-Ukraine coalition is trying to reassure the U.S. ally that help will soon be on the way — even after a bruising GOP confrontation over keeping the government open snuffed out billions in immediate new aid.

But for that bipartisan group — which has served as a bulwark against growing House Republican opposition to continued aid — the past week has been a rude awakening. Not until now has the depth of division and tricky politics within the Republican Party been so apparent. And Senate leaders are now doing damage control after the omission of Ukraine aid and plotting to ensure a continued stream of military aid to Ukraine.

The next three months are critical, according to interviews with more than a dozen lawmakers and aides in both parties, and Republicans are signaling that the best shot at delivering Ukraine the weapons it needs will require a single funding bill that can last through the 2024 election, avoiding a series of protracted battles that could sap momentum.

“It’s obvious that there’s some fatigue. And so my own view is we need to do it one time,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). “We don’t want to do this again every three months. Obviously, that’s open for discussion. But I’m for one and done.”

Democrats’ anger over the episode over the past few days is palpable. Mild-mannered Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado was so upset by the lack of Ukraine funding that he delayed action on the bill until late Saturday night. The majority party is now recalibrating how to move forward.

“We need a little time to go back to the drawing board,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said late Saturday. “A lot of us were caught off guard by how the last 24 hours went.”

In the House Republican Conference, even some of Ukraine’s once-strongest allies have revolted against more cash. Many Republican senators are still on board with helping the country, but they turned against their own bill on Saturday in support of a Ukraine-free House funding bill to avoid a shutdown.

Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump, a Ukraine aid skeptic, is marching toward the party’s presidential nomination.

“There’s going to have to be a major debate in this country,” added Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the No. 3 Senate leader and one of the many Republicans who retreated from insisting on Ukraine funding when the alternative was a potential shutdown. It was an argument many made privately over the past week — but not McConnell.

At first it looked as though Congress might shelve the debate over Ukraine and disaster money until later in the fall. In fact, that was the initial plan as Democratic and Republican senators devised their government funding legislation. The Biden administration had other ideas.

McConnell, the chief GOP proponent of defending Ukraine against Russia, spoke to both national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the days before the Sept. 30 shutdown deadline, according to people familiar with the conversations in Congress and the Biden administration.

McConnell informed the administration that its three-month, $24 billion Ukraine request could never ride on a short-term stopgap bill, and argued for the legislation to instead provide flexibility and transfer authority — flexibility to move around existing money and resources — to buy time; he did not want a shutdown over Ukraine aid.

On Sept. 24, Blinken told McConnell that Ukraine needed money; McConnell ultimately agreed to support the request.

Two days later, the bill came out with $6 billion for Ukraine and was dismissed out of hand by the House GOP. Then, on Friday, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that Senate Republicans could get behind a funding bill that was silent on Ukraine but included billions in disaster relief, according to a person familiar with the conversations. McCarthy introduced it a day later; only nine Senate Republicans ended up opposing that bill.

“Republicans listened and coordinated our efforts with the House,” said Scott, who regularly hosts conservatives in both chambers at his Capitol Hill townhouse.

Still, McConnell kept advocating for the Senate’s bill and its Ukraine funding up until Saturday’s party lunch, when it became clear the rest of the party simply wanted to avoid a shutdown. That sets the stage for a Ukraine fight later this year, possibly around the new Nov. 17 funding deadline or perhaps the end of the calendar year if Congress punts again.

McConnell insists his party will stick with it regardless of the political pain, declaring he’s “confident the Senate will pass further urgent assistance to Ukraine later this year.” And there’s an argument that McConnell was just sticking to his word to the White House over the past week.

Yet some took the snub of Ukraine aid in the new funding law as a sign of things to come.

“Senate leadership tried to get Ukraine jammed into the CR and they just got bucked. McConnell negotiated it in the CR. And he couldn’t carry the caucus,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who opposes more Ukraine funding. “That’s a big deal.”

Senate Democrats are trying to jump-start a standalone Ukraine funding bill this month in the aftermath of the failed effort to send $6 billion to Ukraine. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) said she believes there is bipartisan support for such a bill, though the timing and structure of the bill is “part of what all needs to be worked out.”

At some point Ukraine backers will have to decide whether attaching money to a must-pass spending bill is the best strategy given the pressures on McCarthy to keep his speakership. Ukraine funding opponent Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said any Senate action only “puts more pressure on [McCarthy] and makes his job harder.”

Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs panel who attended a private meeting McCarthy arranged with Zelenskyy in September, said that he “was present when [McCarthy] told Zelenskyy that he’d be fighting for him to get the money.” Another Democrat in the room, who was granted anonymity, also said that McCarthy committed aid to Zelenskyy, even as publicly he remained noncommittal and suggested he wanted more accountability for any funds.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) hopes to add his proposal with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) for an inspector general to any Ukraine bill to ease concerns over wasteful spending — an idea also popular among some House conservatives. Even then, would the House GOP go along? “There’ll be a big appetite in the Senate — I don’t know about the House,” Kennedy said.

Perhaps an even grander bargain might be necessary. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), the No. 4 GOP leader, supports an effort to combine the Ukraine debate with a border security bill. The law that funds the government through mid-November is silent on the border despite the Biden administration’s funding request for billions more and a last-minute effort in the Senate GOP to marry border security with Ukraine funding.

Sarah Ferris contributed to this report. 

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Merrick Garland said in an interview that aired Sunday that he would resign if asked by President Joe Biden to take action against Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. But he doesn’t think he’ll be put in that position.

“I am sure that that will not happen, but I would not do anything in that regard,” he said on CBS “60 Minutes.” “And if necessary, I would resign. But there is no sense that anything like that will happen.”

The Justice Department is at the center of not only indictments against Trump that include an effort to overturn the 2020 election and wrongly keeping classified documents, but also cases involving Biden’s son Hunter, the aftermath of the riot at the U.S. Capitol and investigations into classified documents found in the president’s home and office. Garland has appointed three separate special counsels.

Garland has spoken only sparingly about the cases and reiterated Sunday he would not get into specifics, but dismissed claims by Trump and his supporters that the cases were timed to ruin his chances to be president in 2024.

“Well, that’s absolutely not true. Justice Department prosecutors are nonpartisan. They don’t allow partisan considerations to play any role in their determinations,” Garland said.

Garland said the president has never tried to meddle in the investigations, and he dismissed criticism from Republicans that he was going easy on the president’s son, Hunter, who was recently indicted on a gun charge after a plea deal in his tax case fell apart. Hunter Biden is due in a Delaware court this week.

“We do not have one rule for Republicans and another rule for Democrats. We don’t have one rule for foes and another for friends,” he said. ”We have only one rule; and that one rule is that we follow the facts and the law, and we reach the decisions required by the Constitution, and we protect civil liberties.”

Garland choked up when talking about his concerns over violence, particularly as judges and prosecutors assigned to the Trump cases got death threats.

“People can argue with each other as much as they want and as vociferously as they want. But the one thing they may not do is use violence and threats of violence to alter the outcome,” he said. “American people must protect each other. They must ensure that they treat each other with civility and kindness, listen to opposing views, argue as vociferously as they want, but refrain from violence and threats of violence. That’s the only way this democracy will survive.”

Rep. Dean Phillips will step down from his role as co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, but “will remain in his congressional seat representing MN-03 and will remain a part of the Democratic Caucus,” a spokesperson for the Minnesota lawmaker confirmed to POLITICO in a statement.

“My convictions relative to the 2024 presidential race are incongruent with the majority of my caucus, and I felt it appropriate to step aside from elected leadership to avoid unnecessary distractions during a critical time for our country,” Phillips said in a statement forwarded by the spokesperson. “I celebrate Leader [Hakeem] Jeffries for his remarkable and principled leadership and extend gratitude to my outstanding friends and colleagues for having created space and place for my perspectives. I’ll continue to abide by my convictions, place people over politics, and support our shared mission to deliver security, opportunity, and prosperity for all Americans.”

Axios first reported Phillips’ plans.

The moderate Democrat has floated the possibility of mounting a primary challenge against President Joe Biden, meeting with donors in New York over the summer to talk about the prospect.

In August he called on other Democrats to “jump in” to the presidential race, citing polling from The New York Times that showed most Democrats would prefer someone other than Biden in the 2024 presidential race.

“I think I’m well positioned to be president [of] the United States. … I do not believe I’m well positioned to run for it right now,” he said at the time.

But as of last week, Phillips still had not ruled out a White House bid.

“I am thinking about it. I haven’t ruled it out,” Phillips said during an interview on “The Warning” podcast, though he noted that there people “more proximate, better prepared to campaign with national organizations, national name recognition, which I do not possess.”

