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 Arkansasnative 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 on foreign policy, immigration and international trade.
His appeal was illumiworkers against nonwhites nated in the anti-immigrant fighting in the same econocry at his 2016my.rallies:
“Build the wall! Build the But those lines of attack wall!” He upset Clinton in don’t differ fundamentally Wisconsin, Michigan and from what Clinton tried Pennsylvania by less than four years ago. Maslin, the 80,000 votes combined, Democratic pollster, pointstretched out surprisingly ed to the personal core of wide victory margins in Biden’s pitch as a key disOhio and Iowa and made tinction. Minnesota uncomfortably “I really do view this close for Democrats. campaign as a campaign
Nationally, 64 percent of between Scranton and Park white voters without a Avenue,” Biden said last college degree backed week at a CNN town hall, Trump in 2016, according nodding to his Pennsylvato a Pew Research Center nia boyhood home and analysis of the electorate, Trump’s adult life in Manwhile 28 percent supported hattan, where the president Clinton. Among white built his branding empire, college graduates, Clinton complete with the skyled 55 percent to 38 perscraper emblazoned with cent. his name.
In Wisconsin, recent Biden insisted in Wispolls suggest Trump is consin that his backleading modestly among ground, so much closer white voters without a culturally to working-class college degree. A WashingAmericans, means he actuton Post-ABC News survey ally will deliver on what found white non-college was Trump’s initial appeal Wisconsinites somewhat for so many voters. more likely to back Trump “I know many of you over Biden, by a 54 perwere frustrated. You were cent-44 percent margin. A angry,” Biden said, explicNew York Times/Siena poll itly addressing Trump found a slight advantage supporters. “You believed for the president, 50 peryou weren’t being seen, cent-39 percent. represented, or heard. I get
To be sure, Biden makes it. It has to change, and I policy arguments as he promise you this: It will tries to appeal to those change with me.” voters. The Democrat juxBiden even added a dig taposes his tax plans, at the long list of Ivy which would impose highLeague-educated figures er burdens on the wealthispanning both major parest Americans, with ties, from Trump and his Trump’s calls for more University of Pennsylvania cuts. He casts Trump as business degree to the judging the economy by the Columbia and Harvardstock market alone. educated Democrat, Oba
Biden also blasts Trump ma, who gave Biden the for trying to dismantle the biggest break of his politi2010 health insurance overcal life. haul amid a pandemic and “I say it’s about time that for failing in recent weeks a state-school president sat to win congressional apin the Oval Office,” said proval for additional aid to Biden, a University of Delashore up the economy still ware graduate, in Wisconreeling from COVID-19. sin. “Because you know And he chides the presiwhat? If I’m sitting there, dent for stoking racial diviyou’re gonna be sitting sions and pitting white there, too.”