U.S. President Joe Biden said Wednesday the Democrats’ setbacks in Tuesday’s elections underscore that the party needs to “produce for the American people,” but he pushed back against the notion that the off-year election results were a repudiation of his presidency.
Biden insisted that his inability to get Congress to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure deal and a $1.75 trillion package of social and climate programs ahead of the voting didn’t make a difference.
In Virginia’s governor’s race, Democrat Terry McAuliffe lost to first-time Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin in a state that Biden won by 10 percentage points a year ago.
“I think we should have passed it before Election Day,“ Biden said. ”But I’m not sure that I would have been able to change” people’s minds in Republican-leaning areas either way.
He added that, “people are upset and uncertain about a lot of things” including the pandemic, the job market and the price of a gallon of gasoline.
© 2021 The Canadian Press
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