President Joe Biden turned to retail politics in Pennsylvania on Friday, strolling through small businesses trying to convince voters in the critical swing state the economy is better under his watch.
Returning to the Keystone State just a week after his first major 2024 event in Valley Forge, Biden has staked his reelection hopes on winning Pennsylvania again with the help of a powerful ally in Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), who warned of “total chaos” if his state returned former President Donald Trump to the White House.
Biden has visited Pennsylvania 33 times since taking office, more than any other aside from his native Delaware, and gladhanded in the midsized city of Allentown and the nearby borough of Emmaus on Friday.
Those frequent visits may be paying off. A Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday found Biden leading Trump in Pennsylvania by a 47% to 45% margin, his first Pennsylvania lead in that poll of the entire 2024 cycle.
“They’re feeling much better about how the economy is doing,” Biden told reporters Friday of the Pennsylvania voters. “What we haven’t done is letting them know exactly who got it changed. … Everybody’s doing better and they believe it. They know it. And it’s just beginning to sink in.”
“Scranton Joe” has touted his Pennsylvania roots for decades, and his home in Wilmington is just 10 miles from the state line.
”Pennsylvania, so crucial and so close, again takes center stage as the swing state with the electoral heft to decide the election,” Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy said when the latest numbers were released.
Trump flipped Pennsylvania, formerly a “blue wall” state, en route to his massive upset win over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But Biden flipped it back in 2020, and Democrats defeated Trump’s hand-picked candidates for Pennsylvania governor and U.S. senator in the 2022 midterm elections. One of those victors, Shapiro, was on hand Friday.
Unusual for a Biden trip, there was no public speech or event on the schedule, only stops to a handful of local businesses, including a bike shop, shoe store, coffee house, and a fire training academy, to stop and chat with the locals about “Bidenomics.” He was joined by Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) and Shapiro as they toured businesses throughout the afternoon.
“When are you opening a store in Delaware?” he asked the owner of Emmaus Run Inn. He then pointed at the press and joked, “Would you give them running shoes so they can take off?”
Biden was working to show off his retail politicking skills, though he was trailed as usual by a team of media members and protected by his imposing security detail.
Not all residents were charmed by the outreach. As Biden toured the local bike store, South Mountain Cycle, onlookers sitting on the deck of a nearby house shouted, “Go home, Joe” and “You’re a loser.”
Shapiro took time for a 10-minute question-and-answer session with the press, during which he defended Biden’s record and trashed his rivals.
“[Biden has] got the opportunity in this campaign to lay out a clear contrast between the work he has done and what he’s represented, and the absolute and total chaos that Donald Trump would bring into this country,” Shapiro said.
Trump was top of mind for the governor, who said “Donald Trump” 11 times during the session.
“When Donald Trump’s offspring were running around the country — probably his chief offspring was right here running for governor against me — they got shellacked in the election,” he said, referring to GOP governor candidate Doug Mastriano. “[Voters] want calm and order.”
Shapiro also spoke about the various infrastructure investments underway thanks to the $1.2 trillion bill Biden signed into law in 2021.
The Biden campaign is likely to lean on Shapiro again as Election Day approaches, as his approval rating is nearly 20 points higher than the president’s.
Shapiro is one of many young Democratic governors who hope to boost Biden in 2024, singing the virtues of the president’s leadership and contrasting them with the antics of Trump.
“Biden is going to do well in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist T.J. Rooney previously told the Washington Examiner. “Right now, it’s Joe Biden vs. Joe Biden, and nobody wins that election. When it’s Donald Trump, by that time maybe thrice convicted, it’ll be different.”
Along with his frequent visits to the state, Biden has kept some of Trump’s pro-manufacturing policies in place, including most of his tariffs on China, with an eye toward blue-collar workers. The other piece of the strategy involves painting his opponent as an extremist, something Biden did last Friday when he commenced his campaign in earnest with a Philadelphia-area speech marking the third anniversary of Jan. 6.
“Today we are here to answer the most important of questions: Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?” Biden said then. “This is not rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time. It is what the 2024 election is all about.”
In Allentown, the mood was more informal. Biden took a few questions from the press, saying he’d “already delivered the message to Iran” with the strikes he authored against Houthi targets and implying that more will be coming if the group doesn’t change its ways.
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Otherwise, it was a low-key day for the president, who has tended to leave the spotlight to Trump during recent election cycles. Unlike Shapiro, the president did not mention Trump during his brief remarks before leaving town, instead focusing on the economy.
“Starting a new business is an act of hope,” Biden said, adding that his conversations with business owners gave him a genuine sense of optimism. “I came away from this really reassured that what we’ve done has had an impact.”
