WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden will travel to the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Tuesday to discuss his efforts to reduce gun violence, a top concern among Americans ahead of congressional elections in November.
Biden will use his visit to the small city of Wilkes-Barre to lay out plans that include asking Congress for $37 billion for crime prevention programs and providing some of that money to police to reduce gun crime.
The request, unveiled in budget proposals earlier this month, will include $13 billion over the next five years to hire and train an additional 100,000 police officers.
Ahead of the elections in November, many Republican candidates are portraying Democrats as unwilling to fight growing crime rates in some parts of the country.
They are also trying to tie them to the “defund the police” movement that arose out of racial justice protests in 2020, although many Democrats, including Biden, have never supported slashing police funds.
As in 2020, when Biden was elected president, Pennsylvania will be a key battleground state in November and in the next presidential election in 2024.
It is home to one of a handful of competitive Senate races that will determine whether Democrats can hold onto their razor-thin majority in the U.S. Senate.
But some Democratic candidates in the state and elsewhere have wrestled with whether to join Biden on the campaign trail, with some fearing his low approval ratings could drag down their campaigns.
John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania and the state’s current lieutenant governor, was not expected to join Biden for the event on Tuesday but planned to meet with him at another Pennsylvania event on next week.
(Reporting by Nandita Bose and Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
