Biden campaign targets blue-collar voters
Joe Biden stood on the floor of awisconsin aluminumplant 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. “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 “Middle-class Joe” with “hardscrabble” roots, but as he turns to the closing stretch of his third presidential bid, the Scranton, Pa., 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 a demonstration of Biden’s personal contempt for Trump and the Democratic challenger’s pride in his own family history as mostly working-class Irish Catholics. But 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.
“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.”
Trumpadvisers, for their part, see the president as having
enough of an upper hand among the white working class to be reelected.
“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.
Inwisconsin, recent polls suggest Trump is leading modestly among white voters without a college degree. A Washington POST-ABC News survey found white non-college Wisconsinites somewhat more likely to back Trump over Biden, by a 54 percent-44 percent margin.
Biden makes policy arguments as he tries to appeal to those voters. He juxtaposes his tax plans, which would impose higher burdens on thewealthiest Americans, with Trump’s calls for more cuts.
Biden also blasts Trump for trying to dismantle the 2010 health insurance overhaul amid a pandemic and for failing in recent weeks to win congressional approval for additional aid to shore up the economy still reeling from COVID-19. And he chides the president for stoking racial divisions and pitting white workers against nonwhites fighting in the same economy.
“I really do view this campaign as a campaign between Scranton and Park Avenue,” Biden said last week at a CNN town hall.
Biden insisted in Wisconsin that his background, so much closer culturally toworking-class Americans, means he actually will deliver onwhatwas Trump’s initial appeal for somany voters.
“I know many of you were frustrated. You were angry,” Biden said, explicitly addressing Trump supporters. “You believed you weren’t being seen, represented, or heard. I get it. It has to change, and I promise you this: It will change with me.”