Biden returns to his Scranton roots to pitch tax plan
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden returns to his childhood hometown of Scranton on Tuesday to campaign for three straight days in Pennsylvania, taking advantage of the chance to work on the battleground state while Donald Trump spends the week in a courtroom in New York City for his first criminal trial.
The Democratic president plans to use Scranton, a working-class city of about 75,000, as a backdrop for his push for higher taxes on the wealthy. At the same time, he will portray Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee and a billionaire himself, as an instrument of wealthy interests.
It’s all aimed at reshaping the conversation about the economy, leaving many Americans feeling sour about their financial situation at a time of stubborn inflation and high interest rates despite low unemployment.
Biden plans to spend Tuesday evening in Scranton before heading to Pittsburgh on Wednesday morning. He then heads back to the White House, returning to Pennsylvania on Thursday, this time visiting Philadelphia.
By the time the week is over, Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris will have visited the state eight times this year, reflecting its importance to Biden’s hopes for a second term.
“It’s difficult to find paths for Biden to win the White House without Pennsylvania being involved,” said Daniel Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Since Harry Truman in 1948, no Democrat has become president without winning the state.
Scranton, the president’s first destination, will mix the personal and the political for Biden. He grew up in a three-story colonial house in the Green Ridge neighborhood until his father struggled to find work and the family moved to Delaware when the future president was ten.
Although Delaware ultimately became the launching pad for Biden’s political career, he often returned to Scranton and based his autobiography in the city. He visited so often that he was sometimes called “Pennsylvania’s third senator.”
In 2020, Biden described the presidential campaign as “Scranton versus Park Avenue,” and his reelection team is framing this year’s race in a similar manner.
“You have Joe Biden, who sees the world from the kitchen table where he grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Donald Trump, who sees the world from his country club at Mar-a-Lago,” Michael Tyler said. communications director of the campaign.
Christopher Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, described Scranton as a “mythical place in political culture,” and it will be a test of Biden’s political appeal.
“It’s an area that, on paper, fits perfectly with the Republican Party’s populist gains during the Trump era,” Borick said.
However, Biden won the city and surrounding county in 2020. If he can take Scranton and similar places again this year and limit Trump’s victory margins in rural areas, Biden may be able to secure another victory in Pennsylvania.
“Everything is on the margins. All we talk about are small shifts,” Borick said.
Biden’s position on taxes is a key part of his efforts to blunt Trump’s populist allure.
When Trump was president, he signed a series of tax breaks in 2017 that disproportionately benefit the wealthy. Many of the cuts expire at the end of 2025, and Biden wants to keep a majority of them to fulfill his promise that no one making less than $400,000 will pay more in taxes.
However, he also wants to raise $4.9 trillion in revenue over ten years with higher taxes on the rich and corporations. His platform includes a “billionaire tax,” which would set a minimum rate of 25% on the income of the wealthiest Americans.
Biden’s trips in Pennsylvania overlap with the start of Trump’s first criminal trial, presenting both an opportunity and a challenge for the president’s campaign.
Trump is defending himself against criminal charges over a scheme to suppress allegations of affairs with a porn actress and a Playboy model. Biden’s team has quietly embraced the contrast of the former president locked in a courtroom while the current president has free rein to focus on economic issues top of mind among voters.
The juxtaposition becomes less useful, however, as Trump sucks up the nation’s attention in the first-ever criminal trial of a former president.
Biden campaign officials said they had no concerns about the process.
“Wherever Donald Trump is, whether it’s at Mar-a-Lago, in a courtroom or anywhere else, he will be focused on himself, his toxic agenda, his campaign of revenge and retaliation,” Tyler said. a continuation of the contrast that the American people have seen since the beginning of this campaign.”
Sam DeMarco, chairman of the Republican Party in Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, said the message from Democrats is that “the economy is good, but we’re just not smart enough to realize that.”
However, DeMarco said, “Across the board, life costs more today than it did when Joe Biden came into power.”
“These are the things that families are feeling,” he said. “And a scripted performance by the president will not change that.”
Trump was last in Pennsylvania on Saturday evening in Schnecksville, where he described Biden as a “demented tyrant” and blamed him for all the country’s problems, in addition to his own legal troubles.
“All of America knows that the real blame for this nightmare lies with one person, Crooked Joe Biden,” Trump said.
He attacked Biden’s tax plans, falsely claiming that “they’re going to raise your taxes by four times.”
Trump also elaborated on the Civil War battle in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, calling it “so brutal and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways,” and suggesting that Confederate General Robert E. Lee was “no longer in the fight sit’. favor.”
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Associated Press writers Josh Boe and Will Weissert contributed to this report.