Former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump went head-to-head in the swing state of Florida on Thursday, and will cross paths again today when they both campaign in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Biden aims to shore up his leads in those Midwestern states and connect with the blue-collar voters that Hillary Clinton neglected in the waning days of her race with Trump four years ago.
If Biden is not able to flip the battlegrounds of Florida and North Carolina, he could potentially carve a path to the White House by rebuilding the Democrats’ blue wall in the Rust Belt and capturing Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, while holding Minnesota in the Democratic column.
Trump won those three Midwestern states by less than a percentage point in 2016, and Biden’s kinship with the blue collar voters who live in working class towns like Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he lived as a young boy, was one of the major selling points to Democratic primary voters as he cultivated the image of “middle-class Joe.”
While Trump has campaigned, both in 2016 and 2020, as a voice for the “forgotten men and women” who live in those communities, Biden has argued that the President ignored their needs while helping his wealthy allies — attempting to frame the race as Scranton versus Park Avenue.
But Trump has argued that Biden favored trade policies that sent jobs overseas and threw open the border to the detriment of working-class voters.
A key facet of Biden’s success in 2020, however, is that he has cut into Trump’s margins with White voters who do not hold a college degree — a trend he hopes to accelerate in the closing days of the campaign as he tends to those key Midwestern states.
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