Main Edition
US
FR
April 17, 2024 - 3:00pm
Joe Biden only lived in northeastern Pennsylvania for about seven of his 81 years, but the city of Scranton looms large in his autobiography. The city, the state’s fourth-largest in the days of the President’s youth, was the home of Biden’s mother’s family for generations, since they immigrated from Ireland in the 19th century. Pennsylvania — and Ireland — make up only about half of the President’s family tree but, in his telling, he’s Scranton Joe the Irish Democrat through and through.
Biden returned to Scranton yesterday, kicking off a three-day swing through Pennsylvania. Not only is the state dear to the President’s heart, it is also essential to his hope for victory over Donald Trump in November.
Speaking to a small gathering of press and locals there yesterday of his plan to raise taxes on corporations and on Americans earning more than $400,000 per year, Biden used the city as a touchstone. “Scranton values or Mar-a-Lago values,” he said. “These are the competing visions for our economy that raise questions of fundamental fairness at the heart of this campaign.”
Biden’s rhetoric echoes his party’s past — perhaps the reason he fared better against Trump than Hillary Clinton did four years earlier. But the Democratic Party of coal miners and Irish ward bosses that propelled Biden’s great-grandfather to the State Senate several generations ago has been slipping away. In its place is a new coalition centred on Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (Biden’s next two campaign stops), which is increasingly backed and funded by rich and upper-middle-class suburbanites outside the two cities.
Scranton may be, as one local Republican said recently, “home to the last vestiges of 20th-century Democratic machine politics”. But other once-solidly Democratic regions are now at least Trump-curious (Erie, Wilkes-Barre) if not fully Trumpified (southwestern Pennsylvania). These changes were driven by a shift in white working-class voters from their historic home in the Democratic Party to their new place in the GOP. That shift has been mirrored by the move of richer and college-educated white voters into the Democratic Party.
Trump won Pennsylvania on the votes of these new Republicans in 2016, carrying the state by 44,292 votes — just a 0.72% margin. Four years later, Biden bested him by a larger but still narrow margin of 82,166 (1.18%). Polls show the current race in the state to be just as close — the RealClearPolitics average of polls has Biden ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania by just 0.1% (46.3 to 46.2%)
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeHow many in Scranton value an open border, a hands-off approach to crime, programs that increase homelessness instead of alleviating it, inflation and economic uncertainty, participation in other people’s wars, and the relentless focus on race and genitalia?
If this is what Scranton, or a national majority, wants, then it will get more of it and I don’t hear any whining about it. As the emptiest suit to ever seek and hold the Oval Office rightly said – elections have consequences.
Except those issues are nowhere to be seen or heard on the MSM. They are all abortion all the time.
Surely even Americans who aren’t political must know by now that Biden isn’t really going to champion the interests of the blue collar class over those of the bankers, lawyers and billionaires who put him in the White House?
And the military industrial complex.
And the intelligence-deep state complex.
Please, don’t insult my intelligence by calling it “intelligence.”
And I thought this was going to be another dementia article about Joe Biden losing track of where Pennsylvania was or where he was. All very reassuring.
I’ll assert that all political parties contain a shadow version of themselves and that over time they swing towards it. So we see the ‘natural supporters’ turning away and towards some alternative.
A question is how quickly the Democratic supporters are turning away and how quickly the Republicans are offering a new home to the working man.
HE obviously thinks he’s losing PA: He suddenly wants to triple tariffs on Chinese steel.
There are lots of interviews where Joe claims to have grown up with all kinds of diversity…. in a Black neighborhood, with the Italians and the Greeks too, among the Muslims and don’t forget the Jews!
As for being working-class I think most of us realize his hands are unblemished by anything resembling real work.