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| Photo Credit: AP. |
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is making his third trip to Pennsylvania in less than a week and returning just two days after his predecessor, Donald Trump, staged his own rally there — illustrating the battleground state’s importance to both parties as Labor Day kicks off a nine-week sprint to crucial midterm elections.
Trump spoke
Saturday night in Wilkes-Barre, near Scranton, where Biden was born. The
president made his own Wilkes-Barre trip last week to discuss increasing
funding for police, decry GOP criticism of the FBI after the raid on Trump’s
Florida estate and to argue that new, bipartisan gun safety measures can help
reduce violent crime.
Two days
after that, Biden went to Independence Hall in Philadelphia for a prime-time
address denouncing the “extremism” of Trump’s fiercest supporters. On Monday,
he’s attending Labor Day festivities in Milwaukee, in another key swing state,
Wisconsin, before traveling to Pittsburgh for that city’s parade.
The White
House says Biden will celebrate “the dignity of American workers.” The
unofficial start of fall, Labor Day also traditionally kicks off political
crunch time, with campaigns scrambling to excite voters ahead of Election Day
on Nov. 8. That’s when control of the House and Senate, as well some of the
country’s top governorships, will be decided.
Trump has
endorsed candidates in key races around the country and Biden is warning that
some Republicans now believe so strongly in Trumpism that they are willing to
undermine core American values to promote it. The president said Thursday that
the midterms will be a battle “for the soul of the nation,” the same slogan he
used to win the 2020 election, and that “blind loyalty to a single leader, and
a willingness to engage in political violence, is fatal to democracy.”
Biden added
in that speech that “MAGA Republicans are destroying American democracy,”
referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign cry and pointing to
incidents like last year’s mob attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Trump said
during his Saturday rally that Biden’s Philadelphia appearance featured “the
most vicious, hateful and divisive speech ever delivered by an American
president.”
“He’s an
enemy of the state,” the former president said.
Monday will
see Biden return to another theme that was a centerpiece of his 2020 campaign,
that labor unions burnished the middle class, which in turn built and strengthened
modern American society.
Endorsements
from key unions helped Biden overcome disastrous early finishes in Iowa and New
Hampshire to win the Democratic primary, and eventually the White House. He has
since continued to praise labor unions — even though many voters without
college degrees, many working class, remain among Trump’s strongest bloc of
supporters
Mary Kay
Henry, president of the 2-million-member Service Employees International Union,
called Biden championing unions heading into the midterms “critical” and said
that the labor movement must “mobilize in battlegrounds across the country to
ensure that working people turn out.”
“We’re really excited about the president
speaking directly to workers about, if he had the opportunity, he’d join a
union,” Henry said. She added: “This president has signaled which side he’s on.
And he’s on the side of working people. And that matters hugely.”
Biden,
meanwhile, has personal history with Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parade, which is
among the nation’s largest. He attended the 2015 installment as vice president and
returned in 2018. Both times, Biden, now 79, faced questions about whether he’d
run for president in upcoming elections — which he opted against in 2016 before
winning the White House in 2020.
This year,
the oldest president in the nation’s history has faced speculation about if
he’ll seek a second term in 2024 — though he’s insisted that’s his intention,
and the pressure has dissipated some in recent weeks, amid a string of policy
and political successes for Biden and his party.
Still, both
perennial presidential battleground states Biden is visiting on Monday may
provide key measures of Democrats’ strength before this November and 2024. With
inflation still raging and the president’s approval ratings remaining low, how
much Biden can help his party in top races remains to be seen.
In
Wisconsin, Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes is trying to unseat incumbent
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, but drew criticism from Johnson’s campaign for
being noncommittal beforehand about appearing with Biden in Milwaukee. In the
state’s other top race, Tim Michels, a construction executive endorsed by
Trump, is attempting to deny Democratic Gov. Tony Evers a second term. Evers
said he planned to join Biden on Monday.
Pennsylvania
voters are choosing a new governor, with state Attorney General John Shapiro
facing another Trump-endorsed Republican, Doug Mastriano, and a new senator.
That race is between Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Trump-backed
celebrity heart physician Mehmet Oz. Shapiro and Fetterman both planned to
attend Monday’s Pittsburgh parade.
The
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin races could decide which party controls the Senate
next year, while the winner of each governorship may influence results in
2024′s presidential election. The stakes are particularly high given that some
Trump-aligned candidates have spread lies about widespread fraud that did not
occur during the 2020 election — raising questions about what might happen if a
candidate they don’t support wins the next presidential contest.