Granholm specifically cited investments in the transmission grid, expanding nuclear energy initiatives and addressing the loss of fossil fuel jobs as areas where the GOP could move closer toward the White House’s infrastructure proposal.

“It’s just curious why there isn’t more coming together,” she said.

Granholm’s remarks come after Biden last Friday rejected the latest GOP counteroffer from Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), which increased Senate Republicans’ previous proposal of $257 billion in new spending by roughly $50 billion, according to the White House.

In an earlier meeting last Wednesday, Biden had pushed Capito to support $1 trillion in new spending, after decreasing his roughly $2.3 trillion initial demand to $1.7 trillion. Biden and Capito are scheduled to speak again on Monday.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a key vote on any potential package, said on Sunday that he was confident a bipartisan deal could be reached. Progressives, however, have urged Biden to pursue the so-called reconciliation process, which would allow Democrats to pass the legislation without Republican votes in the Senate.

Meanwhile, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is set to begin work marking up its own infrastructure bill on Wednesday.

“The president still has hope. Joe Manchin still has hope. We all have hope that it can happen. They’ll be talking on Monday. But I can tell you the House will start their markup on Wednesday,” Granholm said on Sunday.

“It is frustrating that there’s not more coming together on this,” she added. “But the president’s red line, as you have heard, is that inaction is his red line. So there will be action. We’re just hopeful that we can see it in a bipartisan way that would be good for the country.”

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg offered a gentler assessment of the negotiations Sunday but acknowledged there was “still lots of daylight, honestly, between us and our Republican friends” on the price and scope of the infrastructure package.

He also nodded to the possibility of passing the White House’s proposal through reconciliation, telling CBS’s “Face the Nation” that “as our Democratic friends remind us, there is another way. But our strong preference is to do this on a bipartisan basis.”

But even if Biden ultimately decides to forge ahead on legislation without Republican support, “there are 50 Democratic senators who think for themselves,” Buttigieg said, and “you can’t simply assume that all of them are going to come on board with something unless we work through it together.”

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo predicted on Sunday that those Senate Democrats, particularly Manchin and fellow moderate Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), would end up backing Biden’s proposal should bipartisan talks collapse.

“I think they will. They are very engaged, both of them. They want to do what’s right,” she told ABC’s “This Week.”

Unlike Granholm, Raimondo also sought to deemphasize the urgency of the coming days’ negotiations, arguing that this week “is not [a] do-or-die” timeframe for a potential compromise between Biden and Senate Republicans.

“The practice of legislating is much more art than science,” she said, and “there is no hardwired deadline” for the infrastructure talks.

“We won’t do this forever,” Raimondo added. “But right now, there are good faith efforts on both sides, and we’re going to continue the work of doing our job and trying to get a bipartisan agreement.”

White House aides stress that the trip is meant to be a public launch for actions that have either been in the works or in planning stages for months all over the federal government.

“Having a head of state visit, the vice president in this case, really galvanizes a whole host of actions,” one senior administration official said.

“I expect when she comes back, she’ll want to bring the Cabinet together again to make sure we’re making progress [on] the goals that she’s set to make sure that the governments themselves are meeting our expectations for their level of engagement, to make sure that the international community is engaged.”

For months, aides who are experts in the region have been holed up with Harris, briefing and presenting her with a range of options for negotiations and conversations with the leaders she’ll be meeting with.

“She is going to be ultimately making some of these calls once she’s in the meeting. I think what she’s trying to do is figure out, as a former prosecutor, how is she going to make her best argument?” a senior administration aide said.

The trip is also a chance for the administration to reset what her role on immigration policy actually is. Harris was tasked with leading diplomatic efforts in the Northern Triangle and Mexico nearly three months ago, but aides admit in private that the rollout could have been “smoother.” The initial announcement that Harris would oversee efforts to address the root causes of migration — which came amid a spike in the number of migrants, particularly unaccompanied children, arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border — prompted Republicans to label her the “border czar” and blame her for continued influx of migrants there.

