America’s second Catholic president was visiting his childhood neighborhood in April, when he employed a bit of ritualized Irish Democratic politicking.
“I’m Joe Biden,” he introduced himself to a patron at a small coffee shop gathering in Green Ridge, long a bastion of Irish-Catholic families who work in law and politics. “I went to St. Paul’s.”
The greeting, an echo of the old Catholic habit of identifying oneself by church parish, was Biden’s homage to the parochial nature of Scranton, home to one of the nation’s highest concentrations of white Catholics.
Biden’s local ties and cultural roots helped lift him to victory in 2020 here in Lackawanna County, the population hub of increasingly red northeastern Pennsylvania. In this most Catholic part of the swing state with the second-highest Catholic population, Biden ran ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 pace, enabling his narrow, one percentage point statewide victory.
But now, as Democrats battle for the state with Kamala Harris as the nominee, their chances of winning in the region or performing well enough there to carry the state are looking considerably dicier. It’s not just the loss of Biden — an older, white, Catholic man with an affinity for the working class — from the top of the ticket that worries local Democrats.
It’s the cultural dissonance with Harris, a Californian and woman of color who has spearheaded the party’s post-Dobbs abortion messaging. That profile makes her an awkward fit in a closely watched, economically hard-pressed working-class region that’s historically been a locus of anti-abortion activity.