Former Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday responded to President Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine his ties to Pennsylvania by playing up his connection to another key voting bloc: the working class.
“Yesterday, Trump tried to attack me at his campaign rally by saying I abandoned Pennsylvania. I’ve never forgotten where I came from,” Biden, the Democratic primary front-runner, wrote on Twitter. “My family did have to leave Pennsylvania when I was 10 — we moved to Delaware where my Dad found a job that could provide for our family.
“Trump doesn’t understand the struggles working folks go through. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to worry you will lose the roof over your head. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to wonder if you’ll be able to put food on the table.”
Trump’s campaign is ratcheting up its efforts to win over voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — states that were key to his victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Trump on Monday told an audience of thousands at an airport hangar in Montoursville, Pa., that Biden abandoned the state and never looked back.
“He’s not from Pennsylvania,” the president said of Biden. “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,” Trump continued. “He let other countries come in and rip off America. That doesn’t happen anymore.”
Biden was born in Scranton in 1942, but his family in 1953 moved to Delaware, where Biden later served six terms as senator.
“He doesn’t understand,” Biden tweeted of Trump, “that the longest walk a parent can make is up a short flight of stairs to their child’s bedroom to say, honey, I’m sorry. We have to move. You can’t go back to your school. You won’t see your friends because Daddy or Mommy lost their job.“
Trump’s jabs would seem to reflect deep-seated concerns about Biden’s candidacy, which the president reportedly views as his biggest threat in 2020. Trump has repeatedly lobbed a wide range of insults at the former vice president, often presenting himself as more youthful and energetic than Biden, who at 76 is four years older than the president.
The white male septuagenarians appeal to overlapping constituencies that could prove crucial to winning in 2020, should the pair face off in the general election. As former President Barack Obama’s running mate, Biden helped win over blue-collar and Rust Belt voters — the same groups that helped propel Trump to the White House in 2016.
Biden’s tweets highlighted the contrast between his background and that of the president, a billionaire businessman from New York.
The Trump campaign recently completed a polling project that shows the president trailing Biden in Pennsylvania, two people briefed on the results told POLITICO. Those close to Trump, however, said they think the former vice president’s popularity will decline once the honeymoon stage of his campaign — which he launched last month at a union hall in Pittsburgh — ends.
Both candidates seem to have homed in on Pennsylvania as the key to the White House in 2020, dedicating attention and resources to the state. Biden on Saturday railed against the president at an event in Philadelphia, where his campaign headquarters is.
Trump, on the other hand, has already made moves to ramp up GOP forces in the state, which he won by less than 1 percentage point in 2016. During his appearance Monday, the president told the Montoursville crowd that their state is one he’s “got to win.”