White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed Wednesday that President Joe Biden still intends to campaign for Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) in the Sep. 14 California recall election, despite the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan.
“I can confirm, the president does still plan to go and campaign for Governor Newsom in California … that is still certainly his plan,” Psaki said.
Psaki added that she did not have any particular dates or details about Biden’s plans to travel to, and campaign in, California.
Conservative talk radio host Larry Elder (R) leads most opinion polls among potential replacements for Newsom, should he be recalled. On Tuesday, in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Elder dared Biden to campaign for Newsom:
I’ll believe it when I see Joe Biden come here. I’m not sure he’s going to. I understand he’s supposedly going to come here to campaign on behalf of Gavin Newsom. His popularity now is in the low forties — I think I saw 41%. Most Americans don’t even believe he’s home — that somebody else is in charge. So it’s going to backfire. But let him bring it in. Let him have him come in, and try to defend Gavin Newsom’s record on crime, and on homelessness, and on the outrageous cost of living, and on the way he ignored science and shut down the state to the point where a third of small businesses are gone forever. Let Joe Biden make that case for him. I want him to come here. Let him do it. And out of all the major political figures in America, Gavin Newsom’s one of the few who’s praised the way he handled the Afghan crisis. And it has been a disaster after a disaster, one of the worst foreign policy mistakes America has ever made. So if Joe Biden wants to come here and lend his presence to California, I welcome that opportunity. But I don’t believe he’s going to do it.
Vice President Kamala Harris will campaign with Newsom in the Bay Area on Friday, after returning from Southeast Asia.
Psaki declined to say whether the recall had become a “referendum” on Democratic Party policies in general.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.