Biden to Key Voters: 'What Did the Bottom Half Get?'

With the backdrop of a union facility in a key battleground county of Pennsylvania, Joe Biden on Saturday blistered President Trump as only pretending to care about the working-class voters who helped flip the Rust Belt to the Republican column four years ago, the AP reports. "Anyone who actually does an honest day's work sees him and his promises for what they are," Biden told a masked, socially distanced crowd at a training facility for plumbers and other tradespeople. Biden has hammered Trump on the economy in recent weeks, from indictments of how the president has downplayed the coronavirus and its economic fallout to a withering personal contrast between Biden's middle-class upbringing with that of the multimillionaire's son and self-proclaimed billionaire.

Nowhere could Biden’s arguments prove more decisive than in Erie County. Long a Democratic bastion, it was among the most populous counties in the nation to flip from the Democratic column to Republicans in 2016. But Erie County rebounded strongly to Democrats in the 2018 midterms. "The president can only see the world from Park Avenue. I see it from Scranton and Claymont. Y'all see it from Erie," Biden said, referring to his childhood hometowns in Pennsylvania and Delaware. He lamented "the most unequal recovery in American history" since COVID-19 ground the economy to a halt in the spring. The investor class and top wage earners are fine, Biden said, "but what did the bottom half get?" (See why Pennsylvania is a crucial 2020 state.)