But aides say they aren’t focused on correcting the record for Republicans, because the trip likely won’t change the GOP’s tactics. “They’re deliberately not getting it. It’s not hard to understand but they want to try to tie her up in the border czar position for their own purposes,” a senior administration official said.

Beyond the GOP’s framing of her job, Harris faces major issues in working with Central America and Mexico on the corruption, poverty, violence and other destabilizing conditions driving thousands of people to migrate north to the United States. In addition to having some of the highest homicide rates in the world, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have been rocked in recent years by political turmoil, natural disasters and Covid-19 and the economic downturn it’s caused. The pandemic appears to have caused a dramatic drop in migration from the region in 2020, but migrant crossings have surged upward again in 2021. U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel encountered more foreign nationals from the Northern Triangle through the first half of fiscal year 2021 than they did in all of fiscal year 2020, according to the Congressional Research Service.

For now, Harris has opted to center her work around Guatemala and Mexico, while lower level officials have taken on talks with the governments of Honduras and El Salvador, whom the administration has less faith in.

While more open to collaboration, the Guatemalan and Mexican governments have their own set of issues. In Guatemala, the government is seeking to undercut civil society groups. In Mexico, López Obrador has slammed the U.S. for giving money to non-profits that have been critical of his government.

“She does have to really deliver a message to the government of Guatemala about governance and rule of law, but she also has to make sure she doesn’t come across as the overbearing American official that’s trying to tell Central Americans what to do,” Selee said. “That’s a really tough tightrope to walk.”

Advocates and community leaders in Guatemala on Thursday urged the Biden administration to take concrete action to improve conditions for Guatemalans in their home country and those already in the U.S. That includes rescinding Title 42, which allows the U.S. to almost immediately expel migrants arriving at the border and granting Guatemalans Temporary Protected Status, which would grant legal status to certain migrants already in the U.S.

The advocates, speaking at a press conference ahead of Harris’ trip, made clear, however, that anti-corruption needs to be a centerpiece of any strategy toward the region — a point that Harris has agreed with in public remarks.

The Biden administration needs to take “very firm positions and make very firm decisions on issues of corruption in Guatemala. As long as those positions are not taken, they’re not supporting us,” Carolina Escobar Sarti, a Guatemalan human rights activist working with Grupo Articulador de la Sociedad Civil en Materia Migratoria, a coalition of immigrant advocacy and human rights groups, said at the press conference.

Immigrant advocates and civil society groups in the U.S. and Central America are also concerned about the Biden administration’s push for both Mexico and Guatemala to help crack down on migrants heading for the southern U.S. border.

Beyond enforcement, there needs to be a “commitment to doing the greatest effort to amend [U.S.] immigration laws” and “have a real investment in development not only in Central America but in south, southeast of Mexico,” Martha Bárcena, former Mexican ambassador to the U.S., said.

The Biden administration’s aid to Central America has largely been measured thus far. However, Biden has proposed a $4 billion aid package as part of a long-term strategy toward the region.

In April, the U.S. Agency for International Development deployed a disaster assistance response team to help with humanitarian needs. That same month, Harris announced the U.S. would send an additional $310 million for humanitarian relief and to tackle food insecurity in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Harris also announced that a dozen companies and organizations — including Mastercard, Nespresso and Microsoft — have committed to invest in the Northern Triangle countries to help spur economic development in the region.

Immigrant advocates point to polling that shows addressing root causes isn’t only the right policy, but the right politics, too. A majority of Americans — 86 percent of Democrats, 87 percent of Republicans and 81 percent of Independents — agree that the U.S. government should work more closely with other countries in the region to preemptively reduce migration, according to a Civiqs poll conducted for Immigration Hub in April.

