Barack Obama is trying to do something he couldn't during two terms as president: help Democrats succeed in national midterm elections when they already hold the White House.
Of course, he's more popular than he was back then, and now it's President Joe Biden, Obama's former vice president, who faces the prospects of a November rebuke.
Obama begins a hopscotch across battleground states Friday in Georgia, and he will travel Saturday to Michigan and Wisconsin, followed by stops next week in Nevada and Pennsylvania.
The itinerary, which includes rallies with Democratic candidates for federal and state offices, comes as Biden and Democrats try to stave off a strong Republican push to upend Democrats' narrow majorities in the House and Senate and claim key governorships ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
With Biden's job approval ratings in the low 40s amid sustained inflation, he's an albatross for Democrats like Sens. Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada. But party strategists see Obama as having extensive reach even in a time of hyperpartisanship and economic uncertainty.
“Obama occupies a rare place in our politics today,” said David Axelrod, who helped shape Obama's campaigns from his days in the Illinois state Senate through two presidential elections. “He obviously has great appeal to Democrats. But he's also well-liked by independent voters.”
Neither Biden nor former President Donald Trump can claim that, Axelrod and others noted, even as both men also ratchet up their campaigning ahead of the Nov. 8 elections.
“Barack Obama is the best messenger we've got in our party, and he's the most popular political figure in the country in either party,” said Bakari Sellers, a South Carolina Democrat and prominent political commentator.
Obama left office in January 2017 with a 59% approval rating, and Gallup measured his post-presidential approval at 63% the following year, the last time the organization surveyed former presidents. That's considerably higher than his ratings in 2010, when Democrats lost control of the House in a midterm election that Obama called a “shellacking." In his second midterm election four years later, the GOP regained control of the Senate.
Swimming against those historical tides, Biden traveled Thursday to Syracuse, New York, for a rare appearance in a competitive congressional district. After months of Republican attacks over inflation, he offered a closing economic argument buoyed somewhat by news of 2.6% GDP growth in the third quarter after two previous quarters of retraction.
“Democrats are building a better America for everyone with an economy ... Where everyone does well,” Biden said.
Yet Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist, said Obama is better positioned to take that same argument to Americans who haven't decided whom to vote for or whether to vote at all.
“If it's just a straight-up referendum on Democrats and the economy, then we're screwed,” Smith said, acknowledging that no incumbent party wants to run amid sustained inflation. “But you have to make the election a choice between the two parties, crystallize the differences.”