Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is joining the weekend party in New Hampshire, where she will campaign for President Biden ahead of Tuesday’s primary, which is already drawing leading Republican candidates to the state.
Unlike the other candidates, however, Biden will have to win a write-in campaign. The president chose not to put his name on the ballot when New Hampshire, which he lost in 2020, defied his attempt to shift the Granite State’s first-in-the-nation primary status to South Carolina, which he won.
The decision leaves his allies scrambling to run a write-in campaign for him. Boston’s progressive Democratic mayor will be in New Hampshire on Saturday, taking part in two of what her campaign described as “small, regional write-in Biden events,” held by volunteers in their communities.
“At some events, volunteers will be joined by New Hampshire and national leaders including Boston Mayor Michelle Wu,” the mayor’s campaign stated in a press release, adding, “These are locally-managed, grassroots events — mostly small gatherings of friends and neighbors.”
Wu, who will take part in 10 a.m. and noon events, also spoke of her weekend plans to campaign for Biden during a Tuesday appearance on GBH’s Boston Public Radio, in response to a question about whether she was worried about Donald Trump come November — given the former president’s easy victory in Monday’s Iowa caucus and poll results that show him leading in “virtually” every major state.
“We don’t have a choice, but to work as hard as we possibly can to try to explain what’s at stake here,” Wu said. “It’s a moment in our political history, in our country’s history where it feels like people are not talking to each other and one set of information is just staying within a certain space.”
Wu said, for example, that she was gathering from watching interviews on the night of the caucus that people were choosing to vote a certain way out of a “larger feeling of disillusionment and anxiety.”
“We know what happens,” Wu said. “We know what is going to happen if it goes down that route.”
To that end, Wu said she will be in New Hampshire rallying volunteers from Boston and Massachusetts “to try to help with a push there.” The idea is to get people to talk to people, she said, saying that people are more likely to change their minds through direct conversations, rather than what they read in the media.
“Under the Biden administration, we’ve gotten federal dollars to be able to transform so many aspects of what we do, from childcare to businesses to climate, and we need to make those connections much more visible and apparent to people,” Wu said.
