Biden is expected to use the backdrop of several small
businesses in the onetime steel and manufacturing haven of the
Lehigh Valley to make the case that middle-class entrepreneurs
and workers are thriving, inflation is waning and that the
81-year-old Democrat deserves a second term in office.
Heavy manufacturing in the so-called Rust Belt began to ebb in
the 1970s, hollowing out once thriving American cities as rising
costs and global trade drove business elsewhere. Today,
Allentown's unemployment stands at around 3.9%, near 20-year
lows.
Biden is pairing a bread-and-butter argument about falling
consumer inflation and low unemployment aimed at the plurality
of voters who say that the economy is their top concern, with
the case that Republican Donald Trump's authoritarian tendencies
are a threat to U.S. democracy. The latter 2024 election pitch
was the subject of his most recent trip to Pennsylvania, which
was just last Friday.
Biden has struggled so far to make either message stick with
voters. Polls show Biden in a very close race with Trump as many
Americans appear to be unenthusiastic about their choices.
Biden aides see Pennsylvania, home to Biden's Scranton
birthplace, as a must-win state. He won in 2020 with 50.01% of
the vote. In 2016, Trump won Pennsylvania with 48.58% of the
vote.
Biden's political aides are in general-election mode, hoping to
woo swing-state voters even as Trump's focus remains on the
ongoing primary contest in Iowa, which is holding a Republican
caucus on Monday but is not expected to be very closely
contested in the November election.
Trump, president from 2017 to 2020 and leading the field for the
Republican nomination, has made inflation under the Biden
administration a key part of his pitch for re-election.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Editing by Kim Coghill)
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