Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination as a centrist. But his policies have since moved to the left, which raises an important question: Can he still win the independent, centrist, and swing-state voters he’ll need with an agenda that looks more like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s than his own?
Though Biden’s recent polling has been solid, if he squanders his lead, blue-collar workers in Pennsylvania will likely be one of the reasons why. Biden sold himself to the voters in his home state as a friend of the working class, but his recent climate change initiative, for example, threatens to undermine the support he’s built.
“Joe Biden is really one of us. I always loved the man,” Cassidy, 55, a registered Democrat and unionized worker, told the Washington Examiner. “He scares me now. Is he embracing the new green deal or whatever they are calling it? He needs to get some stuff straight.”
Biden released his revised climate change plan this week after appointing Ocasio-Cortez to co-chair his climate panel. And sure enough, the revisions made to his original climate plan came straight out of the Green New Deal’s playbook. Biden increased the plan’s overall spending, moved up the date when the power sector must be free of carbon emissions, and shifted the plan’s focus to the creation of “green jobs,” which would eventually replace mining, fracking, and other fossil-fuel-related industries.
So it’s no wonder Pennsylvania’s workers, many of whom depend on the fossil fuel industry, are nervous about Biden’s leftward lurch.
“Biden needs to steer his car out of the far-left ditch back to the middle if he wants us to support him,” said Shawn Steffe, a business agent for Boilermakers Local 154 in Pittsburgh and a “lifelong Democrat.” “It’s not happening. I don’t see my members voting for someone who will take away their jobs and pensions over something that has a lot of half-truths to it.”
With that said, Biden’s polling in the state remains strong. A Monmouth University poll released this week has Biden 13 points ahead of President Trump in Pennsylvania. And among independent voters in the state, Biden leads Trump by a 21-point margin — 54% to 33%.
It’s clear, however, that Biden is walking a tightrope. On the one hand, he needs to increase voter enthusiasm and convince the Democratic Party’s liberal base, which supported candidates such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the primaries, that he can be their candidate too. But on the other, Biden needs the support of the working class, whose members turned out for Trump in 2016 and might do so again.
But right now, it seems like Biden is only concerned about pleasing the Left. And it’s hard to blame him: Ideologues such as Ocasio-Cortez are the future of the Democratic Party, and they’ll leave no room for the centrists and workers Biden once claimed to represent.
