The mayor of Detroit, Michigan, is endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden ahead of his city hosting the second Democrat presidential debate next week.
Mike Duggan, who has served as mayor of the struggling Midwestern city since 2014, officially said he was backing the frontrunner because of his ties to Detroit.
“He visited multiple times,” Duggan said on Monday when explaining the decision for his endorsement. “He cares deeply about the city and auto industry and auto workers. Joe Biden has a whole career of watching out for the working class in this country.”
The former vice president’s team put out a statement thanking the mayor for his endorsement and playing up the role that Detroit and Michigan will have in the 2020 presidential election. Biden said:
Detroit represents the backbone and prosperity of the middle-class and heart of the American auto industry, and Mike has done tremendous work spurring the city’s economic growth after crisis, revitalizing its mass transit system, and expanding access and opportunity to the city’s job training services for citizens,” Biden said.
He added that both Michigan and Detroit would be “crucial to defeating Donald Trump and restoring the soul of our nation.”
On the campaign trail, Biden has often invoked the city and the efforts it has taken to revive its economy in the face of globalization and the recession.Those attempts at praise, however, have not always been viewed favorably by either the citizens of Detroit or the media.
In May, Biden told an Iowa audience about a trip he took to Detroit as vice presiden, where he saw how local entrepreneurs were helping create jobs in economically distressed communities. The remarks wouldn’t have caught much attention if not for Biden’s describing how the program plucked women from the “hood” and taught them to code.
Biden said at the time:
We said look, put together a program for us where we can teach people how to code. We went out, literally into the hood, and they found, turns out, 54 [individuals], they happened to be all women, the vast majority were women of color, no one with more than a high school degree, aged 24-to-54, and almost a third of them only had a GED.
The comments were met with “nervous laughter” and even an audible “yikes,” according to the Washington Examiner.
Biden had previously told the same story about Detroit, using the same language when addressing the Brookings Institution in 2012.
Duggan’s endorsement comes as Detroit faces a big two weeks in the national spotlight. On Sunday, the NAACP kicked off its national convention in the city. Numerous presidenital candidates and high-ranking members of Congress are expected to make an appearance at the gathering. Next week, even more journalists and candidates will descend on the city when it hosts the second Democrat presidential debate on July 30-31.
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