Biden's visit with Raleigh family over Cook Out trays featured in campaign video
A Raleigh family's meal with President Joe Biden is the focus of a new political push from Biden's reelection campaign.
His campaign posted the video to Instagram on Monday, featuring shots of meals from North Carolina fast-food chain Cook Out and snippets of the Democratic president's conversation with Eric Fitts and his two teenage sons, Christian and Carter.
Biden’s campaign has said it would target North Carolina with heavy campaign advertising in his push to win the battleground state in the 2024 election. Biden narrowly lost North Carolina to then-President Donald Trump in 2020. Trump is again the GOP front-runner in 2024. Polling for the 2024 presidential race shows a statistical dead heat between Biden and Trump. A Morning Consult Poll published Sunday shows Trump leading Biden 43% to 42%, and a YouGov Poll published Friday shows Trump leading 45% to 44% — both within the margin of error.
Biden visited Raleigh last month to speak about broadband internet and economic development. He then stopped at a Cook Out restaurant, where he and Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper ordered food and milkshakes — a signature of the chain.
Biden then delivered the meals to the Fitts family, where they spoke about education over dinner. Biden has made student loan forgiveness a key political battle in his first term as president; the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his initial plan to cancel about $430 billion in student loans, but his administration has since successfully erased $137 billion in debt through a different strategy, the Wall Street Journal has reported.
Eric Fitts is one of the tens of thousands of Americans who have had some student loan debt erased by Biden's actions. The video Biden posted Monday, however, focuses instead on the kids' plans. As they eat chicken fingers and burgers, Carter tells Biden about his middle school basketball team, and Christian talks about a high school program that's giving him the chance to go see college campuses and learn more about the business world.
"My favorite thing is this business academy I'm in," he tells Biden after his dad presses him to talk about school. "We travel. We go to N.C. State, Wake Tech. We went to this small dry-cleaning business. And it's just cool. It's a great experience."
Biden expresses his admiration for those opportunities, then wraps up the video telling the teens to go easy on their dad.
"Dads are hard to raise," he says. “Once you're a teenager, you've got to be patient with us."
