President Biden is visiting Pennsylvania for the third time in less than a week, and he is returning just two days after his predecessor, Donald Trump, held a rally there.
This highlights the significance of the battleground state to both parties as Labor Day ushers in a nine-week countdown to the pivotal midterm elections.
Near Scranton, where Mr. Biden was born, in Wilkes-Barre on Saturday night, Trump gave a speech.
The president travelled to Wilkes-Barre last week on his own dime to raise police funding, refute GOP criticism of the FBI following the raid on Donald Trump’s Florida estate, and promote new, bipartisan gun safety laws as a means of reducing violent crime.
Two days later, Mr. Biden travelled to Philadelphia’s Independence Hall for a prime-time speech criticising the “extremism” of Trump’s most ardent supporters.
He will attend Labor Day celebrations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, another crucial swing state, on Monday before heading to Pittsburgh for the city’s parade.
Biden will honour “the dignity of American workers,” according to the White House. Labor Day, which marks the unofficial beginning of autumn, also marks the beginning of election season, when campaigns are frantically trying to pique voter interest before November 8 election day.
Control of the House and Senate, as well as several of the most important governorships in the nation, will be decided at that time.
Biden is expressing concern that some Republicans may now be so committed to Trumpism that they are prepared to compromise fundamental American ideals in order to advance it. Trump has endorsed candidates in significant elections around the nation.
Invoking the campaign slogan he used to win the 2020 election, the president declared on Thursday that the midterm elections will be a fight “for the soul of the nation” and that “blind adherence to a single leader, and a propensity to participate in political violence, is destructive to democracy.”
In that speech, Mr. Biden also stated that “MAGA Republicans are destroying American democracy,” alluding to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan and citing instances such as the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol last year.
At his rally on Saturday, Trump said that Biden’s speech in Philadelphia was “the most vile, racist, and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president.”
The previous president declared, “He is an enemy of the state.”
On Monday, Mr. Biden will revisit a different idea that was a major part of his 2020 campaign: that labour unions enriched the middle class, which in turn helped to build and solidify contemporary American society.
Mr. Biden overcame disastrous early finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire with the support of important unions, winning the Democratic primary and ultimately the White House.
Since then, he has kept praising labour unions, despite the fact that many voters without college degrees and many members of the working class continue to make up the majority of Trump’s supporters.
Ahead of the midterm elections, Mr. Biden’s support for unions was deemed “critical” by Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which has 2 million members.
Ms. Henry also stated that the labour movement must “mobilise in battlegrounds across the country to ensure that working people turn out.”
Henry stated, “We’re particularly pleased about the president speaking directly to workers about whether he would join a union given the chance.” Added her: “This president has made his allegiance clear. He supports the rights of workers. And that is very important.”
In contrast, Mr. Biden has a personal connection to Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parade, one of the biggest in the country.
As vice president, he went to the 2015 gathering and came back in 2018. Both times, 79-year-old Biden was asked if he would run for president in the upcoming elections; he decided against it in 2016 and went on to win the White House in 2020.
The oldest president in American history has faced questions about whether he will run for reelection in 2024, but he has insisted that is his intention.
The pressure has lessened in recent weeks as a result of a series of policy and political victories for Biden and his party.
Still, both perennial presidential battleground states Biden is visiting on Monday may give significant tests of Democrats’ strength before this November and 2024.
We’ll have to wait and see how much Mr. Biden can aid his party in competitive contests when inflation continues to soar and the president’s popularity numbers remain dismal.
In Wisconsin, Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes is vying to replace Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, but Johnson’s team criticised Barnes for being vague in her prior statements about joining Biden in Milwaukee.
Tim Michels, a construction entrepreneur backed by Trump, is aiming to prevent Democratic Governor Tony Evers from being re-elected in the state’s other key contest. Evers declared his intention to accompany Mr. Biden on Monday.
Pennsylvania voters will choose a new governor, with state attorney general John Shapiro competing against Doug Mastriano, a fellow Trump supporter, and a new senator.
Democratic Lt. Governor John Fetterman is running against Trump’s supporter Mehmet Oz, a well-known heart specialist. Both Shapiro and Fetterman intended to go to the Pittsburgh parade on Monday.
The outcomes of the gubernatorial contests in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania might determine which party controls the Senate the next year, and the outcomes of each race could have an impact on the presidential election of 2024.
Given that some Trump-aligned candidates have distributed false information about rampant fraud that did not take place during the 2020 election, the stakes are very high, increasing concerns about what would happen if a candidate they don’t like wins the next presidential election.