President hits road to break ground
After speech, Biden digging in to sway working-class votes
With his call for a “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America,” President Joe Biden on Tuesday night acknowledged rhetorically what Democrats have been preparing for two years: a fierce campaign to win back white working-class voters through the creation of hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs that do not require a college degree.
Biden’s economically focused State of the Union address may have eschewed the cultural appeals to the white working class that former President Donald Trump harnessed so effectively, the grievances encapsulated by fears of immigration, racial and gender diversity, and the sloganeering of the intellectual left. But at the speech’s heart was an appeal to Congress to “finish the job” and a simple challenge. “Let’s offer every American the path to a good career whether they go to college or not,” he said.
On Wednesday, Biden rallied supporters in Wisconsin, preparing for an expected reelection announcement this spring.
“Fighting for the sake of fighting gets us nowhere,” Biden said at a training facility run by the Laborers’ International Union of North America. “We’re getting things done.”
Workers lined up in orange shirts and hard hats behind the president as he spoke. A banner that said “union strong” hung to the side.
Biden, who beat Donald
Trump in 2020 by a narrow margin in Wisconsin, talked about helping workers make “a couple more bucks” and preventing them from “getting stiffed” by companies that “play us for suckers.”
“My economic plan is about investing in people and places that feel forgotten,” said Biden.
Biden’s next stop is Tampa, Florida, on Thursday, where he’s expected to discuss proposals to safeguard Social Security and Medicare, and lower the cost of health care.
While the quest for working-class voters is emphasized by the traditional post-State of the Union blitz, where the president, vice
president and Cabinet officials fan out across the country to promote his themes from the speech, much of that path was already laid by the last Congress with the signing of a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, a $280 billion measure to rekindle a domestic semiconductor industry and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $370 billion for low-emission energy to combat climate change.
Whether or not Biden can persuade a divided Congress to act on his remaining plans, the money from those laws has just begun to flow, and a surge of hiring is coming. Many of those jobs will be in the industrial battlegrounds that Democrats either took
back from Trump in 2020 or will need in 2024, when endangered senators such as Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin face reelection.
But Democrats will have to match those jobs against GOP culture war appeals aimed at the same voters.
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, ordered state agencies and universities this week to stop considering racial and ethnic diversity in hiring. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is waging a campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts while funding the shipping of migrants from the Mexican border to Democratic cities. The
Republican-led House is holding hearings blaming immigrants lacking permanent legal status for the smuggling of fentanyl that is ravaging blue-collar cities and towns, though most of the arrests in the fentanyl trade have involved American smugglers.
Republicans openly mocked Biden’s “Finish the Job” slogan, and among working-class voters, they have public opinion with them. In a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, just 36% of Americans without a college degree approved of Biden’s performance, compared with 53% of college graduates. His approval on economic issues was even worse, with just 31% of voters without a degree approving of his handling of the economy.
“Finish the job? On what? Fueling inflation? Opening the border? Lowering wages? Emptying our energy reserves?” asked Tommy Pigott, the rapid response coordinator at the Republican National Committee.
In a New York Times/ Siena College poll in September, 59% of white working-class voters said Republicans were the party of the working class, compared with 28% who chose Democrats. Sixtyeight percent of these voters said they agreed more with Republicans than Democrats on the economy, while just 25% picked Democrats. Beyond economics, white working-class voters sided overwhelmingly with Republicans on building a border wall, opposing gun control, stopping illegal immigration and seeing gender as immutable and determined at birth.
Democratic problems with the working class are not limited to white voters. Some blue-collar Black, Latino and Asian American voters have drifted toward Republicans, and Biden rolled out a range of economic appeals aimed broadly at people who are more sensitive to high prices.
He highlighted his efforts to lower insulin costs and cited pocketbook issues recognizable to almost any consumer — what he called “junk fees.” He identified “exorbitant” bank overdraft charges; credit card late fees; change-of-service fees by cable and internet providers; and airline “surcharges.”