Biden’s making a play for North Carolina and Florida. Republicans will have to defend themselves

On Thursday, President Biden made his way to Wilmington, North Carolina, also making a stop in Charlotte to visit the families of police officers killed in the line of duty. Biden’s trip comes shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris visited Charlotte last month. In fact, both have made multiple journeys down to North Carolina this year.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the vice president visited Jacksonville, Florida on the day that the state’s six-week abortion ban came into effect. Harris, as Inside Washington has written before, can zero in on abortion rights in ways that Biden, an 81-year-old Catholic man, cannot. And indeed, Harris delivered some scorching lines against Florida Republicans, saying “extremist” Republican lawmakers who voted in the ban “either don’t know how a woman’s body works, or simply don’t care.”

The president continues to poll badly, even in states that he won in 2020 such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada. So why the focus on tough-to-win states like North Carolina and Florida?

Florida has become a Republican citadel in the past decade, with its governor Ron DeSantis winning re-election by almost 20 points in 2022. That’s a far cry from when Barack Obama and Biden won it twice and when it had Democratic Senators like Bill Nelson and the late Bob Graham.

And North Carolina has proven even more elusive than Florida. After Barack Obama pulled off a miracle in 2008 and became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976 to win the state, it’s taken a hard-right turn. Mitt Romney won North Carolina in 2012, Donald Trump won it twice, and Democrats have not won any of the four Senate races since 2008.

But Democrats think that the fallout from the 2022 Dobbs v Jackson decision