| Joe Biden appeals to working-class whites who defected to Trump. Is that how Democrats win again? | ||||||||
Joe Biden campaigns with Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) during a rally in Hammond, Ind. (Darron Cummings/AP)
HAMMOND, Ind.—Nobody inside the Beltway refers to Joe Biden as “Middle-Class Joe,” despite the former vice president’s insistence in his stump speech that everyone does. “It’s not meant as a compliment,” Biden told 2,300 people at the civic center here Friday night, where he stumped for endangered Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly and continued to test the 2020 waters. “It means I’m not sophisticated.” But Biden has cultivated a brand that makes such a sobriquet believable to many of the white working-class voters in the industrial Midwest who backed President Trump in 2016 after casting ballots twice for him and Barack Obama. He argued in his speech that the government has broken the social contract that allowed for the emergence of a strong middle class after World War II. “Here’s the truth: The public has to know who we are as Democrats. … We’ve kind of lost sight of that,” said Biden. “We have one overarching responsibility: to restore the middle class and to restore the bargain.” The Obama-Biden ticket narrowly carried Indiana in 2008 by appealing to blue-collar workers who were dislocated by the Great Recession. The Hoosier State has the highest percentage of workers in manufacturing jobs and produces more steel than any other. Mitt Romney won Indiana by 10 points in 2012 as the state reverted to its red roots. Then, Trump crushed Hillary Clinton by 19 points in 2016. As a new generation of rising stars focuses on the Sunbelt and growing minority communities, Biden believes Democrats should focus on winning back as many of these voters as possible in the Rust Belt. “I got goosebumps, and I’m 60-years-old. It’s hard to get goosebumps when you’re 60-years-old,” said Jim Holechko, a steelworker in Gary, Ind. “If we have a lot more national Democrats sounding this message, we could win again. I’ve been through four recessions and a depression – because 2008 was a depression, really – and I hope the message Joe had is repeated over and over and over again. I also hope we can rebuild the Democratic Party the way I grew I up with it, which was when Democratic politicians stood up for the dignity of the working man, for respect on the job and for the dignity of work. If Joe runs on that message, I could support him.” Holechko, who is active with the local chapter of the United Steelworkers union, said Biden’s message shows why Democrats should stop nominating moderates. He preferred Bernie Sanders to Clinton in the 2016 Indiana Democratic primary, which the Vermont senator won 52 percent to 48 percent. “Stop the milquetoast,” said Holechko, as his 19-year-old son nodded enthusiastically. “In Indiana, it hasn’t worked. We keep getting our butts kicked by using the milquetoast approach.” Bob Roach, 62, a political independent and an electrical engineer at another nearby steel mill, voted twice for George W. Bush and then twice for Obama. In 2016, he couldn’t bring himself to pull the lever for Clinton or Trump. So he left the top of his ballot blank. But the GOP tax cuts that disproportionately help the richest 1 percent upset him, Trump’s policy of separating kids from their parents at the Southern border disgusted him and America’s declining standing in the world has embarrassed him. “I thought Trump was going to be pretty benign, but it turns out he’s not,” said Roach. “I thought Hillary Clinton was probably the worst candidate Democrats could have possibly put up. I think Joe Biden could have easily beaten Trump. I hope he runs.” His wife Laurel Roach, a proud partisan Democrat, adores Biden because “he’s so down to Earth.” She believes Biden must have faced personal financial hardship when his son Beau died from brain cancer because he’s not independently wealthy, and she spoke fondly of his commute via Amtrak to and from Delaware as a senator to save money. “He knows what all the rest of us are going through,” said Laurel, 57, a homemaker from Highland, Ind. “The current occupant of the White House doesn’t have an empathetic bone in his body.” That was a routine refrain during two dozen interviews. Biden emphasized his hardscrabble roots, and the crowd loved it. “We all come from the same neighborhood,” the former vice president said. “My dad worked 15 hours a day. … I’m from Scranton, Pa., but if you listen to Barack, you think I climbed out of a coal mine with a lunch bucket. … I was listed as the poorest man in the United States Senate when I was there.” -- “Privately, those close to Trump say the Democrat who most worries the president and his team is Biden, who they fear could cut into his working-class white support in such states as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,” Ashley Parker and Bob Costa reported last week. -- A CNN poll published Sunday showed Biden at the top of the 2020 Democratic field. Asked to pick from among 16 possible presidential candidates, 33 percent chose him. The next closest was Sanders, with 13 percent, followed by Kamala Harris with nine percent and Elizabeth Warren with eight percent. You shouldn’t put too much stock in polls this early because they reflect name identification to a large degree. The national sentiment also matters less than how these contenders play in the early states. And the field won’t really shake out until after the midterms. But Biden is particularly strong among Democrats who consider themselves moderate and with people over 45, who are more likely to vote in primaries. All this suggests that D.C. pundits probably have not been taking him sufficiently seriously. He’s routinely an afterthought in 2020 parlor games on the Washington cocktail party circuit. Many who came out Friday said they were there for Biden, not Donnelly. “He’s a straight talker, and I really believe he’s sincere. He seems genuine,” said Beckie Guffin, 67 of Valparaiso, Ind. “He’s the kind of guy you could have a beer with,” added Thomas McDermott, the Democratic mayor of Hammond. “I don’t think I’d ever want to go out and get a drink with President Trump. In fact, President Trump makes me want to go out and drink.” (Trump is also a teetotaler.)
