Jill Biden rallies women, teachers for the Biden-Harris ticket in Bloomington speeches

First Lady Jill Biden highlighted her husband’s plans for education and rallied with teachers and women voters Friday night in Bloomington, putting a focus on women’s rights and the protection of reproductive rights in the United States.

Delivering a campaign speech to a crowd of about 200 at Nine Mile Brewing, Biden said it was important to re-elect President Joe Biden to protect and restore reproductive rights following the 2022 Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

“It’s heartbreaking to see that your generation has to re-fight battles that we thought we had settled so many decades ago,” Biden said. “Post-Roe America isn’t the future that we should be handing down to our daughters and our sons, and I promise you, Joe and I are by your side in this fight, and we’re not going to rest until we right every wrong.”

She took aim several times at former President Donald Trump, warning that there is “no guarantee that access to reproductive health care will remain” if Trump wins in November.

Biden took time to praise Minnesota’s women in high-ranking elected positions, saying that the president has placed women “at the center of his agenda” with his selections of Vice President Kamala Harris and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“Joe has spent his entire career lifting up women, but that other guy, Trump, he spent a lifetime tearing us down and devaluing our existence,” she said.

The brewery crowd of mostly women included a mix of young and middle-aged people and seniors from an array of professions, including teachers, legislators, students and representatives of reproductive rights advocacy groups.

Following her 12-minute speech at the brewery, Biden — a community college educator who has worked in classrooms for more than three decades — left for Education Minnesota’s annual convention at the DoubleTree Hotel in Bloomington. She kicked off “Educators for Biden-Harris,” a national organizing program to “engage and mobilize teachers, school staff, and parents” in the presidential election, according to a news release from the campaign.

Education Minnesota is the state’s largest union representing the state’s teachers, and its political action committee is consistently one of the biggest backers of Democratic campaigns in Minnesota, spending $5.2 million in the 2022 midterm election.

Outside the hotel, about 100 pro-Palestine protesters chanted and held signs as Biden’s motorcade swept by. They expressed anger about the president’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war and U.S. aid to Israel.

“Jill Biden’s campaign to ask educators to vote for Biden is against my values as a teacher who believes that all humans have a right to education, and who thinks the money that is spent on this genocide should be spent on our underfunded schools here in the U.S.,” said Meredith Aby Keirstead, a member of the MN Free Palestine Coalition, in a statement.

Jill Biden made several trips to Minnesota during her husband’s 2020 election campaign, when Joe Biden decisively beat Donald Trump in Minnesota by more than 7 percentage points. Recent polling from KSTP-TV shows Biden and Trump in a statistical dead heat this cycle, with Biden’s lead over the former president falling within the poll’s margin of error.

That could force Biden and his surrogates to campaign in Minnesota this year, despite the state’s long track record of supporting Democratic presidential candidates.

Biden has hired three veteran political operatives to manage his campaign in Minnesota. U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer is serving as Trump’s Minnesota campaign chair and is developing a plan intended to flip the state for Republicans this fall.