Hillary Clinton will endorse Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy on Tuesday, according to a Democrat who requested anonymity to discuss the plan.
The Biden campaign said Clinton would join the presumptive Democratic nominee for a virtual town hall later Tuesday to discuss the impact of the coronavirus on women. Clinton teased the announcement by tweeting a picture of her, Biden and President Barack Obama laughing in the Oval Office.
As the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, Clinton made history by becoming the first woman to lead a major party’s ticket. Her endorsement is the latest sign of the Democratic Party rallying around its nominee to challenge President Donald Trump in the fall.
Several other leaders from across the party’s ideological spectrum have also backed Biden in recent weeks, including Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a leading progressive. Hillary Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, has not yet publicly endorsed Biden and has kept a lower profile during the Trump era.
The swift coalescing around Biden stands in stark contrast to four years ago, when Hillary Clinton was unable to win over a significant portion of the electorate’s left flank. Sanders battled her to the end of the primary calendar and waged a bitter fight over the party platform before endorsing her and campaigning for her in the fall. Hillary and Bill Clinton have argued that Sanders’ push deeply wounded her campaign against Trump.
The Trump campaign sought to foment the same tension on Tuesday by arguing that the Democratic establishment is again asserting itself.
“There is no greater concentration of Democrat establishment than Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton together,” Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, said in a statement. “Both of them carry the baggage of decades in the Washington swamp and both of them schemed to keep the Democrat nomination from Bernie Sanders.”
Despite overlapping for decades as Democratic heavyweights, the Clintons and Biden have never been especially close allies. Biden’s nearest alignment with Hillary Clinton came during Obama’s first term, when Biden was vice president and Clinton was secretary of state. Both had sought the Democratic nomination in 2008 — and both were dogged by their 2002 votes as senators in favor of the war powers resolution that President George W. Bush used to invade Iraq in 2003.
Biden suggested in his 2017 book, “Promise me, Dad,” that Obama favored Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid over the possibility of Biden running. With Obama by his side, Biden announced from the White House Rose Garden in 2015 that he wouldn’t seek the presidency the following year.
As first lady and secretary of state, Clinton was among the leading voices in women’s rights discussions around the world. She made headlines during her husband’s first term with forceful advocacy for women during a United Nations conference in Beijing, where the Chinese government was under fire for human rights abuses.
“I believe that, on the eve of a new millennium, it is time to break our silence,” Clinton said. “It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights.”
She punctuated her argument with a line that has been replayed and repeated countless times since: “Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.“
Biden campaigned for Hillary Clinton in the fall of 2016 and has praised her during his 2020 run as someone who “would have made a great president.”
But he’s also implicitly criticized her campaign by saying repeatedly that Democrats did a poor job of reaching white working-class voters who once helped anchor the Democratic coalition. As recently as an April 15 fundraiser, Biden touted his own ability to win “the kind of folks I grew up with,” the “high-school educated” population who believe Democrats have abandoned them.
And he regularly cites that slice of the electorate when arguing he can win Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — the three states where Clinton’s narrow losses handed Trump an Electoral College majority despite her national popular vote lead.
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