WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden plans to tap Julie Chavez Rodriguez as his 2024 re-election campaign manager, two sources familiar with the decision confirmed to NBC News Sunday.
Chavez Rodriguez, one of the most prominent Latinas in the administration and a granddaughter of the late labor leader Cesar Chavez, serves as a senior adviser to the president and the director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. CBS News first reported that she would be named Biden’s campaign manager.
“It makes sense to bring someone with her bona fides to Biden’s campaign leadership team,” said Maria Teresa Kumar, president and CEO of Voto Latino, a nonprofit organization that seeks to boost Latino participation in elections.
Biden is expected to officially announce his bid as soon as Tuesday, the fourth anniversary of his 2020 campaign launch, and he has summoned major financial backers to Washington for a Friday dinner and Saturday meetings.
Chavez Rodriguez worked as a deputy campaign manager on Biden’s general election team in 2020 following a stint as traveling chief of staff on now-Vice President Kamala Harris’ unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Prior to that, she worked in Harris’ Senate office, as a senior official in the Office of Public Engagement in President Barack Obama’s White House and as the director of programs at the Cesar E. Chavez Foundation.
Democrats have long expected that most of the shots for his campaign will be called from the White House, where his coterie of top advisers — a group that includes Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn and 2020 campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon — sit.
The long-awaited Biden campaign is ramping up at a time when former President Donald Trump has taken a commanding lead in polls of Republican primary contenders and potential candidates. Most national surveys show a tight race in a possible rematch between Biden and Trump.
Biden’s approval rating stood at 41 percent in an NBC News poll released Sunday, his lowest level since May. In the same survey, 70% of Americans — including 51 percent of Democrats — say they believe Biden should not run. Sixty percent of Americans, including one-third of Republicans, say they believe the same about Trump.
Chavez Rodriguez would not be the first Latina to run a presidential campaign. But she would be the first Latina to win as campaign manager if she she is appointed as expected, stays in the role and Biden is re-elected.
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