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ERIE, Pennsylvania: Against the backdrop of a union facility in a key county on the Pennsylvania battlefield, Joe Biden on Saturday (October 10) criticized President Donald Trump saying he was only pretending to care about class voters. worker who helped change the Rust Belt to the Republican Column four years ago.
“Anyone who really does an honest day’s work sees him and his promises for what they are,” Biden told a masked and socially estranged crowd at a training center for plumbers and other tradesmen.
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The Democratic challenger has hit Trump on the economy in recent weeks, from sweeping accusations of how the president has downplayed the new coronavirus and its economic consequences to a withering personal contrast between Biden’s middle-class upbringing and that of the billionaire’s son. and the self-proclaimed. multimillionaire.
Nowhere could Biden’s arguments be more decisive than in Erie County. A long-time Democratic stronghold, it was one of the most populous counties in the nation to go from the Democratic column to the Republican column in 2016.
Trump edged out Democrat Hillary Clinton by nearly 12,000 votes, four years after President Barack Obama beat Republican Mitt Romney by 19,000 votes. That represented a net change of 31,000 votes in a state that Trump won by about 44,000 votes. Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate to carry Erie since the landslide re-election of President Ronald Reagan in 1984 and the first Republican standard-bearer to win Pennsylvania since George Bush’s 1998 election.
Erie County rallied strongly against Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections.
“The president can only see the world from Park Avenue. I see it from Scranton and Claymont. Everybody sees it from Erie, ”Biden told union leaders and members, referring to his childhood hometowns in Pennsylvania and Delaware.
He lamented “the most uneven recovery in US history” since COVID-19 crippled the economy in the spring. The investor class and top earners are fine, Biden said, “but what did the bottom half get?”
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The former vice president and his aides have said they believe it is critical for voters to connect the pandemic to the economy. A Pew Research poll conducted between September 30 and October 5 found Biden with a wide advantage when voters were asked who they trusted to handle the coronavirus. Biden beat Trump on the question from 57% to 40%.
However, Trump maintained a 52-51% lead as a voter choice to “make good economic policy decisions.”
Biden took advantage of the stop at the training facility to showcase his knowledge of apprenticeship programs and underscored the role traders play in the broader economy.
“If all the investment bankers in New York went on strike, nothing would change much in America,” Biden said, “but if all the plumbers decided to stop working, all the electricians, the country would stop.”
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Biden delivered his first campaign speech at a Pittsburgh union hall in April 2019, and since then he has amassed a long list of union endorsements. The president’s reelection campaign seeks a repeat of 2016, when Clinton won many of the same union endorsements, but large swaths of rank and file members split from his leadership to back Trump.
The president and his Republican allies have pushed for paid media and social media posts arguing that Biden’s fiscal and energy policies would cripple the economies of industrial states, especially energy-producing states like Pennsylvania.
Trump has repeatedly falsely stated that Biden will ban fracking as a means of extracting natural gas. Biden has proposed only excluding new leases on federal land, a fraction of hydraulic fracturing operations in the US.
“No matter how many lies I tell, I am not, I am not banning fracking,” Biden said. “Period.”
