Biden’s Scranton vs. Park Ave. appeal targets working class
Joe Biden stood on the floor of a Wisconsin aluminum plant this week, shed the trappings of his decades in national politics and then took aim at the billionaire New Yorker he wants to evict from the Oval Office.
“I’ve dealt with guys like Donald Trump my whole life, who would look down on us because we didn’t have a lot of money or your parents didn’t go to college,” Biden said, recalling his boyhood roots. “Guys who think they’re better than you. Guys who inherit everything they’ve ever gotten in their life and squander it.”
Biden has long cultivated his persona as “MiddleClass Joe” with “hardscrabble” roots, but as he turns to the closing stretch of his third presidential bid, the Scranton, Pennsylvania, native is personalizing his pitch as he tries to undercut one of the president’s core strengths.
“The truth is,” Biden said, “he never really respected us.”
It’s at once a demonstration of Biden’s personal contempt for Trump and the Democratic challenger’s pride in his own family history as mostly workingclass Irish Catholics. But, most importantly as voters begin casting early ballots, it’s a carefully tailored message aimed at voters who’ve abandoned Democrats in recent elections and helped Trump flip a band of Rust Belt states to fashion his own presidential victory map.
The strategy goes beyond the headlines from Democrats’ 2018 midterm success, when college-educated whites in metro areas swelled the congressional ranks of suburban Democrats and handed the party a House majority, new governorships and scores of state legislative seats around the country. Now Biden and his advisers believe his profile, combined with Trump’s liabilities, allows Democrats to capitalize on their new base without forsaking their old one.
“There are so many people in our party who have just said, ‘screw the white working class, they don’t matter anymore and we can’t get them because they’re all racist,’ blah, blah, blah,” said Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster based in Wisconsin. “But thank God Joe Biden is not running that kind of campaign. He knows better.”
Trump advisers, for their part, see the president as having enough of an upper hand among the white working class to be reelected. Still, it wouldn’t take much of a shift for Biden to win states like Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania that the president carried by less than 1 percentage point in 2016, and Trump certainly seems mindful of that prospect.
“Joe Biden’s devoted his career to offshoring your jobs, throwing open your border, dragging us into endless foreign wars,” Trump told a crowd in Wisconsin recently.
In Pittsburgh, Trump accused Biden of stealing his proposals to shore up American manufacturing. And in Nevada, he went directly at Biden’s biographical pitch, casting the lifetime politician according to his resume and not his roots: “I did more in
47 months as president than Joe Biden did in 47 years.”
Pitting working Americans against the wealthy ruling class in presidential politics didn’t start with Trump or Biden.
Since Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era New Deal, Democrats have claimed the mantle of the nation’s labor force, with Biden being the latest nominee boasting a litany of labor union endorsements.
From Richard Nixon’s victories onward, Republicans answered as defenders of a “silent majority” battling a “coastal elite,” figures like Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry of Massachusetts and
2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who’d decamped to New York after her Arkansas-native husband, Bill Clinton, left the White House.
President Barack Obama survived GOP attacks on him as an “elitist,” winning two terms with Biden as his running mate. But Trump accelerated the shift to the GOP and overcame his own Manhattan pedigree with his “Make America Great Again” slogan and “America First” pitch.