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Joe Biden Returns to Scranton to Outline Economic Policy Joe Biden, in Scranton, Says Trump Owes Current Economy to Obama Years
(about 4 hours later)
As President Trump heads to Pittsburgh to deliver a speech on Wednesday, Joseph R. Biden Jr. will be on the other side of the state seeking to draw sharp contrasts with the president on economic policy and biography, and to make overtures to the longtime Democrats who voted for Mr. Trump, helping him to win Pennsylvania in 2016. SCRANTON, Pa. — Joseph R. Biden Jr. returned to his native city on Wednesday seeking to undermine President Trump’s strongest case to voters for re-election, the resilient economy, accusing Mr. Trump of inheriting an economic upturn but, “just like everything else he inherited, he’s in the midst of squandering it.’’
Mr. Biden, who was born in Scranton, Pa., is expected to give an address on Wednesday morning on the middle class in the northeastern Pennsylvania city where he has maintained close ties. President Obama won the state in 2012, but in 2016, many working-class, more culturally conservative Democrats there embraced Mr. Trump’s message of economic populism, his hard-line approach to immigration and his disdain for the political class in Washington, reflecting a broader national trend that helped deliver him the White House. Mr. Biden’s speech was billed as an economic policy address, but it was light on new plans; he repeated many ideas he has advanced before. Instead, he made an emotive appeal rooted in his middle-class biography to restore the “values” of an American compact, in which hard work allowed average families to afford a home, higher education and health care.
Democrats have been arguing ever since about how to recapture those voters, and how much to focus on them. “There used to be a basic bargain in America: If you contribute to the well being of the outfit you work with, you got to share in the benefits,” Mr. Biden said, speaking to a few hundred in a downtown auditorium. “That bargain’s been broken.”
In a statement released ahead of the speech, Mr. Biden painted the president as a corrupt and entitled member of the elite and argued that the president’s policies, like his tax measure, don’t help working people. Although corporate profits are up, Mr. Biden said, middle-class wages are stagnant and families are buckling under the burden of health bills and college. He promised to undo Republican tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy.
“Donald Trump has had everything given to him and spent his entire life and presidency enriching himself,” he said. The former vice president spoke in a region where in 2016 Democrats abandoned the party in droves for Mr. Trump’s economic populism and nativism.
In the statement, he said that as president he would “increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour and ensure that workers are paid fairly for the long hours they work and get the overtime they have earned.” Winning back at least a share of those voters in Scranton — and in dozens of Scrantons across the northern industrial states — is likely the key for Democrats in depriving Mr. Trump of a second term.
“Donald Trump doesn’t know what it means to be a part of the middle class,” the statement said. “I do.” Mr. Biden’s appearance came the same day that a new CNN national poll showed him with a commanding lead in the Democratic primary, with the support of 34 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning registered voters, followed by Senator Elizabeth Warren at 19 percent and Senator Bernie Sanders at 16 percent. It is Mr. Biden’s widest lead in the CNN survey since shortly after he announced for president.
Mr. Biden, one of the leading Democratic presidential candidates who has referred to himself as “Middle Class Joe,” has pointed to his personal experience as well as policy proposals to argue that he can connect with those voters, though it remains an open question how many voters who chose Mr. Trump in 2016 are willing to swing back to the Democrats in 2020. But there is no national primary, of course, and Mr. Biden’s advantage in the early-primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire has ebbed or evaporated. The CNN survey is a sign that nationally he has retained strong support despite facing weeks of unproved attacks by Mr. Trump on him and his son Hunter over their activities in Ukraine, an issue driving the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.
The split-screen moment in Pennsylvania comes after weeks of clashes between the Trump and Biden camps, as Mr. Trump has repeatedly made unfounded accusations against Mr. Biden and his son, Hunter, with a focus on the younger Biden’s overseas business dealings. Mr. Biden’s economic prescriptions, less sweeping than other leading Democrats seeking the nomination, include a $15 federal minimum wage, tripling funding for at-risk schools, free community college and a plan for students to pay down their college debt by committing to community service.
In the last month, Mr. Biden has faced concerns from some Democrats over whether he was responding quickly and aggressively enough to Mr. Trump’s attacks. His campaign has settled on a strategy of frequently criticizing Mr. Trump and seeking to discredit his messages, while also focusing on policy matters — health care in particular. Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate is a low 3.9 percent, though it is higher, 5.2 percent, in Lackawanna County, where Scranton is. A manufacturing downturn may be underway statewide, with 8,100 jobs lost this year so far, an issue that could cut into the president’s 2016 promises to restore industry in the Rust Belt.
Mr. Trump’s urging of the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens helped trigger the impeachment inquiry he now faces in the House. While Mr. Biden visited Scranton in northeast Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump was scheduled to be in Pittsburgh in the western part of the state on Wednesday afternoon, to address natural gas drillers. The president’s visit comes close to the one-year anniversary of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in that city when a gunman killed 11 worshipers.
Though Democrats made strong gains in the 2018 midterms in Pennsylvania, it is very much up in the air whether they will carry the state next year, and who would be their most formidable opponent to the president. Mr. Trump has held rallies both before and since his election at an arena in nearby Wilkes-Barre that drew some 10,000 people.
Although Hillary Clinton narrowly carried Lackawanna County, Mr. Trump cut deeply into the Democratic margin of more than 26,000 votes that Barack Obama piled up here in 2012.
Democrats have been arguing ever since about how to recapture those voters, mostly white and working class, and how much to focus on them. Mr. Biden, who is regarded warmly by many Pennsylvanians thanks to his history here, spent many minutes recounting family stories he has told regularly: his father moving alone to Delaware for a job but promising to send for the family when he could afford to; his father feeling ashamed when a bank turned him down for a loan to pay for his son’s college. His father telling young “Joey” that “the measure of success is not whether you get knocked down, it’s how quickly you get up.”
The split-screen moment in Pennsylvania comes after weeks of clashes between the Trump and Biden camps. In the last month, Mr. Biden has faced concerns from some Democrats over whether he was responding quickly and aggressively enough to Mr. Trump’s attacks. His campaign has settled on a strategy of frequently criticizing Mr. Trump and seeking to discredit his messages, while also focusing on policy matters — health care in particular.
Jim Connors, a former Democratic mayor of Scranton, who attended Mr. Biden’s speech, maintained that despite Mr. Trump’s 2016 strength in the region, disillusionment has set in with some who voted for him.
“I think that Trump fooled the nation because his pitch was, I’m going to kick their rear ends: the Mexicans, China and NATO, everybody, they’ve all been taking advantage of us,” Mr. Connors said. “And he did nothing.”