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Yet even before he took the stage before a few hundred supporters gathered in a Teamster’s Temple, Biden got a sharp reminder that before he can take on the president, he first must survive the Democratic primary.
Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a news release boasting that he is the only presidential candidate to oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, and other free trade measures, a thinly-veiled attack on the former vice president as he begins his campaign with union members in a region walloped by manufacturing losses. As a senator, Biden supported NAFTA and voted to create permanent normal trade relations with China.
It was the second time since Biden entered the race last Thursday that Sanders, his closest competition in the polls, has targeted him, and another sign of what could be a robust debate between a mainstream liberal and a democratic socialist.
Sanders had a rally of his own in Pittsburgh earlier this month and quietly met with union leaders while he was in town. He also invited Leo Gerard, the head of the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers union, to his office for a meeting earlier this year, according to a Sanders campaign official.
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Biden’s crowd was more modest, but his debut here as a candidate was suffused with political and personal symbolism.
Western Pennsylvania was once filled with reliably Democratic voters, many of them union members, but the state tipped to Trump three years ago in part because many working-class whites in this region abandoned their ancestral party. No Democratic nominee has won the White House without carrying Pennsylvania since 1948, and the promise of Biden’s candidacy is that his appeal with this bloc of the electorate could swing the state, along with other Big 10 battlegrounds, back from the Republicans.
Democrats barely broke a sweat in retaining the governorship and a Senate seat last year and picked up three House seats, all in the heavily-suburban, southeastern part of the state where Trump’s popularity has plummeted.
The former vice-president, as he rarely fails to note, spent his early childhood years in Scranton and has long trumpeted his status as this state’s “third senator.” Biden is particularly close to union officials here, having jogged his way through Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parade in the past, including in 2015 when he was considering a presidential run.
“He connects, his voice resonates and they know he’s got a track record of performance on their behalf,” said Harold Schaitberger, the president of the national Firefighters union, which offered its endorsement of Biden on Monday.
Asked what Biden brings to the primary, Schaitberger swept out his hand to a few hundred firefighters and other union members, mostly white, who had gathered on Pittsburgh’s Market Square for a midday worker’s service: “All these people right here.”
But Pittsburgh offers a glimpse at Biden’s challenges as well as his opportunities. The city, its workforce and its politics are all rapidly changing.
This is no longer the smokestack-belching, steel-producing industrial powerhouse of yore. Health care, technology and the sciences now drive the economy. And while the United Steelworkers union is still based downtown, and claims the most local members of any labor group, the more diverse, service-industry unions are growing.
Even the choice of venue for Biden’s appearance illustrated the city’s transition. When he appeared before hundreds of firefighters and building trade members at a well-worn Teamsters hall, he was standing in a thoroughly gentrified neighborhood, Lawrenceville, that is home to a ramen joint, a number of boutiques that trumpet their female ownership and, naturally, a hipster coffee shop.
The region is also undergoing a political realignment. While the old steel and coal towns outside Pittsburgh are turning toward the GOP, the affluent enclaves that were once full of Republicans, as well as many Steelers and Penguins coaches and players, are now tilting toward Democrats.
It was Rep. Conor Lamb’s margins in some of these upscale precincts that propelled him to surprise special election victory a year ago here, and Democrats just won a special state Senate race thanks to some of the same voters.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.