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First Lady Jill Biden making weekend visit to Las Vegas

Updated February 28, 2024 - 6:58 pm

First lady Jill Biden will visit Las Vegas on Saturday as part of a kickoff for the Women for Biden-Harris campaign program.

Details about the visit were not available Wednesday, but a statement from the campaign said the first lady will visit the battleground states of Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin from Friday through Sunday to mobilize women across the country to re-elect President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

In Nevada and the other battleground states, the first lady will meet with women to discuss what’s at stake for them and the role they will play in this year’s election.

The Women for Biden-Harris program will include organizing calls for women to hear from campaign surrogates about important issues in the election and how to get involved. The program will launch digital ads around the first lady’s travel and ads targeted to women throughout the election cycle, according to the campaign.

“Women put Joe in the White House four years ago, and women will do it again,” the first lady said in a statement. “In our communities, women are the organizers, the planners, the mobilizers. We get things done. That’s exactly why we’re launching Women for Biden-Harris now — because when women organize, we win.”

Biden’s campaign and Democrats writ large want to make reproductive rights and access to women’s health care a central issue this year, inspired by wins in elections in 2022 held after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, its 1973 decision establishing a constitutional right to an abortion.

Former President Donald Trump takes credit for the high court decision because he nominated three justices who tipped the ideological balance of the bench to the right.

Separately, the Alabama Supreme Court this month stunned with a ruling that declared embryos produced through in vitro fertilization are children, opening anyone who destroys them to potential criminal prosecution.

Clinics in the state shut down in response, denying women access to care.

Women were a crucial part of the coalition that elected Biden in 2020, giving him 55 percent of their vote, according to AP VoteCast.

Black women and suburban women were pillars of Biden’s coalition, while Trump had a modest advantage among white women and a much wider share of white women without college degrees, according to the AP survey of more than 110,000 voters in that year’s election

Contact Jessica Hill at jehill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @jess_hillyeah on X.The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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