Few may recall this now but during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, there was considerable speculation that Joe Biden would enter the race. In the end, he chose not to, much to the relief of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. And Donald Trump, whom the Republican Party chose to represent their policies and values, was equally relieved, commenting that he much preferred to run against Clinton.
So it’s not surprising that the prospect of a Biden candidacy is deeply unsettling to the Trump campaign. That sense of uneasiness increased when Biden announced his candidacy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and set up his campaign headquarters there.
In 2016, Trump narrowly eked out a victory in Pennsylvania, much to the surprise of the political classes, but his star in the state has since waned considerably and he faces an uphill battle to retake a state which many regards as a bellwether of the national political mood. In 2018 nearly 400,000 more Pennsylvanians voted for a Democrat to represent them in the state house than for a Republican, a glaring shift in voter preference that was somewhat obscured by gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic votes in urban areas.
But the 2020 presidential election will not be gerrymandered, and every Pennsylvanian’s vote will count. In particular, the 2018 vote turnout from Philadelphia and its surrounding counties (Montgomery, Chester, Delaware, and Bucks) looked far more similar to the Pennsylvania that twice elected Barack Obama. Specifically, those educated suburban women who had previously been lukewarm to the Hillary Clinton candidacy appear primed to deliver a crushing blow to Trump’s hopes in those counties, which tend to overshadow if not wipe out altogether the voters from the state’s interior enclaves that Trump depends on.
It was against this backdrop that Trump last night, at a rally in Montoursville, began frantically lobbying what appears to be a remarkably stupid (even for Trump) line of attack against the current Democratic frontrunner—and Pennsylvania native—Joe Biden.
According to Politico, he accused the then around-sixth grade Biden of abandoning the Keystone State and its job development.
“He’s not from Pennsylvania,” Trump said. “I guess he was born here, but he left you folks. He left you for another state. Remember that, please….He left you for another state, and he didn’t take care of you, because he didn’t take care of your jobs. He let other countries come in and rip off America. That doesn’t happen anymore.”
That’s right. Trump’s new take on the former Vice President’s Pennsylvania background is to suggest that the eleven-year-old Scranton native Joe Biden made a conscious and opportunistic decision to abandon the Commonwealth in 1953, apparently leaving poor Pennsylvanians to fend for themselves.
The reality is far more compelling, just not particularly compelling for someone like Donald Trump, a trust-funded brat who has had his life and wealth handed to him since his nanny nursed him.
In the 1950s, Scranton, Pa., was at the start of a long, slow decline. The coal mines that had fueled the city’s early prosperity were shutting down, leaving residents to cope with gaping sinkholes and a scarred landscape. Textile factories, too, were on their way out, and thousands of people picked up and left for better opportunities elsewhere. Joining the exodus were 10-year-old Joe Biden and his family. Unable to find a steady source of work, Biden’s father, Joe Sr., had been commuting to Wilmington, Del., to clean boilers. By 1953, he decided it was time to move the whole family across the state lines.
It’s understandable why such a story would not resonate with someone like Trump, who has a record of trivializing sacrifices while never having been forced to make any sacrifices in his own life. It’s the same entitled mentality that prompts him to denigrate, say, a decorated POW for his sacrifice to our country.
The fact is that Biden’s roots in Pennsylvania are profound, compared to Trump’s, whose only tie to the state appears to be his attendance at the University of Pennslyvania’s Wharton School.
As pointed out in the Washington Post:
The former vice president’s ties to the area go back generations. Biden, a noted genealogy enthusiast, took part in a question-and-answer session for Ancestry.com in 2016 where he described how his great-great-grandfather had moved to northeastern Pennsylvania in 1851 after emigrating from Ireland. Scranton was where his grandparents, and his parents, had met, he said. After moving away in the fourth grade, he continued to spend most of his summers and holidays there, visiting his mother’s family in the same middle-class, predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhood where he had spent his early years.
In addition to the eleven formative years of his life spent in Pennsylvania, Joe Biden has maintained strong ties to the commonwealth ever since. When he married his first wife, half of his groomsmen were from Scranton, PA. And long before his service as vice-president, Biden had routinely been referred to as Pennsylvania’s “third Senator,” a fact he reflected on in 2010.
“For the last thirty-five years, any time Scranton needs something … I don’t know how to say no to them,” Biden told GQ in 2010. “For real. I really don’t. You know, it’s still home.”
These are the kind of geographical ties that people like Trump, who appears to have neither close friends or family kept at anything but an arm’s length distance, may not understand. The people of Pennsylvania, however, understand it quite well.
But there may be another, more pragmatic reason Trump would want to try this silly line of attack on Biden’s roots. Barack Obama handily won Pennsylvania twice, with Biden at his side. Assuming he has actually given the matter conscious thought, Trump may recognize, deep in that brain of his, that Biden could potentially neutralize the most time-tested and effective weapon in the Trump catalog: virulent race-baiting.
And without that race-baiting to whip up his supporters, Trump really doesn’t have much going for him at all.