‘They probably would have given Biden one more vote’: Trump looks for inroads in Scranton

SCRANTON, Pennsylvania — Former President Donald Trump ventured Wednesday into President Joe Biden’s home turf, aiming to run up the score with the working-class voters he will need to recapture the White House.

With Biden gone from the Democratic ticket, Trump is betting he can win more votes in the reddening region of Northeast Pennsylvania where the president was raised.

In a cavernous sports complex not far from the President Biden Expressway, Trump delivered the economic message his campaign — and local Republican activists — believe holds sway in a region that has suffered from industrial decline. His pledges to halve energy costs and let workers “frack, frack, frack” drew rousing ovations from the crowd, as did his calls to end taxes on everything from tips to Social Security to overtime pay. And he issued dark warnings that union workers are “not going to have any jobs” if they don’t vote for him.

Trump has tried and failed to wrest Scranton and surrounding Lackawanna County from Biden and the Democrats’ clutches for two consecutive elections. But Republicans are now bullish that Trump can make inroads in the northeastern corner of this critical battleground state without Biden on the ballot — convinced that Vice President Kamala Harris does not hold the same sway among the region’s more conservative Democrats who have long been loyal to “Scranton Joe.”

“This area is still predominantly Catholic, still predominantly conservative. We have what we used to call Reagan Democrats, or late Gov. [Robert] Casey Democrats, who were either pro-gun or pro-life Democrats, who have always voted Democratic,” said Vince Galko, a Scranton-area Republican strategist.

“They probably would have given Biden one more vote,” Galko said. “I’m not sure they’re going to give that vote to Harris.”

Trump and Harris are running virtually tied in Pennsylvania. But the region surrounding Scranton, in the northeastern portion of the swing state, is home to many working-class white voters who have swung hard to Trump and the GOP in recent years. The historic coal region once boasted a proud labor movement and booming manufacturing industry. But as those anchors of the community have declined, so, too, have the Democratic Party’s fortunes.

Luzerne County, next door to Lackawanna County, voted for former President Barack Obama twice before backing Trump by a whopping 19 percentage points in 2016. In 2020, Biden was able to cut Trump’s margin of victory there to only 14 points, which helped him win the state. In Lackawanna, meanwhile, Biden carried the county by 8 percentage points, expanding Clinton’s 4-point margin from 2016.

But Republicans surpassed Democrats among registered voters in Luzerne County earlier this year, according to state data. And though Democrats still hold a roughly 27,000-voter edge in Lackawanna County, the number of Republican voters here has ticked up from last year.

The former president’s campaign is now targeting voters in the region who cast ballots for Obama, Trump and then Biden. Trump rallied in nearby Wilkes-Barre in mid-August. And his team argues that, with Biden out of the race and replaced by a candidate from California who has lost some of the labor endorsements the Democratic ticket enjoyed in 2020, the Republican nominee can win over enough working-class voters to narrow the margin in Lackawanna County.

It cites as proof of concept a Teamsters survey of its members in Pennsylvania that put Trump up 65 percent to 31 percent over Harris, part of a broader poll of the union’s members that also showed the rank-and-file favored Trump. The former president touted those numbers on Wednesday — though some in the union questioned the poll’s methodology — and shrugged off that the powerful labor group ultimately declined to endorse in the race.

Harris’ campaign in a statement bashed Trump for airing his “personal grievances” during the rally and “bragging about his plan to raise taxes by $4,000 a year while killing American jobs.”

“That doesn’t sound like a recipe for success in winning over Scranton,” Harris campaign spokesperson Matt Corridoni said. “Vice President Harris is outlining real plans to boost U.S. manufacturing and create thousands of jobs, lower costs for families, and open pathways to the middle class for voters without college degrees, while Donald Trump is rambling about windmills.”

In a speech focused heavily on energy production, Trump on Wednesday accused Harris of reversing her stance on banning fracking “for an election” and assailed her past support for the Green New Deal. He called wind power “bullshit” and vowed to empower energy workers in the state to “drill, drill, drill.” He pledged to stop plant closures and reiterated his calls for no taxes on tips or overtime.

And Trump, unable to shake his preoccupation with Biden nearly three months after the incumbent ended his reelection bid, alternated between insulting the president as “grossly incompetent” and regarding him with something bordering on patronizing affection. In nearly the same breath as he mocked Biden’s physical and mental fitness, Trump said the president “looks better now than I’ve ever seen him look.”

Then Trump, who has attempted to yoke Harris to Biden and his policies, sought to sow discord between them, baselessly claiming that the president “hates” his No. 2 and that “there’s going to be an explosion before the election with them.”

But it was Trump’s message on the economy that appeared to resonate with rally-goers here.

“This valley used to be full of factories,” said Susanne Green, who grew up in the Wyoming Valley. “There’s no factories anymore. Everybody’s out of work. And it’s been like that for generations.”

Green, a lifelong Democrat-turned-Republican who said she voted for the GOP nominee for the first time in 2016, said she was motivated to get more directly involved in Trump’s campaign after he was shot in July in Butler, a few hundred miles across the state. On Wednesday, the Benton Township resident was serving as a volunteer at what she said was her first Trump rally.

“It’s really a toss up here in our county,” Green said.

Charlie Spano, a longtime GOP activist and past Scranton mayoral candidate, said Trump could capitalize on Democrats who are “pissed off that Biden got ditched” and are weighing whether to vote for the Republican or simply stay home.

Harris does not have the same appeal as Biden in Scranton, Spano said. And she erred, in his opinion, in passing over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate in favor of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

“Putting Shapiro on the ticket would go a long way toward keeping Pennsylvania blue,” Spano said. “And she blew it.”