“I’m concerned that something could happen between now and next November that would make the Democratic Convention in Chicago an unmitigated disaster,” he told podcast host Steve Schmidt.

Biden is already facing two intraparty challenges from the author Marianne Williamson and the lawyer and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., though he holds a significant lead in the polls over both.

President Joe Biden is predicting that the 2024 presidential election could make or break the MAGA movement.

“I think that this is the last gasp or maybe the first big gasp of the MAGA Republicans. And I think Trump has concluded that he has to win. And they’ll pull out all the stops,” Biden said during an interview with ProPublica that aired Sunday. Though the 2024 general election is still more than a year away, and former President Donald Trump has yet to win the Republican nomination, Biden has already moved to go after the current front-runner in the GOP primary.

Biden has been pitching his reelection bid as a fight for democracy. So far he’s delivered four major speeches on the topic at events across the country, the most recent — and most forceful — in Arizona last week.

“We have to stand up for America’s values embodied in our Declaration of Independence because we know MAGA extremists have already proven they won’t,” Biden told those who gathered in Tempe to hear him speak. “We have to stand up for our Constitution and the institutions of democracy because MAGA extremists have made clear they won’t.”

During recent closed-door fundraisers, the president has also warned that “democracy is on the ballot,” and he’s publicly railed against political violence like that which the country saw during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

In the interview with ProPublica, Biden also slammed hard-right House Republicans’ move to refuse to vote for a bill that would avert a government shutdown unless their demands for spending cuts and conservative border legislation were not met.

“You see what’s happening in terms of what MAGA Republicans are doing in the House. They don’t make up a majority of the House, but they’re bringing them [to] a screeching halt,” Biden told former CNN reporter John Harwood in the interview.

With minutes to spare, President Joe Biden signed a stopgap funding bill Saturday to avert a shutdown and keep the government open for 45 days.

In doing so, he capped a chaotic 24 hours that riveted much of Washington but left one of the White House’s top priorities, aid for Ukraine, in serious jeopardy.

Like others in the nation’s capital, the Biden White House had been caught off guard Saturday morning when Speaker Kevin McCarthy abruptly reversed course and announced that he would bring a clean, stop gap bill to fund the government through November 17, 2023.

But aides weren’t terribly surprised. They had assumed the government shutdown showdown would end this way at some point — with the main question being whether McCarthy would take his lumps before or after the funding deadline.

They weren’t displeased with the outcome either. The bill didn’t just fund the government, it also included $16 billion in disaster relief and, as one White House official noted, avoids “any version of the deep cuts to essential domestic programs that were proposed in the past few days.”

But the final measure did not include aid for Ukraine, and its absence was not just a blow for Biden but to Volodymyr Zelenskyy too. The Ukrainian president had just met with the president and lawmakers last week to once again make the case for additional funds for Kyiv’s defense against Moscow.

Inside the administration, aides attempted to downplay the exclusion. “Speaker McCarthy has stated his support for aid to Ukraine,” the White House official said, adding that they expected him to bring a separate bill to the floor “shortly.”

And Biden too stressed his expectation that there would be another attempt to pass Ukraine aid in the near term.

“While the Speaker and the overwhelming majority of Congress have been steadfast in their support for Ukraine, there is no new funding in this agreement to continue that support,” Biden said in a statement. “We cannot under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted. I fully expect the Speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment.”

How much of that was spin, wishcasting, or solid intel was hard to tell. No one in the White House would say they received an actual assurance from McCarthy that he’d bring a measure up for a vote. Instead, two administration officials noted that McCarthy has never himself said he wouldn’t support aid to Ukraine. The view from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. was that the speaker couldn’t include it in a government funding bill, lest he incur a full bore insurrection from within his party. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t push it as a separate matter.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made assurances that funding for Ukraine aid remains a priority.

“We will not stop fighting for more economic and security assistance for Ukraine. Majorities in both parties support Ukraine aid, and doing more is vital for America’s security and for democracy around the world,” he said after the Senate’s passage.

There is certainly some Republican appetite to see that happen, too.

“Most Senate Republicans remain committed to helping our friends on the front lines,” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said earlier in the night. And Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he expected Ukraine aid to be included in the full year appropriations that Congress is set to complete later this year.

But the House GOP is a different beast. McCarthy’s office didn’t offer any response to a request for comment. However, POLITICO reported on Saturday that he had been open to including Ukraine aid in the stopgap funding bill but was unable to finalize language in time.