“She has led with this message of giving hope and that makes sense to people,” said Sergio Gonzales, executive director of the advocacy group Immigration Hub and former senior policy adviser to Harris on immigration and homeland security. “It’s important to the American public because it’s a message people can relate to and understand” even if there are big variations on how they believe immigration policy should be handled, he added.

The message of hope is one thing but the carrot and stick approach, experts of the region say, is key. Stephen McFarland, a former ambassador to Guatemala to Presidents Bush and Obama, who has spent the last decade consulting in the region, said the followup on promises and possible threats is going to be the real challenge, because it will force the leaders to actually make good on their promises.

“They will reinforce the administration’s credibility, because if you only talk nice and don’t pressure and make good on threats, then they won’t take you seriously,” McFarland said.

Aides say Harris knows that a lot of this is going to depend on her ability to convince Northern Triangle countries to actually work to address corruption, violence and poverty more than they have in the past. One said it will “require political will from the governments of the region” to manage migration, which is something she will be making very clear to leaders.

“She is going to be one that’s going to be making a lot of these decisions because she is leading the effort. But at her request, we have put together carrots and sticks. And she will deploy them as she manages the leadership on this for the president,” a senior administration official said.

Kemp’s standing with the rank-and-file has, improbably, improved, according to interviews with more than 30 party officials, strategists and activists here. And in his partial rehabilitation — the product of a relentless focus on so-called election integrity issues and culture war staples to excite the base — Kemp may serve as a model for dozens of Republicans elsewhere who have incurred Trump’s public wrath and are seeking to regain their standing with Republicans at home.

Kemp’s fate looms especially large in Georgia, a swing state where Trump not only was defeated by Joe Biden but saw Republicans lose both U.S. Senate seats in the state’s runoff elections in January. Fearful that Trump’s frequent criticism of Kemp could lead to a damaging primary and depress Republican turnout in a close general election — potentially a rematch with Democrat Stacey Abrams — several Georgia-based Republicans and Republicans with ties to the state have privately appealed to Trump to hold back, according to multiple sources familiar with the conversations.

“I think he wins [next year’s GOP primary] with 65, 70 percent of the vote,” Robert Lee, a Georgia-based Republican strategist, said in a crowded hall shortly after Kemp spoke on Saturday afternoon.

That assessment — widely shared here — is one that Republicans blistered by Trump elsewhere could learn from. Earlier this year, Kemp’s polling had fallen off, GOP activists in several counties reprimanded him, and it was unclear whether the governor, seeking his second term next year, could even survive a primary challenge.

On Saturday, Kemp was met by a cheering section to compete with the booing. Then, he lingered for several hours in the convention halls — shaking hands and posing for photographs.

Clint Day, a former state senator who just months ago was far more pessimistic about Kemp’s prospects, said, “I think he could be reelected.”

The proximate cause of Kemp’s improved standing is the controversial voting law Kemp championed, which, among other restrictions, makes it more difficult to cast absentee ballots. Signing it in March not only reaffirmed his conservative credentials on voting access but cast him as a central figure in the GOP’s war over the issue with Democrats and corporate America.

Joel Allen, a party official in suburban Atlanta’s 6th Congressional District, said “Kemp really did a service to himself with SB 202,” referring to the voting bill.

And while Republicans may have been disappointed in Kemp they gained a common foil in Major League Baseball, which announced that it would move its All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest of the legislation. Condemnations by two Georgia-headquartered companies, Coca-Cola and Delta, gave Kemp another platform to push back against perceived excesses of corporations and the left.

Kemp has also directly inserted himself into the GOP’s broader culture wars. In fundraising appeals in recent weeks, he has seized on leading wedge issues, saying critical race theory “has NO PLACE in our Georgia classrooms,” while pillorying “cancel culture” and “’Defund the Police’ nonsense taking hold in liberal strongholds and with the Democrats in Washington, D.C.”

Meanwhile, the governor has significantly relaxed coronavirus restrictions in the state, while issuing an executive order late last month banning state agencies from requiring Covid-19 vaccine passports.

