Rust Belt’s ‘honest’ Joe wins back territory on familiar battleground
For Joe Biden, the “scrappy kid from Scranton”, it has always been about the Midwest. If he lost there, he told himself, he had no hope of winning.
Mr Biden spent most of his campaign trying to appeal to the voters he believed he could win back from Donald Trump in places such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – the trio of traditionally Democratic industrial states that cost the party the White House in 2016.
Now, with Mr Biden and the president locked in a race that has gone to the wire, the path to 270 electoral college votes for either man came down to these three states.
If predictions based on early returns are borne out, Mr Biden could well pull off the hat-trick to claim victory. A nail-bitingly tight race in Wisconsin was called for the former vicepresident with the thinnest of margins. In Michigan, with 96 per cent of ballots cast, he was one percentage point ahead and it was called for the Biden campaign.
Pennsylvania, which holds out the biggest prize of 20 electoral votes, was leaning Right but was set to veer sharply Left once the mail-in ballots were counted in deep-blue cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
Mr Trump had tried desperately to eat into the Democrats’ share of the blue-collar vote, claiming his rival would end fracking, and jeopardise traditional jobs in one of the country’s top oil and gas-producing states.
“At every turn, they’ve twisted the knife into the back of Pennsylvania workers,” Mr Trump told crowds in the Rust Belt state last week. “They keep saying it’s close [in Pennsylvania] but I don’t think it’s close.”
It was a much easier claim to make when he was running against Hillary Clinton. Mr Biden, however, is seen by many here as another ordinary son, just another “middle-class Joe” who used to take the Amtrak train to work in DC during his time as a senator, like any other commuter.
“You can tell he’s down to earth,” said Michael Karnoff, 66, from Mr Biden’s hometown of Scranton, as he sat anxiously waiting for Pennsylvania to be called. “If he comes from this area, you know he’s honest, we don’t harvest thieves around this way.” Mr Karnoff, an electronics distributor before he retired, voted for Mr Trump in 2016, hoping the businessman would create jobs for the area, which has suffered from economic depression since the coal mines closed.
“Trump got in because a lot of people here don’t trust Washington,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “Biden is part of the establishment, but this is what we need in the trying times we’re in now. We need a [Theodore] Roosevelt or a [ Winston] Churchill, not an isolationist who is only concerned with himself.”
Lackawanna County, which covers Scranton, swung hard toward Mr Trump in 2016. This year, with 99 per cent of votes counted as of last night, Mr Biden was carrying it by 8 points.
Mr Karnoff was not surprised. “People are tired of the shenanigans,” he said. “We all just want to return to normality.”
In winning Pennsylvania and other states such as Michigan and Wisconsin that had not voted Republican in decades, Mr Trump broke through what the Democrats had dubbed their “blue wall” in the Midwest.
State polls in 2016 had wildly underestimated Mr Trump’s support in the Rust Belt by more than five points, the largest such polling error so far this century. The most important reason, according to a post-mortem from the American Association for Public Opinion Research, was that they undercounted non-college-educated voters, who turned out in droves for the president.
Early returns this year pointed to Mr Biden expanding Mrs Clinton’s margins in the outskirts of Philadelphia, and Mr Trump failing to put up the same kind of numbers he did in 2016 in central, western and northeastern Pennsylvania.
The 77-year-old Democrat has appeal in big cities, like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, too.
“When’s the last time you saw Trump on main street?” said cab driver Tyler Wolf, 26, from west Philadelphia. “He’s always holding his rallies in the airport miles out of town. And this is someone who claims to be a man of the people.”
Both candidates had campaigned furiously in the must-win state right up until the last minute, with Mr Trump even visiting Scranton, Mr Biden’s birthplace, on the eve of the election.
The former vice-president paid a visit himself on election day, where he was greeted by throngs of supporters who patted him on the back and chanted his name.
“We love you, Joe,” they shouted outside Mr Biden’s childhood home. “We got this.”
‘You can tell he’s down to earth. If he’s from this area, you know he’s honest, we don’t harvest thieves’