As the bill headed to the Senate floor Saturday evening, there were widespread expectations on Capitol Hill that a Ukraine-related vote would occur next week, given deep support in the Senate.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, when asked about the lack of fresh Ukraine money in the bill, said “we have to get to work on this issue” and suggested there would be a vote as soon as Monday.

“House Republicans will have a choice in the next few days when we reconvene on Monday.

Are they going to stand up for freedom, democracy and truth and the Ukrainian people, or will they continue to bend the knee to the pro-Putin caucus in the House Republican conference?” he said in a post-House vote news conference Saturday.

As news of the clean stopgap bill’s components emerged on Saturday morning, the White House kept in touch with Democrats on the Hill, monitoring (like them) the specific components of the legislative language. There was some intrigue over whether the measure authorized — or, more precisely, did not prevent — a cost of living adjustment for the salaries of congressional members. There also was some anxiety that House GOP leadership was trying to jam something through the chamber without giving lawmakers time to read it.

But, in the end, there were no readily visible poison pills. The White House kept its distance from the actual whip count operation, staying firm in its goal to keep Biden out of the process. Officials have insisted that the president brokered a funding deal with the speaker back in the spring and would not revisit that agreement.

There was no time to issue a formal Statement of Administration Policy, as is standard on major bills. Rank-and-file House Democrats got no guidance on the White House’s position, according to several people granted anonymity to discuss what would have been private discussions.

But the silence implied that the Biden administration didn’t oppose the bill, either. In the end, more than 200 House Democrats ended up backing the measure.

Myah Ward and Eun Kyung Kim contributed to this report.

President Joe Biden placed a big bet that he could sell an improving economy under the banner of “Bidenomics.”

Three months later, some allied Democrats fear he’s made a serious misstep.

Several top Biden allies have privately raised concerns about the phrase to the White House, according to two people familiar with the backchanneling.

And Rep. Steven Horsford, who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, said in an interview this week that he’s warned the White House that the Bidenomics brand is built on shaky ground. He believes it advances a message that wrongly centers the conversation on the president and his electoral ambitions rather than the voters who stand to gain from the administration’s economic accomplishments.

“With all due respect to the president, to the White House, this is not so much about them as it is the people who are benefiting by the policies that they came out and demanded,” said Horsford (D-Nev.). “We have to do a better job framing this not so much for one person — for the office of the presidency — but for the people.”

Their worries are underscored by a slew of polling showing that the economic recovery the White House has sought to spotlight as a triumph is not making a dent in the public’s psyche. Most Americans are still skeptical the U.S. is in an upturn, let alone one resilient enough to last much longer. The rising cost of living remains a dominant theme in voters’ minds, crowding out major gains in jobs and wages. And so far, the Bidenomics drumbeat that began earlier this summer has yet to prove it can change their minds.

“At this point, Bidenomics doesn’t really have strong answers to people’s biggest worries,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank. “There ought to be a lot of thinking in the White House now about changes in the way they present their case for the economic good that this administration has done.”

Inside the White House, aides have largely dismissed Democrats’ fears as premature and overblown, arguing it’s far too early to judge a messaging strategy designed to play out over the yearlong run-up to the 2024 election. They remain confident that, after winning the presidency and then defying predictions of a midterm wipeout, they have a better read on the national mood than their critics.

“Bidenomics is the president’s economic agenda and it is strongly supported by the American people,” said White House spokesperson Michael Kikukawa. “That work and our message build on what the midterms and recent special elections proved: Americans favor the president’s vision for growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up over trickle-down MAGAnomics.”

Americans are just beginning to reap the rewards of Biden’s economic agenda, officials said. Consumer spending continues to rise, signaling greater confidence in the economy’s stability than people may be willing to admit.

Perhaps most crucially, Biden officials believe voters don’t yet see the issue as a choice between Biden’s economic vision and the policies of former President Donald Trump and his GOP allies. Sharpening that contrast will prove critical in changing Americans’ attitudes over the next several months, they said.

“Like they did in 2022, Americans will face a choice between MAGA Republicans whose agenda serves the rich and powerful, and Joe Biden, whose agenda serves the middle class,” said Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz, highlighting a pair of early ads that spotlight individual voters. “That strategy worked then, and it will again in 2024.”

