Earlier today, Biden spoke with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough about whether the Democratic Party was having trouble speaking to working-class white voters. Biden said: “I think we have, in part. And the reason is we’ve been consumed with crisis after crisis after crisis. And so I go in my old neighborhoods, and they go, ‘Joe. Hey, Joe, over here. What about me?’ And I say, ‘Well, look, all these things that are happening.’”
Biden is from Scranton, Pennsylvania. The surrounding county, Lackawanna, has been solidly blue for decades. But Trump campaigned in the area today, making his case for the working-class white voters Biden has worried about. A Wall Street Journal article on the GOP nominee’s campaign stop said 3,011 Lackawanna Democrats switched their voter registration to Republican this year, versus 502 who did the reverse. “Statewide, 80,674 Democrats have become Republicans in 2016,” the article continues, “compared with 28,522 Republicans who became Democrats.”