He’s keeping an aggressive campaign schedule this fall that’s already taken him to other areas where Trump made gains, including Michigan and Pennsylvania. Earlier Friday, he stumped in rural Kentucky for House candidate Amy McGrath, who is challenging Rep. Andy Barr (R) in a district Trump won by 15 points but that was not long ago solidly Democratic. The crowd chanted, “Run, Joe, Run.” He went on Saturday to South Carolina, an early primary state, to support Democratic gubernatorial candidate James Smith. Since Labor Day, Biden has also spoken in blue states like California, New Jersey and Rhode Island – showing his ability to appeal to more culturally liberal voters. All told, he’s endorsed more than 50 candidates for House, Senate and governor. At the Indiana rally, Biden said he first planned to keep respectfully quiet and give Trump time to succeed but changed his mind after watching the president’s response in the summer of 2017 to the death of Heather Heyer. Trump said afterward that there were “some very fine people on both sides” of the protests over the removal of a Confederate statue after a car plowed into the crowd she was standing with. “No president has ever, ever, ever, ever, ever since the Civil War done anything like that. Nobody,” said Biden, reading from a teleprompter. “These are the same guys calling refugees ‘animals,’ literally ripping children and infants from the arms of their parents at the border [and] preying on the hopelessness and despair of some of the communities under greatest distress. … Our silence is complicity.” -- One challenge for Biden is his age. He’s very energetic for 75, and he’ll be 79 in January 2021. But there are signs that people hunger for a fresh face more than someone who has already run for president twice before. Trying to make the point that Donnelly is one of the best lawmakers he’s ever worked with, Biden boasted that he is the 13th longest serving senator in U.S. history. “I’m going to reveal how ancient I am,” he quipped. A few minutes later, he noted that he got elected to the Senate in 1972 at the age of 29 even as Richard Nixon won in a landslide over George McGovern because he ran a fearless campaign. Moving to foreign policy, Biden noted that he’d just returned from Europe. “I’ve known every major world leader in the last 44 years because of the nature of my job,” he said. From the looks of it, at least half the people in the gymnasium were women. But Biden often punctuated his comments with the word “man” like a surfer says “bruh,” underscoring that he’s from an older generation. For someone who has spent the bulk of his life wandering the marble corridors of power, he also tries to sound macho in a way few younger Democratic pols do. He said he knows Donnelly would have his back if a group of guys ever tried to jump him on the street. “I used to play baseball,” he said later. “We used the term pace on the ball. We could use some pace on the ball.” The crowd in the arena was mixed between African Americans, labor types and others who have gotten engaged in politics for the first time during the Trump era. It was not just the steelworkers who liked Biden. Juanita Camacho, 46, was working at an elementary school the day after the 2016 election when a little Hispanic boy came crying because some white classmates told him that Trump’s victory meant he’d soon be sent back to Mexico. “Kids see Trump, and they think it’s okay not to be nice,” she said. “I love Joe Biden because I genuinely feel that he and President Obama cared a lot about the people. I’m not feeling that right now. That matters more in a politician than anything else: You have to care about the people you’re representing.” |
No comments:
Post a Comment