The administration has increasingly leaned into that contrast in recent weeks, emphasizing GOP proposals to cut taxes for the wealthy and roll back popular drug pricing moves. Bidenomics, top aides believe, gives the president a shorthand for comparing his various achievements against Republicans’ unpopular policies.

“It’s important to have a unifying theme and a vision that we’re explaining and that all these policies fit within,” said one longtime Biden aide, waving off strategy concerns as “bedwetting and Monday morning quarterbacking” from nervous Democrats. “The president didn’t win in 2020 adjusting his concern every day to the latest concern on cable news.”

But the administration’s case for patience is no longer masking the angst within the party that Bidenomics as a brand is falling flat — and perhaps is a microcosm of larger obstacles facing the coming campaign. An administration with accomplishments to sell has struggled to do so. A president who wants more credit for his work may, Democrats worry, be alienating voters by appearing insulated from their real life struggles.

In more than a dozen interviews across the party, Democrats offered various defenses and diagnoses of the administration’s messaging strategy and what may need to change. But nearly all acknowledged that the Bidenomics messaging blitz has failed to brighten voters’ view of the economy to date. Some now bemoan that the White House has tied itself so closely to a future economic trajectory it can’t really affect and certainly can’t control.

“I’ve never understood why you would brand an economy in your name when the economy hasn’t fully recovered yet,” said Michael LaRosa, a former spokesperson for first lady Jill Biden. “People need to be able to see and feel an economy in their own personal bank accounts. And it doesn’t change no matter how loud you scream the economy is better.”

The White House’s inability to gain more credit has confounded many Democrats. They believe Biden’s ability to steer the nation out of the pandemic and into an era of wage gains and near-record-low unemployment should be paying major political dividends.

Instead, most polling still shows clear majorities remain unhappy with the overall state of the economy and inflation in particular. A recent NBC News poll found fewer than 4 in 10 approve of the president’s handling of the economy. And though 55 percent said they were satisfied with their own financial situation, that figure tied a record low for the poll question dating back to 1994.

“The place where economic confidence is faltering most is with the base of the Democratic Party — so it’s among young people, among African Americans and Latinos,” said Republican pollster Micah Roberts, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies who handled the economic questions in the bipartisan NBC poll. “There’s a disconnect between the two or three months of [the Bidenomics] campaign and what people are actually feeling.”

Interviews with a diverse group of striking autoworkers and other voters in the critical battleground state of Michigan this week highlighted Biden’s troubles: Many of them had voted for him in 2020 and appreciate that he joined the picket line Tuesday. But several were frustrated with his handling of high prices and other economic issues — and not yet sold on voting for him again next year.

Darnay Curry, a Black United Auto Workers member striking at a plant in Warren, Mich., said he isn’t sure whether he’d back Biden or Trump if the election is a rematch between them.

“Neither one has said anything that actually gets to me just yet,” said Curry, who said he cast a ballot for Biden in 2020.

Tone Woods, a Black building trades worker from Detroit, said he is also undecided after voting for Biden in 2020. He attended Trump’s speech Wednesday in the Detroit area.

“Gas is high. Inflation. So that’s why I’m stuck in the middle,” he said. He is considering Trump because “the economy was a little better when Trump was in office, to be honest with you.”

Faced with sentiments like these, some Biden allies have advocated for a more empathetic approach that scales back on boasting about accomplishments in favor of greater acknowledgment that rising prices remain a challenge. Even as inflation cools, the shock of higher prices for basic needs like groceries and housing still appears to outweigh improvements in the abundance of jobs in the eyes of voters.

Horsford, for one, has directly urged Biden’s inner circle to focus more on selling specific policy wins by highlighting the businesses and individuals better off because of them instead of touting a broader Bidenomics vision that he said simply “isn’t cutting through.”

Trying to package Biden’s range of accomplishments under one umbrella risks obscuring the individual policies that polls show are wildly popular, like capping insulin costs and boosting domestic manufacturing, he and others argue. It asks voters to buy into an overarching economic philosophy they may not be totally sold on, rather than focus on more concrete improvements in their communities.

And crucially, they worry that christening Biden’s legacy well before it’s finished is plain old risky.

“There’s a difference between the actual thing working and the message landing with people,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), who praised Biden’s recent focus on touting specific policies and values, such as visiting the UAW picket line and creating a new gun violence office, as encouraging signs the administration is honing its message.

“I’ve told this to the president and the administration, [and] the campaign: You’ve got to make people feel like they’re along for the battle, like they’re part of the battle.”