Biden returns to NH campaign trail Monday
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Mar. 11—CONCORD — President Joe Biden will make his first 2024 campaign stop in New Hampshire on Monday, campaign officials have confirmed.
The visit will come four days after Biden's State of the Union speech and follows planned campaign stops in the swing states of Pennsylvania on Friday and Georgia on Saturday.
Former President Donald Trump will also campaign in Georgia on Saturday.
The White House has not commented on whether the trip here will have an official component to it.
For more than 15 months, Biden boycotted coming here and refused to have his name appear on the first-in-the-nation presidential primary ballot because he wanted South Carolina to hold the first primary.
The Democratic National Committee followed Biden's direction, and approved a calendar that tried to force New Hampshire to hold the second primary along with Nevada, four days after South Carolina.
This DNC proviso also required for New Hampshire to repeal its first-primary law and legalize no-excuse absentee ballot voting.
Gov. Chris Sununu called the demands "extortion" and political leaders from both major parties condemned the DNC process.
Citing the state's first primary law, Secretary of State David Scanlan defied the DNC calendar and had New Hampshire vote on Jan. 23, 11 days before the vote in South Carolina.
Biden won New Hampshire's primary after more than 65% of Democratic primary voters wrote his name on their ballots.
In response, the Biden-Harris campaign days after the primary announced a robust hiring of campaign staff in New Hampshire.
Biden then met with the state's congressional delegation and they said he vowed to campaign vigorously here to win the state's four electoral votes.
In 2020, Biden beat Trump in New Hampshire by 7 points; Trump narrowly lost the state in 2016 to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Top campaign officials at the time also sent word to leading New Hampshire Democrats that Biden would be coming to the state soon after his annual speech to Congress.
