Biden campaign revs up criticism of Vance before convention speech

MILWAUKEE — President Joe Biden‘s campaign is trying to start defining Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance (R-OH) before he officially accepts the GOP’s nomination at the party’s convention in Milwaukee.

Vance is scheduled to address the Republican National Convention Wednesday night, and Democrats are already going on the offensive against his place on former President Donald Trump‘s ticket. During a Biden campaign press conference down the road from Fiserv Forum, Quentin Fulks, deputy campaign manager, repeated that Trump picked Vance “because he would bend over backwards” for him and would help the former president expand his MAGA agenda “no matter the harm to the American people.”

“J.D. Vance is an anti-choice politician, whose views on reproductive freedom and women’s rights would take us back decades,” Fulks told reporters Wednesday morning, describing him as an interesting choice considering Trump’s historic problems appealing to women.

“So you can bet that our campaign team, Biden-Harris, is going to spend every moment from now until November reminding voters of the clear choice they’ll face between a Trump-Vance administration who will ban abortion nationwide and a Biden-Harris administration, who will never stop fighting for Americans and their rights and freedoms,” he said.

But Fulks also defended Vice President Kamala Harris, with whom Vance will debate on Aug. 13 on CBS, contending she is “a powerful voice in this nation.” Harris has been increasingly criticized by Republicans since Biden’s first debate against Trump, and Democrats speculate whether she can replace him on the ballot this November.

“Kamala Harris’s story is an American story and she has spent her life serving the people as a prosecutor, district attorney, and attorney general, a United States senator, and as vice president,” he said. “President Biden picked her because she is qualified for the job. Sadly, for J.D. Vance, I cannot say the same.”

At the same press conference, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), co-chair of the Democratic National Convention‘s rules committee, confirmed to the Washington Examiner his panel would not hold a virtual roll call to nominate Biden or a replacement before Aug. 1 amid the upheaval regarding his party’s ticket.

“This meeting was scheduled for many months, the one on Friday, and it was never meant to be the virtual roll call,” Walz said. “It will be setting out the agenda as the rules committee moving forward.”