Too close to call as Biden and Trump vie for blue-collar votes
The Democrat President knows the support of steelworkers in his birth state of Pennsylvania is vital in for his re-election.
President Joe Biden and Donald Trump are in a bidding war to win over blue-collar workers in Pennsylvania, a state that has for decades held the keys to the White House.
Having visited his home state eight times this year, Mr Biden on Wednesday doubled down on efforts to court steelworkers.
The Democrat President knows their support is vital for his re-election and his address came shortly after Mr Trump’s rival pitch last week.
“I’m President because of you guys,” Mr Biden said at the headquarters of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh. “I’m proud to be the most pro-union president in American history.”
Attacking China for dumping cheap steel and aluminium on the global market, the 81-year-old said he was tripling tariffs on Chinese steel imports, and said Beijing was “not competing, they’re cheating”.
“Since I came into office, our GDP is up and our trade deficit with China is down. We’ve got the strongest economy in the world,” Mr Biden said.
The state is on a knife-edge, with recent polls suggesting Mr Trump, 77, is pulling ahead.
A recent survey of the seven most likely swing states for The Wall Street Journal showed Mr Trump ahead by four percentage points in Pennsylvania. Others have Mr Biden ahead by a whisker, but it is too close to call in a state that Mr Biden flipped in 2020.
It is often said that the road to the White House leads through Pennsylvania, with no Democrat having won a presidential election without also collecting the state since Harry Truman in 1948.
“It’s hard to draw paths to Biden winning the White House that don’t involve Pennsylvania,” said Daniel Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
A win is also personal for Mr Biden. Speaking in his childhood hometown of Scranton on Tuesday, another of the key state’s blue-collar towns, he tried to draw a distinction between his economic outlook and that of his rival.
“Scranton values or Mar-a-Lago values?” Mr Biden asked, in a reference to Mr Trump’s luxury Florida mansion. “Donald Trump looks at the world differently to you and me,” he said during a speech where he called on billionaires to pay more and promised not to raise taxes on middle earners. “He wakes up ... in Mar-a-Lago thinking about himself, how he can help his billionaire friends gain power and control and force their extreme agenda on us.”
Some of Mr Biden’s closest allies wonder if the problem is not that his messages are failing to cut through but that voters do not like what they are hearing.
Ron Klain, until a year ago Mr Biden’s chief of staff in the White House, questioned the campaign’s strategy last week. “I think the President is out there too much talking about bridges,” he said, according to audio obtained by Politico. “He does two or three events a week where he’s cutting a ribbon on a bridge. If you go to the grocery store, you go to the grocery store and ... eggs and milk are expensive; the fact there’s a f..king bridge is not (inaudible).”
One of the President’s key pieces of legislation is the Inflation Reduction Act, passed two years ago, which aims to repurpose the US economy towards climate change and greener energy. Democrat strategists argue that it is not what the blue-collar workers of Pittsburgh and Scranton care about, and that if prices keep rising, it will be tough for the President to laud something that claims to be cutting inflation.
“Ron was right about ribbon cutting events for bridges,” says Douglas Schoen, a party strategist who worked for Bill Clinton. “It sums (up) the problem with the Biden campaign. It is not dealing with the real economic issue that people are facing, whether in Pennsylvania or anywhere else. People are concerned about inflation, prices at the petrol pump, prices at the supermarket, and there is nothing, literally nothing, from Biden about these things.”
The Times
Britons score highest on lowest life expectancies
Britain has the worst life expectancy in western Europe, a report has found.
‘Reacting to pictures in his head’: Will Putin use nuclear weapons?
As Moscow threatens to respond to Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles, experts warn Vladimir Putin’s state of mind is the danger that could lead him to going for the nuclear option.