In the weirdest campaign strategy since Jimmy Carter’s Rose Garden strategy Joe Biden rarely ventures out from his basement lair. But he did do a drive-in rally in Pennsylvania on
Saturday which also brought out a crowd of enthusiastic Trump supporters.
As Karen Townsend reported for Hot Air, they gathered in a parking lot across from the parking lot for the Biden rally. The enthusiastic Trump supporters were making some noise, shouting and honking their horns.
“We don’t do things like those chumps out there with the microphones, those Trump guys,” Biden railed to supporters ensconced in about 130 cars at a drive-in rally at Bucks County Community College in Newtown, Pennsylvania.
As Abigail Marone, of Trump Rapid Response tweeted, “Looks like more Trump supporters showed up to Biden’s Bucks County, PA event than Biden supporters!”
And judging by the video posted it does look like there were more than 130 cars in the Trump counter rally. There were cars, pickup trucks and SUVs draped with American flags and campaign banners, who invaded a nearby parking lot — within earshot of Biden — to honk horns and try to shout the Democrat down.
The Trump counter-rally is important because Bucks County is crucial swing county just north of Philadelphia, which Hillary Clinton won by less than 1 percent in 2016 — and which Democrats hope to win more resoundingly this year, with the help of suburbanites allegedly turned off by Trump.
Here’s Biden’s problem – in 2016 Trump won big around the coal-producing parts of Appalachian Pennsylvania. His oversized turnout in the coal counties of Washington, Greene, Cambria, Somerset, Westmoreland, Luzerne and Fayette helped earn him that 41,000-vote edge over Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, who famously told a town-hall audience during her campaign, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
And Western Pennsylvania is still strongly pro-Trump.
A recent study by the Allegheny Conference, reported by Salina Zito, found Pennsylvania’s coal industry supports about 17,000 jobs either directly or indirectly. In addition, Pennsylvania’s oil and natural gas industry fuels more than 322,000 direct and indirect jobs and contributes $45 billion to the state’s economy, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis.
Those voters and their families could swing an election.
And they haven’t forgotten that back in February Joe Biden said during a rally that he wants to "get rid of fossil fuels."
Biden said: "We are going to get rid of fossil fuels."
Referring to radical environmentalist protestors who interrupted the event, Biden said:
"That's okay, these guys are okay, they want to do the same thing that I want to do, they want to phase out fossil fuels and we're going to phase out fossil fuels."
Biden also said there would be "no more coal plants."
Biden's hostility to energy industry workers is nothing new, either. In December of 2019 he suggested if coal miners lose their job due to his policies they should learn to code.
Now, the Associated Press reports America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC, ran an eight-week ad campaign for TV, the internet and mail over the summer reinforcing Biden’s anti-fossil fuels positions to the hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians who work in the industry, or see their businesses benefiting or receive royalties from a well on their land.
Trump’s campaign is running its own ad this fall featuring a fracking technician named “Jen” who says Biden would end fracking and “that would be the end of my job, and thousands of others.” And Great America PAC, which supports Trump, produced an ad calling Biden and Harris “fracking liars.”
The Coal Region Canary website was not impressed by Biden’s “chumps” remark either, posting video of Biden’s remarks with the comment:
Joe Biden called Pennsylvania Trump supporters “chumps” today during one his bizarre car rallies in Bristol, Bucks County.
In fact, he didn’t do it just once. He said it twice.
C’mon man! How’s he going to play us like that?
The pro-Trump enthusiasm in Western Pennsylvania means Biden and the Democrats are going to have to vastly improve on Clinton’s suburban numbers and judging by the turnout of pro-Trump “chumps” at the Bucks County counter-rally, the numbers in the suburbs are not trending very strongly in Joe Biden’s favor.
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