Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby. Tonight, Joe Biden has returned to the campaign trail… sort of. The former president, who left the White House with historically low approval ratings, was considered potential campaign poison until his successor became even more unpopular. Now Biden—still fighting cancer—wants to help Democrats in the midterms. A few of them, at least, in places where his endorsement can actually make a difference. Where? More on his delicate political dance, below…

Also mentioned in this issue: Linda Sánchez, Suzan DelBene, Hakeem Jeffries, Dan Koh, Cedric Richmond, Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon, Tony Blinken, Jeff Zients, TJ Ducklo, Annie Tomasini, Anthony Bernal, J.D. Vance, Barack Obama, Keisha Lance Bottoms, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and more…

The Congressional Progressive Caucus and Rep. Linda Sánchez, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s political arm, are furious with Democratic leadership after the D.C.C.C. released its second “Red to Blue” list, identifying the candidates it’s most bullish on in competitive House primaries—generating a burst of public drama that’s been rare during Suzan DelBene’s D.C.C.C. tenure. “Voters, not the D.C.C.C., should pick Democratic nominees,” the C.P.C. declared in a statement to Axios.

But this morning, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries shrugged off the criticism in a conversation with Marianna Sotomayor, the brilliant Capitol Hill reporter who joined Puck this week. “The D.C.C.C. has traditionally only gotten involved in a handful of competitive primaries in advance of those taking place,” he told Marianna. “This time around, the decision was made to get involved in a handful of primaries by the D.C.C.C., including in PA-7 and CA-22, based on the D.C.C.C.’s assessment as to who was most likely to be the strongest candidate in a highly competitive general election.” (Much more from Marianna’s interview tomorrow.)

Ever since Citizens United, Dems have tried to consolidate around primary candidates early to help the eventual nominees bank as much money as possible before the general—and before Republicans unleash super PAC spending. But this particular flavor of intraparty friction has become a lasting problem in a cycle when enthusiasm has produced too many candidates. And though the D.C.C.C. has typically gotten its preferred candidates out of primaries in the past, it remains to be seen whether the anti-establishment current in the party could make their endorsements less effective this cycle.

So how helpful is a Biden endorsement? In a narrow context, very. Koh, who has also been endorsed by Harris and Pete Buttigieg, told me that Biden’s endorsement video on Monday generated the best fundraising day of the quarter. Part of that is just the simple matter of attention: Biden is a famous former president. With local and national news not really covering a multi-candidate House primary in the Boston suburbs, making it difficult for candidates to reach voters, Biden’s social media presence provides a very loud megaphone. The former president cross-posted his endorsement of Koh to Instagram, where he still has 16 million followers, and X, where he has 38 million.

Koh told me that in his campaign’s internal polling from earlier this year, Biden had an approval rating of 83 percent among primary voters in his district. Showcasing Biden in his campaign, he said, is a useful reminder of the former president’s decency at a time when Democratic voters are furious with Trump. “Nobody would ever fathom President Biden spending time building monuments to himself or demolishing the White House—because he understood that’s just not what presidents should ever do,” Koh said.

In Georgia, where Black voters make up a majority of the vote in Democratic primaries, Biden also remains more of an asset than a liability. Bottoms, who is leading the polls in the governor’s race, is trying to win the primary outright on May 19 and avoid a runoff. Asking Biden to step in was an easy call, Democrats in the state told me. “He is still very popular with base Democratic voters, especially Black voters in Georgia, where Keisha is in the driver’s seat,” said one Democratic strategist who has worked on campaigns in the state. “Democrats are overperforming in races all over the country. People regret voting for Donald Trump. And so with Biden, I think it’s a perfect storm for him to weigh in on this race. Here you have one of the biggest political figures in the country supporting a Black woman trying to become a governor.”

Biden’s goodwill with Black voters—built over years of political work and cemented by joining Barack Obama in the White House—was his calling card when he ran for president in 2020. He catapulted to victory in the South Carolina primary that year, capitalizing on a debate performance in which he spoke movingly about the racist murders of nine Black churchgoers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. Just this February, Biden got a hero’s welcome in South Carolina at an event organized by the state Democratic Party honoring the sixth anniversary of his primary win—and tacitly thanking him for moving South Carolina to the front of the Democratic nominating calendar once he became president.

In its most recent poll from April, Echelon found that Biden’s favorable rating was a lowly 38 percent among white voters and just 42 percent among Latinos. But among Black voters, his support reached almost 70 percent. Which is precisely why the restless Biden, as unpopular as he is with most voters, still has some cachet inside the Democratic Party beyond the Washington bubble—and he’s likely to use it this year as he works to shore up his tarnished legacy.

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