Biden was up close and personal in Pennsylvania. He hopes it can help him win

SCRANTON — As Megan Bell Giroux introduced President Joe Biden, a childhood best friend of her father’s, she recalled the first time she’d learned the word “smitten.” Biden, on a return visit to Scranton, used it to describe the feeling of meeting his first wife, Neilia, who died in a car crash just six years into their marriage.

At Giroux’s mention of Neilia, Biden turned away from the crowd of supporters and dabbed at his eyes. When it was his turn to talk, he gave a somewhat circuitous, 10-minute retelling of that meeting — the way the sunlight hit her face when they met on spring break, and how she subtly slipped him cash, realizing he was short, on their first date.

“No man deserves one great love, let alone two,” said Biden, who married Jill Biden in 1977. “Anyway, I don’t know why the hell I told ya all that.”

The moment, in a smaller room filled with a few dozen Scranton supporters and union workers, was personal in a way that Biden’s campaign hopes can set him apart from former President Donald Trump.

The campaign has for several months woven more intimate events with everyday people into Biden’s campaign schedule. That was on display in his three-day swing through Pennsylvania this past week, where stops at his childhood home, a Scranton cafe, a union hall, a Philadelphia recreation center, and yes, Wawa and Sheetz, were interspersed with larger speeches. The stops aimed to highlight Biden’s personality, his easy emotion, and his endurance.

“They want to show, literally, his strength and vitality because issues about age are out there,” political strategist Mustafa Rashed said. “Putting him out there as much as possible is a way to counter that.”

Smaller, more personal campaign events also provide a vehicle to retell Biden’s narrative — including the tragedy he’s overcome — to boost his relatability, his campaign hopes, in an election in which most voters say they are unenthused about either candidate.

And it’s all a contrast with Trump, whose bombastic style has appealed to his core base but can be off-putting to voters who like his politics but not his pugilism. Trump’s pace of campaigning has also been much less intense, partly by necessity, due to the criminal trial occupying his time.

Over his three days in Pennsylvania, Biden covered a lot of ground as Trump sat in a Manhattan courtroom, slipping out for a campaign event in New York one day, but otherwise largely campaigning remotely. Biden has largely avoided mentioning Trump’s criminal trials but often notes the difference in their campaign outreach — particularly in Pennsylvania. Biden has opened 14 offices statewide and hired dozens of staffers. He has also raised more money than Trump.

“We have more people employed here. … He doesn’t have one single headquarters in the state,” Biden told a few dozen supporters at a recreation center in Philadelphia. “You know how much money we’ve raised so far? We’ve raised a whole hell of a lot of money.”

Trump may not need the kind of organizing that Biden does, though because Democrats rely more than Republicans on local get-out-the-vote efforts to drive turnout. So far, he still polls closely with Biden in the state despite having virtually no on-the-ground presence.

Trump has prioritized Pennsylvania in terms of the campaign events he does make. He was in Bucks and Lehigh Counties earlier this month and announced a May rally in Wildwood, a popular Jersey Shore destination for people from the Philadelphia region.

Biden’s strategy isn’t without pitfalls. At 81, he’s known to have verbal stumbles and to go on a tangent, which can reinforce the image of an elderly man. Some of the stories he tells stretch the truth or ignore it altogether — such as a tale suggesting that his uncle was eaten by cannibals. And with more exposure, there’s more opportunity for a gaffe to get attention, a frustration for Democrats who note Trump also goes off on tangents and has built a political brand around hyperbole, lies, and sometimes violent rhetoric.

“I don’t understand why he’s telling stories about his long-dead uncle and getting so many parts of it wrong,” GOP political consultant Chris Nicholas said. “If you don’t have all the details of an anecdote nailed down, just leave it out.”

Nicholas, who worked for former Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, said campaigns typically go over anecdotes, which ones to use, and which ones might not land. Biden seems more free to be Biden — sometimes to his benefit, sometimes to his detriment.

Biden similarly has accentuated his personality and empathy in his 2020 campaign, which — partly due to the pandemic — also featured smaller campaign events.

His surrogates have said for months his best strategy is to get out from behind a podium.

“The president, in five minutes hanging out in someone’s kitchen in North Carolina … got five million views on a platform I’ve never heard of,” Sen. Chris Coons said earlier this year. “Put on the quarter zip and put on some jeans and walk on into people’s houses and be Joe Biden..”

In Scranton, Biden stopped by the house he lived in until age 10. He’s built a whole brand around the three-story Colonial, which is now an official trolley stop on a tour of Scranton. That Biden spent more than 24 hours in the city of about 70,000 people shows not only the campaign’s commitment to the narrative but Biden’s soft spot for the city.

The motorcade seemed to take the long route to the house, bypassing throngs of Scrantonians waving flags and signs as it wound through. Once Biden climbed up the stairs and into the house, he didn’t emerge for nearly two hours.

Marty Kearns, who grew up in the home, took Biden through it, along with family and neighbors.

“He got a little choked up thinking about his grandfather, who first bought the house,” Kearns said. “Here he is coming back into the house as president of the United States.”

When a staffer noted the time, Kearns told the president there were Hank’s hoagies, should he want to take some food to go. Instead, Kearns said, the president flashed a grin, told his staff, “I’m gonna have a hoagie,” and jetted out the back door to eat with a group of kids playing outside.

“He’s very personal,” Kearns said. “I think more people should see that he’s just a warm, smart guy.”

Kearns’ mother, Anne, lived in the home until her death in December. Biden had visited her about a dozen times over the years and when he saw her on election day in 2020, he promised to return as president.

Biden’s personal story of tragedy — losing his daughter and wife as a young husband and then later, the death of his son Beau from brain cancer, is a story that the campaign thinks voters can relate to.

“You know what it means to ache,” Joe Kennedy III, a former congressman and the eldest grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, said at a smaller event in Philadelphia on Thursday. “And you know that a lot of other families know that, too.”

Biden again turned away and dabbed at his eyes. It was one of his final stops on the Pennsylvania tour, and he emphasized the point of the last three days.

“You’re my ticket to the White House,” Biden told the room. “You, Pennsylvania.”