In crucial N.C., Biden reveals $82m for internet access
RALEIGH, N.C. — President Biden on Thursday unveiled $82 million for North Carolina to help connect 16,000 new households and businesses to high-speed internet, delivering an election-year pitch about policies he says are “just getting started” at improving the United States.
Biden, the Democratic incumbent who is campaigning to win a second term, coupled his economic message with a few jabs at his predecessor, Donald Trump, currently the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and his most likely future challenger.
Biden brought up Trump’s recent comment that he hoped the economy would crash soon because he doesn’t want to preside over job losses if he were to be reelected in November. Biden told his audience that Trump already was like Herbert Hoover, who held office during the 1929 stock market crash.
“He’s the only president to be president for four years and lose jobs,” Biden said of Trump.
Biden said the work his administration is doing in North Carolina, on high-speed internet, infrastructure, and more, is happening in communities across the country, regardless of the politics.
“What we’re doing here in North Carolina is one piece of a much bigger story,” he said. He said he was keeping his promise to be a president for all America, “whether you voted for me or not.”
Biden talked about all the people who need high-speed internet because they work from home, businesses that need it to reach customers, and students who need to do their school work.
“High-speed internet isn’t a luxury anymore. It’s an absolute necessity,” he said in Raleigh, the state capital. “The investment in high-speed internet means something else as well: good-paying jobs.”
Biden’s reelection campaign has made winning North Carolina and its 16 electoral votes a top priority in this year’s presidential election. The Democrat narrowly lost the state in 2020 by 1.34 percentage points to Trump.
Fast-growing North Carolina is considered a presidential battleground, but only twice in the last 40-plus years has a Democrat won the state’s electoral votes: Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008.
Trump won the state in both 2016 and 2020, with the latter victory in part a result of massive turnout for Republicans in rural and non-urban counties overcoming increasingly Democratic strongholds in and around Raleigh and Charlotte.