Joe Biden only lived in northeastern Pennsylvania for about seven of his 81 years, but the city of Scranton looms large in his autobiography. The city, the state’s fourth-largest in the days of the President’s youth, was the home of Biden’s mother’s family for generations, since they immigrated from Ireland in the 19th century. Pennsylvania — and Ireland — make up only about half of the President’s family tree but, in his telling, he’s Scranton Joe the Irish Democrat through and through.
Biden returned to Scranton yesterday, kicking off a three-day swing through Pennsylvania. Not only is the state dear to the President’s heart, it is also essential to his hope for victory over Donald Trump in November.
Speaking to a small gathering of press and locals there yesterday of his plan to raise taxes on corporations and on Americans earning more than $400,000 per year, Biden used the city as a touchstone. “Scranton values or Mar-a-Lago values,” he said. “These are the competing visions for our economy that raise questions of fundamental fairness at the heart of this campaign.”
Biden’s rhetoric echoes his party’s past — perhaps the reason he fared better against Trump than Hillary Clinton did four years earlier. But the Democratic Party of coal miners and Irish ward bosses that propelled Biden’s great-grandfather to the State Senate several generations ago has been slipping away. In its place is a new coalition centred on Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (Biden’s next two campaign stops), which is increasingly backed and funded by rich and upper-middle-class suburbanites outside the two cities.
Scranton may be, as one local Republican said recently, “home to the last vestiges of 20th-century Democratic machine politics”. But other once-solidly Democratic regions are now at least Trump-curious (Erie, Wilkes-Barre) if not fully Trumpified (southwestern Pennsylvania). These changes were driven by a shift in white working-class voters from their historic home in the Democratic Party to their new place in the GOP. That shift has been mirrored by the move of richer and college-educated white voters into the Democratic Party.
Trump won Pennsylvania on the votes of these new Republicans in 2016, carrying the state by 44,292 votes — just a 0.72% margin. Four years later, Biden bested him by a larger but still narrow margin of 82,166 (1.18%). Polls show the current race in the state to be just as close — the RealClearPolitics average of polls has Biden ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania by just 0.1% (46.3 to 46.2%)
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