Standing in the same area former President Donald Trump stood nearly six years ago to break ground on a new manufacturing facility that never fully materialized, President Joe Biden sought to draw a sharp contrast between himself and his likely 2024 GOP rival in battleground Wisconsin on Wednesday. 

“During the previous administration, my predecessor made promises – which he broke more than kept – left a lot of people behind in communities like Racine,” Biden said of Trump. “On my watch, we make promises and we keep promises.” 

In Racine, the president used a new announcement by Microsoft to commit $3.3 billion to build an artificial intelligence data center in the Wisconsin county to help shape the contrast between him and Trump. 

The new center, expected to bring 2,300 construction jobs and 2,000 permanent jobs to the area, will be constructed on the same land that was supposed to be the site of a $10 billion factory, backed by an investment from Taiwan-based electronics giant Foxconn, announced in 2017 during Trump's presidency. 

“Microsoft, as [Microsoft’s] president already pointed out, is investing $3.3 billion to build a new data center here in Racine that's gonna help operate one of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems in the world,” Biden said on Wednesday. 

The president sought to bill the investment by Microsoft as a product of his economic agenda – particularly his effort to spur private sector investment, especially in communities that have been overlooked, and create jobs around the country. 

“So far, we've created $866 billion in private sector investment nationwide, almost a trillion dollars – historic amounts in such a short time,” Biden said. “And it’s literally creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.”

Wisconsin has seen the addition of 177,000 jobs since Biden took office, 4,000 of which have been added in Racine specifically, according to the White House. One third of the jobs added in Racine, the White House added, are in manufacturing. 

As part of Wednesday’s announcement, Microsoft is also committing to training 1,000 Wisconsin residents by 2030 for datacenter and STEM roles in partnership with Gateway Technical College as well as joining forces with a startup accelerator Gener8tor to train 1,000 business leaders to use AI. 

“It’s all part of Microsoft's broad plan to build artificial intelligence ecosystem right here in Racine,” Biden said. “It's going to be transformative – not here just here but worldwide” 

Polls over the last year show Biden has struggled to sell his economic agenda to the public as he seeks reelection, despite the administration giving it the moniker "Bidenomics" and setting off on multiple tours around the country to try to sell it. 

“That has been the big frustration of the Biden administration, that Biden hasn’t been able to claim credit in the mind of voters for what has ostensibly been a very good economy,” Professor and Director of Political Management at George Washington University Todd Belt told Spectrum News.

“But this is a little bit different than the usual type of ribbon cutting ceremony for bridges and the infrastructure bill and the like, because this one has an additive narrative that I think the Biden administration is trying to push and that is that Biden gets things done whereas Donald Trump just talks,” Belt added of Wednesday's event in Wisconsin. 

Biden’s predecessor and the Republican candidate he looks likely to face in the Nov. 2024 election, Trump, traveled to Wisconsin in 2018 for the groundbreaking of the Foxconn factory complex, which was expected to employ up to 13,000 people. But the factory never materialized; less than a year after the groundbreaking, Foxconn sharply scaled down its manufacturing plans. Now Foxconn employs about a tenth of the original promise, attributing the changes to "market forces."

“He came here with your senator, Ron Johnson, literally holding a golden shovel, promising to build the eighth wonder of the world. Are you kidding me?” Biden said on Wednesday. 

“Look what happened – they dug a hole with those golden shovels and then they fell into it,” Biden said. 

“Instead of making this a referendum on his own record as president, he's tried to create the contrast to make this what we call a choice election between two alternatives,” Belt said of Biden’s campaign, “which is trying to remind people what Trump's term was like, in contrast to what Biden's term has been.”

Trump narrowly won Wisconsin when he secured four years in the White House in 2016. Biden flipped the state in 2020 to secure The Badger State over Trump in 2020.

Wednesday’s trip to swing state Wisconsin also served as a campaign stop for Biden, who swung by a community center to speak directly to Black voters, according to the president’s reelection campaign. 

The president told those gathered about how the African American community helped spark his run the U.S. Senate when he was 29 years old. 

“I really think democracy is at stake,” Biden said of November's election, garnering responses of “it is” from voters. 

“Trump means what he says,” Biden added.  

Before hearing from the president, Biden’s reelection campaign said the voters were set to receive a training on how to use REACH, an app the Biden campaign has been deploying in Milwaukee as part of a pilot strategy to reach Black voters. The app allows voters to spread the word about Biden and his reelection bid to other people they already know in their communities. 

“Generally, we find that the face-to-face contact or person-to-person interaction is more valuable in an electoral context than just digital outreach from a campaign,” Belt said of the strategy. 

“And so this makes sense from a theoretical standpoint, and from  a data science standpoint,” he added. “The question is: Will these people actually follow through on this and will the recipients of this outreach not find it to be intrusive?” 

Coinciding with Wednesday’s trip, the Biden campaign also announced it is launching a new advertising blitz in battleground states in May that will cost $14 million. A sizable piece will be designated for African American, Hispanic, and AAPI media specifically.

The effort comes as polling shows that Biden’s support among Black voters could be slipping.

A survey from the Wall Street Journal released last month found 30% of Black men and 11% of Black women said they will likely support Trump in 2024. That marked an increase, the Wall Street Journal noted in its poll findings, from the 12% and the 6% respectively who supported the former president in 2020 according to AP VoteCast. 

Meanwhile, a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found just over half of Black Americans said they approve of Biden’s handling of his job in March while 45% said they disapprove. 

Belt said that while polls this far out from election day do not always give a great sense of what is going on, the fact that the incumbent president’s reelection campaign is focusing on outreach to such voters shows their internal polling could be showing the same thing. 

“If you can see that they're making an issue out of trying to get voters of color out then they know in their internal polling that this is an issue that they need to address,” Belt said, noting campaigns’ internal polling is often more accurate.