President Biden visits Lehigh Valley businesses in second trip to Pennsylvania in seven days

President Joe Biden swung through several small businesses in the Allentown area Friday as his administration seeks promote a message of an economic comeback ahead of November’s election.

It was his second visit to Pennsylvania of 2024, less than two weeks into the year and just seven days since his last visit. And he has a third planned for Monday, a reflection of the state’s crucial importance in the presidential campaign.

“By the way, we’re almost in heaven. We’re almost in Scranton,” Biden told reporters during the visit, noting his boyhood ties to the state.

A Quinnipiac University poll released this week gave Biden a narrow lead over former President Donald Trump in the state, though his 3-point advantage falls within the margin of error.

The Lehigh Valley is one of the state’s key battlegrounds. U.S. Rep. Susan Wild, a Democrat who welcomed Biden on Friday and represents the Lehigh Valley, won her seat by just under 2 percentage points in the 2022 midterms. She faces several potential Republican challengers this year.

“This is exactly the kind of area that the president should be visiting,” Wild told reporters Friday. “...This is literally the quintessential Middle America even though we are not in the middle of America.”

The Allentown area is home to one the of the state’s larger Hispanic populations, a constituency with whom some polls show Biden has struggled to maintain 2020-levels of support. He last visited the area in 2021 in a stop at a Mack truck plant in Macungie.

On Friday, Biden was greeted by officials including Gov. Josh Shapiro and Sen. Bob Casey, both Democrats, before visiting several businesses — Emmaus Run Inn, South Mountain Cycle, Nowhere Coffee Company — in Emmaus, a borough near Allentown.

Not everyone gave him a warm welcome. Onlookers sitting on the deck of a nearby house shouted “Go home, Joe!” and “You’re a loser!” as he walked into the bicycle store, according to a White House pool report.

Then, when he arrived to the Allentown Fire Training Academy, he was met with dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters, according to the report.

Ahead of the visit, senior Biden administration officials touted nearly 16 million new business applications nationwide from his first three years in office, which officials say are the strongest three years on record. Small Business Administrator Isabel Guzman called the number “16 million acts of hope.”

The unemployment rate in the Allentown Metro Area — which also includes Bethlehem and Easton — has reached a 20-year low at 3.9% and personal income in the city has increased more than 3% from before the pandemic after adjusting for inflation, according to the White House.

White House officials also touted 32,000 new jobs in the area since Biden took office, 2,700 of which are manufacturing, and said new business applications grew in Lehigh County in 2022 by 30% over pre-pandemic levels.

While high prices have made Americans skeptical of the economy, senior administration officials argued that the more competition in the economy spurred by new businesses will lead to lower costs, and that wages are increasing.

The president touts 2.7 million new jobs nationwide in 2023 and an unemployment rate consistently below 4%. The inflation rate was 3.4 % in December 2023, compared to a high of 9.1 % in June of 2022.

But even with lower inflation rates, many Pennsylvanians are still concerned about the economy as they continue to see higher prices than they’re accustomed.

The Quinnipiac University poll found that 44% of Pennsylvania voters think the nation’s economy is getting worse, 29% think it’s staying about the same and 26% think it’s getting better.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said inflation was the “blemish” on an otherwise strong economy.

“Most Americans have never seen this, and I think it’s very, very painful,” Zandi said. “I think people feel like inflation is unfair. They’re asking themselves, ‘Well, I was buying this Kombucha tea or these ramen noodles for x three years ago, now I’m paying y. How is that possible? Now I’m getting ripped off.”

But senior Biden administration officials pointed to December consumer confidence polls from the U.S. Consumer Confidence Conference Board and University of Michigan, which found that Americans believe the economy is improving. The officials also said credit card spending was up during the holidays.

Republicans have blamed inflation on Biden’s economic policies, including State Sen. Jarrett Coleman, a Republican who represents parts of Bucks and Lehigh Counties, including part of Allentown.

“Bidenomics? Does anyone think that’s working? The thing about a healthy economy is that if we had one, the President wouldn’t have to convince people to get excited about it,” Coleman said in a statement. “Many of my constituents are struggling to make ends meet due to inflation.”

However, Joel Naroff, an economist based in New Jersey, blamed inflation largely on the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war, and said that while inflation could have been lower if Biden didn’t provide pandemic subsidies to businesses and households, those very policies helped the economy.

“You can’t just simply say it was his policies that created the inflation,” Naroff said. “It was his policies that created the strong economy and years of low [unemployment], even full employment, that we’ve had at this particular point.”