President Joe Biden makes no public statements during low-key visit to Saginaw

SAGINAW — President Joe Biden campaigned in and around Saginaw on Thursday, speaking with supporters at two small events before leaving Michigan without making any public statements or talking to reporters.

Saginaw County has become a political bellwether in Michigan. Since 1992, the county has voted for the statewide winner in every election.

Both Biden and former President Donald Trump have now won enough delegates to assure them the nominations of their respective parties, barring unforeseen developments. Polling shows many Democratic and Republican voters are not enthused about a rematch of the 2020 election that now appears all but a certainty.

The contrast was stark between Biden's campaign events Thursday, at a private home in Saginaw and inside the clubhouse of a public golf course just outside the city, and Trump's recent campaign event inside an airport hangar in Oakland County's Waterford on Feb. 17.

Trump spoke for more than an hour to a crowd of about 2,000 supporters, blasting judges, the U.S. Justice Department and the move by both U.S. and Michigan leaders to speed the auto industry's transition away from gasoline combustion engines toward electric vehicles. He railed against Biden over inflation and migrants entering the U.S. through the Southern border, two issues that polling shows are of great concern to many voters.

Biden, who landed aboard Air Force One early in the afternoon at MBS International Airport northwest of Saginaw, talked quietly with 20 to 30 campaign supporters on the veranda of a private home in the city's cathedral district. Next, his motorcade wound its way to a second event at a public golf course, called Pleasant View, just outside the city. Reporters, who were not close enough to hear what Biden told supporters at the Saginaw home, were not allowed inside the golf clubhouse after watching him enter the facility in the rain.

A campaign official later said logistical problems were the reason reporters could not hear Biden's remarks at the Saginaw event and that it was not intentional.

Biden, who ignored a reporter's shouted question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his way into the clubhouse, boarded Air Force One around 6:15 p.m. and left the state.

The campaign said he went to the golf course to meet with a single family, as he had done in many other states. There, he was greeted by Hurley Coleman III, executive director of the Saginaw County Community Action Center, and his son, Hurley "HJ" Coleman IV, 13.

Rosa Holliday, 69, a retired GM worker who still does part-time substitute teaching, said she was excited to meet Biden at the Saginaw event and asked him a question about ensuring affordable health care for senior citizens.

“He said it was a top priority for him,” and described how the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, was signed into law under former President Barack Obama when Biden was vice president, she said.

Holliday, who lives in Bay City but does extensive Democratic campaign work in Saginaw, said Biden also talked about the number of jobs created since he took office. Biden didn’t mention Trump directly but did contrast his policies to what the other side would do, she said.

Recent polling has shown a close race between Biden and Trump, with Trump polling better than Biden in many battleground states such as Michigan.

Holliday said she is confident Biden will win, but "we know that if we don't work hard then, yes, we could lose it."

Just as their recent Michigan campaigning was nothing alike, Biden and his supporters have attempted to draw an equally striking contrast about the way each man would govern, increasingly portraying the November election as one in which democracy is on the ballot after Trump for a time refused to accept the results of the 2020 election. Among a raft of criminal charges Trump faces in several jurisdictions, he is accused of conspiring to defraud the government and obstruction of an official proceeding in connection with a riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Holliday said she believes that if Trump wins in November, he will attempt to change the constitution so “he would be staying there for a long time.”

Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, said that's "ludicrous."

"It will not happen," Hoekstra said. Trump "did leave office."

The GOP chairman said that if he were Biden, "I would be trying to change the subject to anything other than the economy and what's been happening at the border."

Contact Paul Egan: 517-372-8660 or pegan@freepress.com. Follow him on X, @paulegan4.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Biden makes no public statements during low-key visit to Saginaw