Queuing like a normal citizen, although accompanied by the deployment of security that follows him wherever he goes, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, voted this Monday in advance in the November 5 elections. Biden has gone to a polling station in his home state, Delaware, a strongly Democratic territory, to deliver his vote.
The president has delivered a ballot on which last July it was still thought that his name would appear. He is the first president not to run for re-election in half a century. After sweeping the Democratic Party primaries, he resigned from the nomination under pressure from his party’s leaders in Congress, who feared that he would drag them into a harsh defeat after his disastrous performance in the debate just four months ago. The baton was then passed to Kamala Harris, later crowned by the Democratic convention, for whom she presumably voted this Monday.
Upon arriving at the electoral center, in the Wilmington area, where he will live after leaving the White House, Biden greeted the press and then approached a woman in a wheelchair, whom he held by the hand while speaking with her. The president came in the company of a group of first-time voters. Representative Blunt Rochester, with a child in his arms, also accompanied Biden. In the 2022 legislative elections, she went to vote with her granddaughter Natalie, who was voting for the first time.
Biden stood in line for more than half an hour. There was a Trumpist in a red cap a few spots ahead of him in line, but most celebrated the president’s presence. Biden chatted, joked and took photos with several citizens who were waiting in line. There were many Harris-Walz signs stuck in the grass as we entered and only a few Trump-Vance ones.
When his turn arrived, the president approached the register, signed with his finger on a screen and went to a booth. “Joseph Biden votes,” said the election worker, as with the rest of the voters. As he left, CNN asked him if it was a bittersweet moment. “No, just sweet,” answered he, who will leave the White House on January 6 after more than half a century of public career as senator, vice president and president.
A marginal role
Biden has played a marginal role in Kamala Harris’ campaign. She has participated in some events, made calls and given some small rallies, but her interventions have been little promoted by the candidate’s campaign, unlike, above all, those carried out by former President Barack Obama, who has also accompanied the candidate. Harris is trying to present herself as a candidate for change and the presence of Biden at her side would complicate this. Presidents typically stay relatively out of the campaigns of their party’s successors.
Biden will not even be at this Tuesday’s rally on the Ellipse in Washington, next to the White House, an event aimed at highlighting the danger that Donald Trump represents for democracy. The president has been very active in that complaint. He was the first to say that the ideology of staunch Trumpists was “semi-fascism” and he starred in several notable events in the 2022 legislative elections with that idea as the central axis. For his first rally this year, before the primaries even began, he traveled to Pennsylvania, near where George Washington set up his winter quarters during the American Revolution, to blame Trump for the assault on the Capitol and warn about his extremist rhetoric. . He even presented his resignation from re-election as an act in defense of democracy.
Like Biden, there are already 45 million Americans who have voted early, either in person or by mail, in the November 5 elections. In Delaware, nearly 100,000 ballots were counted, with the vast majority coming from voters registered as Democrats.