By April, Kemp’s approval rating among Georgia Republicans had climbed 15 percentage points from its post-election low, according to Morning Consult, settling at 74 percent. Internal campaign polling showed improvement from earlier this year, as well.

“I’m in a lot better standing than what the media wants to tell people I am,” Kemp said on Saturday, while otherwise declining to comment.

At a rally at the Westin Jekyll Island on Friday night, Vernon Jones, a former Democrat-turned-Trump-supporting Republican who is Kemp’s most prominent opponent so far, called Kemp a “RINO,” and Jones’ supporters were among the most vocal booing Kemp the following day. Debbie Dooley, a founder of the Tea Party movement in Atlanta who is supporting Jones, called him “the Donald Trump of Georgia,” and a vocal contingent of Jones supporters crowded around him in the convention halls.

But Jones’ own history as a Democrat, in addition to the rich opposition research file on him, is disconcerting to many Republicans in the state.

“If his opponent’s Vernon Jones, I think Brian Kemp’s going to be the nominee,” said Jay Williams, a Georgia-based Republican strategist. “He’s a former Democrat, man … Vernon Jones is the crazy uncle we’ve known for a long time.”

The problem for the GOP, said Donna Rowe, a party official from Cobb County in the Atlanta suburbs, is that “we eat our own in the primary.”

“We’re still going to win it, but it’s going to be a bloodbath,” she said.

Kemp is not yet “out of the woods” with the base, Allen said. That was evident in the cacophony of boos he received during his remarks at the convention, a gathering that typically draws a state’s most fervent activists. The convention, one of the most widely attended in state history, featured many first-time delegates who had joined the convention largely because they believe the lie that the election was stolen from Trump.

Yet even among that far-right audience, Kemp has fared better than some other Georgia elected officials who refuted Trump’s baseless accusations of widespread voter fraud. One of them, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, who along with Raffensperger did not attend the convention, recently announced he would not seek reelection. Another, Attorney General Chris Carr, was nearly drowned out by boos when addressing the crowd on Friday.

Raffensperger, however, has seen the worst of it — he not only repudiated Trump’s claims that the election was stolen, he was also closer in his office to the counting of ballots than Kemp. One of Raffensperger’s primary opponents, David Belle Isle, the former mayor of Alpharetta who Raffensperger defeated in a 2018 runoff for the nomination, distributed literature at the convention depicting Raffensperger with devil’s horns on his head. Rep. Jody Hice, who defended Trump’s effort to overturn the election and is running with his endorsement, distributed boot-shaped pins that read, “Boot Brad.”

The state party on Saturday overwhelmingly passed a resolution to censure Raffensperger.

Bruce Thompson, a Georgia state senator who had called for additional reviews of the November election, said Raffensperger is “done.” But he said the calculation surrounding Kemp has changed.

Though “the base is still pissed off,” he said, Kemp “has managed this as well as he could, as far as the pandemic and getting us open, being a governor … Brian has done a good job since the election with the economy and signing SB 202. And he’s traveling the state.”

That’s a formula that isn’t lost on Republicans who have angered Trump in other states. In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey, similarly reviled by Trump — and censured by Republicans in his state — cheered conservatives when he issued an executive order in April banning the use of some “vaccine passports.”

Just as with Ducey, Trump derided Kemp as a “RINO” at the height of their post-election feud, when the former president pledged to campaign against Kemp in 2022. As late as April, Trump was asserting that Kemp “caved to the radical left-wing woke mob.” He said he was “ashamed” he endorsed Kemp in 2018.

But the governor’s rebound may limit Trump’s options in the state. Former Rep. Doug Collins, a Trump ally, said in April that he would not run for governor, after Trump floated him as a potential contender.

“If Brian Kemp keeps doing what he’s doing, which is the election law stuff, getting through another session with Dems saying he’s a terrible person,” Williams said, “I think he’s probably one really big issue away from kind of ensuring his nomination.”