President Biden stressed the stakes of the upcoming presidential election in his speech in Concord. (Claire Sullivan | New Hampshire Bulletin)
With two weeks until Election Day, President Joe Biden stopped in Concord Tuesday to talk up his administration’s efforts to lower the costs of prescription drugs – and to begin to write his legacy on the issue of health care.
It was his first time back in the state since May, when he was still the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. That was the last time he would visit New Hampshire – a state where presidential aspirations begin – as a candidate for the nation’s highest office. A month later, a halting debate performance against Republican candidate Donald Trump imploded his reelection campaign.
The president and his allies also used Tuesday’s event to cast Biden as a leader who has fought against corporate greed. Biden, who has often described himself as an underdog, brought up a favorite line about how he was once declared the poorest man in Congress. He said when he took office his administration was told it wouldn’t accomplish anything “big.”
“We got a hell of a lot ‘big’ done,” Biden said to the applause of a crowd in a gymnasium at the New Hampshire Technical Institute, a community college in Concord.
A crowd gathers in a gymnasium at New Hampshire Technical Institute in Concord ahead of President Joe Biden’s visit on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024. (Claire Sullivan/New Hampshire Bulletin)
He also made sure Republicans could not claim victory for the Inflation Reduction Act, which he signed in 2022, noting that no Republicans voted for it. The law has allowed Medicare to negotiate down the prices of some costly drugs. Biden also seized the chance to tie Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic candidate for president, to the legislation.
“Kamala, by the way, cast the tie-breaking vote,” he said with a smile. “Don’t tell me one vote doesn’t count.”
For decades, New Hampshire has tested presidential hopefuls with its first-in-the-nation primary. But Biden, with his support to move the Democratic Party’s first presidential contest to the more-diverse South Carolina, has left a lasting mark on the state’s primary.
Though Biden ultimately propelled himself to the presidency, New Hampshire was little help in getting him there. He didn’t reach the state’s contest in his first two runs for president – in 1987, dropping out months before the primary and, in 2008, bowing out after a poor showing in the Iowa caucuses.
In 2020, he finished fifth in the New Hampshire primary, earning no delegates. In 2024, he didn’t appear on the primary ballot as Granite Staters made their picks, but he won the state through a write-in campaign. In the end, though, those delegates never voted for him; when they reached the Democratic National Convention in August, they supported Harris, who by then had replaced him as the party’s presidential contender.
In the 2020 general election, he took New Hampshire over Trump by seven points, a much heftier margin than Hillary Clinton the cycle before, who clung to the state by just 2,736 votes. Trump has not been to New Hampshire since he won this year’s Republican primary. Biden urged the crowd Tuesday to get out the vote, saying the next administration would decide the fate of the country for decades to come.
In his return to New Hampshire Tuesday – possibly his last as president – Biden enlisted the help of a politician who has fared much better here: U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who won the state’s primary by a wide margin in 2016 and again, more narrowly among a crowded field, in 2020.
Sanders, the democratic socialist who stood by the president even as allies abandoned his reelection campaign, has disagreed sharply with Biden on a number of issues, including health care. Even as he urged the party to rally around Biden’s candidacy in a July op-ed in The New York Times, he pointed to his strong disagreement with “the president’s belief that the Affordable Care Act, as useful as it has been, will ever address America’s health care crisis.”
Sanders, instead, has advocated for universal health care through “Medicare for All,” which would create a single-payer health care system. The policy was a major theme of Sanders’ runs for president, and one Biden has not supported.
Still, before a friendly crowd that included members of the state’s congressional delegation and the state Legislature, the two politicians focused on what unites them on the issue. Health care remains an economic stressor for many Americans, more than 25 million of whom are not insured, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. A majority of Americans worry about affording prescription drugs, and an overwhelming share of them across parties point to corporate profits as a contributing factor to the price, according to research published this month by KFF, a nonpartisan health policy nonprofit.
The Vermont senator defined the administration in historic terms.
“I want to thank the president and the vice president for having the courage to be the first administration in the history of this country to stand up to the greed of the pharmaceutical industry and take them on,” Sanders said.
Still, he said, much work remained, pointing out that Americans pay much more for many prescription drugs than those in other wealthy countries and that lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry – including former leaders of both major parties, he noted – far outnumber the lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
After speaking for roughly 30 minutes, Biden was rejoined by Sanders on stage. The two men – who, just a few years ago, were often cast as foils as they competed for the presidency in New Hampshire and other early primary states — grasped hands and raised their arms above their heads. At least in Biden’s capacity as a politician, it may be a final farewell between a state and president whose political histories are inevitably intertwined.
President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders clasp hands before the crowd in Concord. (Claire Sullivan/New Hampshire Bulletin)
This article was first published by New Hampshire Bulletin, part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on Facebook and X.