It’s always sunny for Philadelphia sports fan Jill Biden these days Sport

Let the history books record the fact that First Lady Jill Biden stepped off Air Force One on Sunday night wearing a Philadelphia Phillies jersey and flashing a smile that seemed to suggest there was going to be a lot of trash in the White House .

Like her entire hometown of Philadelphia, Jill Biden has had an incredible couple of weeks.

On Sunday, she was at the Bidens’ vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and erupted in cheers when Bryce Harper hit a home run that sealed the Phillies’ Game 5 win against the San Diego Padres and advanced them to the World Series, where they will face the X Justin Astros.

How big of a sports fan is the first lady? Harper hit his home run around 5:50 p.m. The game ended with a Padres flyout to right field around 6:10 p.m. The Bidens — conveniently — didn’t board the presidential motorcade for the airport and return to Washington until 6:50 p.m. (That departure time was scheduled, according to first lady spokeswoman Vanessa Valdivia.)

Over the weekend, she spent part of her Saturday tied for Game 4 of the Phillies’ preseason series against the Braves from her private cabin on Executive One Foxtrot as she flew from a day of breast cancer awareness events in Fort Lauderdale to two campaign stops for Democrats fighting in Orlando.

And it’s not just baseball. The night after the Braves game, she was at it again, standing on her hometown ballpark, flipping a coin and singing the Philadelphia Eagles fight song in front of a crowd of 67,000 as her team beat the Dallas Cowboys for their sixth win. in their undefeated season.

In these frantic final weeks before the midterm elections, a Philly sports fanatic appears to be running his own campaign to remind America that the Bidens are still the couple you want to have a beer with. She has taken on her husband’s role as the administration’s jovial, uncontroversial All Person – just as Democrats are desperate for any uplift, with President Biden targeted by Republicans for inflation and losing much of the goodwill he once held. was just as lovable, error-prone, Amtrak Joe.

Just as sports can stop that awkward political conversation at the Thanksgiving dinner table, the first lady’s love for the Phillies can be a unifying force. Partisan politics may be tearing the country apart, but if there’s one thing many Americans can agree on, it’s that the people of Philadelphia — even Jill Biden — have a right to feel ridiculously happy right now.

Sure, there were some boos during the Eagles game — though not as loud as the fake video circulating in right-wing circles. It would be surprising if she wasn’t booed by notoriously die-hard Eagles fans who already booed the Cowboys when Biden took the field, and who once booed Santa Claus and pelted him with snowballs.

Besides, Biden took the jibes in stride. She was not in a box with glass walls. She stood in the stands in her Eagles shirt, drank beer, ate pretzels, wrapped herself in an Eagles blanket when it got cold, and took selfies with people in her section. It was at her request that the entire contingent of the White House stayed for the entire game – the Secret Service kicked them out with just four minutes left to avoid traffic jams, Valdivia reports.

Whatever her reception, it was all a “net positive” for Biden, says Lauren A. Wright, a political scientist at Princeton University who has studied first ladies. Her passion for sports allowed Biden to remind Americans of her backstory as a working-class “girl from Philly.”

The trip to the Eagles game wasn’t overtly political (the people who sang the battle song with her on the field that night were cancer patients to promote early detection), but it wasn’t apolitical either.

She walked onto an NFL field in front of a politically ambivalent audience on national television — a wide reach, a potentially hostile reception. And her home state just happened to be the site of one of the nation’s tightest and most important Senate races, with former Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman battling Republican TV host Mehmet Oz to the death. (President Biden flew to Pennsylvania on Thursday to campaign for Fetterman.)

“Anytime the Bidens can be present in a positive context, those are all win-win opportunities,” Wright says, “and there aren’t many with a Democrat in the White House with an economy that most people are very worried about.”

According to Valdivia, watching the Phillies on her plane and going to the Eagles game were top priorities for Biden, things she really wanted to squeeze into that weekend during a crazy schedule of 15 events over five days in five states that included Democratic campaign stops, an overnight stay at the Fort Benning Army post in Georgia, and two impromptu stops at local coffee shops.

Most of her events focused on Biden’s core issues of education, covid relief, cancer and support for military families. They also just happened like that — surprise! – will take place in four states where the Democrats expect tough battles: Wisconsin, Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania. In Atlanta, she fell for Stacey Abrams. In Orlando, she campaigned for Rep. Val Demings and former Congressman Charlie Crist, trying to unseat Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Ron DeSantis, respectively.

Such campaign blitzes are common for first ladies “who want to get the job done,” Wright says. Both Laura Bush and Michelle Obama have held fundraisers, and Wright’s own research for her book, On Behalf of the President: Spouses of the President and the Communications Strategy of the White House Today, found that 18 percent of Laura Bush’s speeches and nearly 30 percent of Michelle Obama’s speeches were made at election campaign. (Melania Trump was a notable exception and rarely campaigned.) It’s just what political spouses do.

Joe Biden’s power was about the public “until he became the most powerful person in the world,” says Kathryn Jellison, a professor of women’s history at Ohio State University. On the other hand, Jill Biden has many close entry points. A working woman, wife and mother who survived the disaster. “She really has a ‘Jill from the block’ persona, and I think now is a good time for her to use that for the Democratic candidates,” Jellison says. It can only help in the margins, “but with the margins so close right now, I guess any vote she can get out in the margins is good.”

She’s also the only first lady in history to keep her full-time position — professor of English composition at Northern Virginia Community College — which also makes her the only person in the administration to be there two days a week, making connections with the likes of Americans without four-year degrees , which Democrats are trying to reach, such as immigrants, single mothers and military veterans, whom Biden often talks about teaching.

However, at a time when the focus of the sports world is on Philadelphia, her roots in Philadelphia seem to be the most popular. Being one of five girls from the city’s working-class suburbs isn’t just a biographical fact about Jill Biden, it’s become a political personality trait.

She’s the girl who punched her sister’s bully in the face and got a “girlie” from her bank teller father for it, as she wrote in her memoir. She’s a teenager who ran across the highway in the dead of night with her friends to break into a pool where her family couldn’t afford a membership. This is the woman who responded, “I’m a good girl from Philly” after her husband was body-banned from attacking vegan activists at one of Joe Biden’s 2016 rallies.

The president recently told CNN’s Jake Tepper that his wedding vows actually have him rooting for the Phillies in the playoffs. “If it wasn’t for me, I would be sleeping alone,” he said. “I married a girl from Philly.”

Game 1 of the World Series starts tonight at 8:03 p.m. The close seven-game streak will end on the Saturday before Election Day. That’s a lot of chances for Jill Biden to try to unite America.