First Lady Jill Biden is starting the summer by headlining campaign events for her husband in California and New York.
Although the 2024 Presidential election is more than a year away, the First Lady is making her first solo trips of the campaign season as part of a three-day series of fundraisers in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles starting Monday (June 12).
Most of the First Lady’s calendar for the week ahead will include attending four political events, including two in the Bay Area, to help her husband’s re-election bid for the Democratic National and Democratic State Party committees.
Biden, 72, will also join Gabrielle Giffords at an event in Los Angeles celebrating the 30th anniversary of the former congresswoman’s Giffords Law Center, an anti-gun nonprofit.
Giffords was shot in the head in 2011.
Biden’s appearance will be her first since a comment at a Thursday (June 8) event didn’t get her expected reaction.
Biddn described visiting “red states and blue states” where she discovered shared values uniting Americans were “deeper than our divisions,” the First Lady then paused briefly.
When the crowd didn’t respond enthusiastically, the first lady added: “I thought you might clap for that.”
The crowd immediately applauded, drawing widespread comparisons to Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential address when he encouraged the crowd to clap.
Biden, who also serves as a community college English professor, last year urged people at various events to make it a priority to vote in the 2024 presidential election.
“Like a lot of educators, to stay organized, I use to-do lists,” the First Lady said.
Biden then claimed that the 2024 election would be won or lost based on where voting is on the students’ “to-do list,” urging them to “Put voting at the tip of your to-do list.”
