WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden was back in battleground Wisconsin on Wednesday pushing his jobs agenda, but his predecessor’s legal issues and Israel’s actions in Gaza hung over his visit.

Biden’s stop in the Racine area to announce a $3.3 billion project by Microsoft to build an artificial intelligence data center was part of a surreal week during which a key ally, Israel, defied his pleas to avoid sending military troops into refugee-packed Rafah in Gaza. It also came one day after a criminal jury and voters heard the first-ever accounts in a courtroom of an adult film star testifying about an alleged sexual encounter with one of the country’s 46 presidents, Donald Trump.

Polling shows why Biden was back in Wisconsin just one week after Trump was campaigning there. Trump had a 1.8 percentage-point lead there in the RealClear polling average Wednesday and a 2.8-point lead in the FiveThirtyEight average. Biden won the state in 2020, with GOP and Democratic strategists saying neither presumed nominee has a clear path to victory in November without the Badger State.

“I get called the most pro-union president in American history. And I make no apologies about that,” Biden said as his White House aides were touting the unionized construction jobs the Microsoft project is projected to create. “I’m serious.”

The massive Microsoft investment will be part of the area’s “comeback story,” he said, blaming, in part, Trump’s term of “trickle-down economics” that produced “broken promises” to the U.S. manufacturing sector.

While the president was in Wisconsin to announce Microsoft’s big investment, he has used previous trips to Wisconsin and other battlegrounds and potential battleground states to hand out federal funds. Biden and his team have paired multiple official White House events to announce grant awards under the bipartisan infrastructure and China competition laws with campaign fundraisers.

Some GOP lawmakers and strategists have criticized his early 2024 approach.

“You’ve got Biden literally flying around the country on Air Force One handing out money. I mean, talk about literally buying votes,” said one Republican strategist, granted anonymity to be candid. “He basically has no other choice. I mean, Trump is consistently leading in poll after poll after poll on the most important indicators.

“A good way to try to offset that is giving people, giving the voters, money,” the GOP strategist said. “Usually, the eventual winner has really won those indicator issues in April, May or June — not October. So President Biden knows he’s got to do something to get at that. Trump has the better hand to play right now: on the economy, on immigration, on the issues people care about the most.”

Foxconn in focus

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