Will Biden's Infrastructure And Manufacturing Wins Energize Voters In 2024?

In the weeks since President Joe Biden traveled to Durham, North Carolina late last month to launch his "Investing in America" tour, senior administration officials have visited construction projects and factories to promote new government investment in manufacturing and infrastructure.

But the initiative has had to compete for attention with growing interest in the 2024 presidential election driven by Donald Trump's historic indictment. This underscores the challenge Biden faces in keeping the spotlight on his achievements in office as he prepares for a likely reelection bid.

The tour's focus on two of Biden's signature domestic policies, the infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, also highlights the difficulty of getting voters to understand the impacts of projects with timelines that stretch past the 2024 election, said David Dixon, the Democratic chairman of Durham County.

"People need to see and feel results," Dixon said, "results being more good-paying jobs, improved quality of life."

"But these policies won't truly be felt for five, 10 years down the road," he added.

Whether Biden can convince voters in battleground states like North Carolina to be patient even for just the next 18 months and give him a second term is an open question.

Biden's ability to find the right balance in his economic messaging between cheerful optimism and hard-nosed realism will go a long way toward determining his success in 2024, should he run for a second term. He hasn't declared yet, though he reiterated this week at a White House event that he plans to run.

In his March 28 speech at a semiconductor plant in Durham, Biden argued his administration has already seen some immediate results from the policies he put in place to help the country recover from the pandemic. He said the manufacturing sector has added 800,000 new jobs under his watch, and the administration has announced 23,000 new infrastructure projects.

Biden also presented his long-term plan to boost American manufacturing and position the U.S. as a global leader in sectors like technology and clean energy.

"Now we're creating jobs; we're exporting jobs no longer," Biden said. "American products are being made here."

He added that the new economy would "leave no one behind," a promise he made as a candidate in 2020 and has often repeated as president. Administration officials have echoed that message as they've traveled the country as part of the tour, which wraps up later this month.

The stops have included one by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to Oklahoma City to discuss aviation safety improvements, and another to Nashville, Tennessee by Mitch Landrieu, the senior White House adviser overseeing the infrastructure law implementation, to announce $233 million in new funding for clean water and drought resilience.

The administration is still in the first stages of implementing the $1.2 trillion infrastructure law. Nearly half of the funding is earmarked for transportation projects, but it also includes significant spending on water, energy and broadband internet infrastructure.

A quarter of the funding is dedicated to new programs—such as one to build a national network of charging stations for electric vehicles—that didn't exist before, said Adie Tomer, who leads the Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative at Brookings.

"It's a tremendous amount of work to stand up these programs, and the Biden administration has done that," Tomer said. "That's a real herculean effort that they deserve credit for. We're seeing the money starting to move out of Washington with reasonable speed."

Going forward, it will be up to states and local governments to decide what projects to fund and how quickly to implement them, Tomer said. He said for that reason, "it makes sense politically that administration officials are flying across the country. Infrastructure upgrades are "really a local story at the end of the day."

The White House has leaned into that strategy, circulating positive local press coverage it has gotten for Biden's Durham trip and other "Investing in America" tour events.

But the tour has been overshadowed by other news, including several recent mass shootings and Trump's indictment for his role making a hush money payment to porn star during the 2016 election.

"Nationally, infrastructure is always competing with other storylines," Tomer said. "Infrastructure headlines are typically made by disasters, rather than successes."

Still, Dixon and other Democrats said that if Biden stays focused on bipartisan victories like the infrastructure law it will resonate with voters who elected Biden to break through the gridlock in Washington.

"If you don't agree on wanting an improved infrastructure system, then your head is in the sand," said Brendon Barber, a former Democratic mayor of Georgetown, South Carolina. "Regardless of whether you like Biden, it should help him."

Republicans conceded that Biden can point to a strong record on infrastructure, but argued it won't be a deciding factor in the 2024 election.

"We've needed investment in infrastructure for decades," said Steve Curry, the Republican National Committeeman from Oklahoma. "Most people are going to say, 'Yeah, infrastructure improvements are good, but that's just one part of the economy.'"

"I think Biden can reach moderate voters with this," Curry added, "but is that enough to sway them? I don't think so."