The New York Times - USA (2020-10-15)

A16 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALTHURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2020

Election

WASHINGTON — During the
Democratic presidential prima-
ries, James T. Kunz, who leads the
operating engineers union in
western Pennsylvania, worried
the party would choose a nominee
determined to cripple the natural
gas industry that has boosted the
livelihoods of thousands of fellow
Pennsylvanians.
And in recent weeks, President
Trump has repeatedly told voters
like Mr. Kunz that Democrats had
done just that. Joseph R. Biden Jr.
will ban the extraction of gas
through hydraulic fracturing, or
fracking, he and Vice President
Mike Pence have said, over and
over — never mind that the for-
mer vice president has said other-
wise.
Mr. Kunz isn’t buying it.
“I’m very comfortable endors-
ing Joe Biden,” Mr. Kunz said.
Lagging in the polls and looking
to regain the white, working-class
dominance that narrowly deliv-
ered the Upper Midwest to him in
2016, Mr. Trump has made frack-
ing something of a last gasp. His
campaign has taken advantage of
confusing statements that Mr. Bi-
den has made about fracking de-
spite his consistent position that
he will not work to ban the prac-
tice.
Mr. Pence, in his debate with
Senator Kamala Harris, lobbed
the accusation that a Biden ad-
ministration would ban fracking
no fewer than five times.
But it does not appear to be
gaining enough traction where
Mr. Trump needs it most, in Penn-
sylvania. Recent polls show Mr.
Biden with a 13-percentage-point
lead in perhaps the most impor-
tant swing state.
Mr. Kunz is one of more than a
half-dozen western Pennsylvania
union officials and members with
the steamfitters union, the build-
er’s guild and construction union
who had told The New York Times
early this year they would not be
able to tell their members to vote
for a candidate who supported a
fracking ban, but who in recent
weeks have sided with Mr. Biden.
Each of them had expressed con-
cern that the Democratic Party
had turned hostile to the fossil fuel
industry as they pressed for the
development of renewable energy
sources like solar and wind power.
But in interviews this month,
they said they took Mr. Biden at
his word that addressing climate
change would not amount to an at-
tack on the natural gas industry.
“The day they can feed the
United States economy energy-
wise with solar and wind, then
thank God for it,” said Kenneth
Broadbent, business manager of
the Steamfitters Local 449 who
has endorsed Mr. Biden. “But
they’re going to need natural gas,
and Biden understands that.”
The alliance between western
Pennsylvania workers and liberal
Democrats remains uneasy.
“Fracking is bad, actually,” Rep-

resentative Alexandria Ocasio-

Cortez of New York, the lead spon-

sor of the progressive Green New

Deal who served as a co-chair-

woman of Mr. Biden’s climate

change task force, tweeted after

the vice-presidential debate.

Evan Weber, political director of

the Sunrise Movement, a youth-

led group of climate activists, crit-

icized Ms. Harris’s performance

during the vice-presidential de-

bate, saying “the American peo-

ple want climate action, and polls

show Democrats have no reason

to shy away from being bold.”

And even in Pennsylvania,

there is evidence that fracking

may not be the dominant issue

that both Mr. Trump and Mr. Bi-

den seem to think it is.

Several union leaders and

members who said they are sup-

porting Mr. Biden said the Trump

administration made policy deci-

sions that hurt their way of life,

like reshaping the courts with con-

servative judges who oppose laws

protecting union wages on feder-

ally funded projects.

“Four more years of President

Trump is just going to destroy our

pensions,” said Thomas R. Mel-

cher, business manager of the

Pittsburgh Regional Building

Trades Council, an umbrella orga-

nization of construction unions.

Mr. Melcher ticked off a list of

what he felt were failed promises

that Mr. Trump made: to bring

manufacturing back, save coal

and deliver a major infrastructure

package.

“He says a lot of things, but ev-

erything that comes out of his

mouth is a lie,” Mr. Melcher said of

the president.

But even union leaders who

back Mr. Biden acknowledged

their rank-and-file is divided. And

at least one powerful union leader,

Shawn Steffee, a business agent

and executive board member with

the Boilermakers Local 154, has

come out strongly for Mr. Trump.

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris

want nothing to do with the fossil

fuel industry. He has flip-flopped

so many times, and President

Trump has embraced fossil fuels,

natural gas and coal,” Mr. Steffee

said.

A 35-year Democrat before vot-

ing for Mr. Trump in 2016, Mr. Stef-

fee said he plans to vote Republi-

can again and believes most of his

membership will, too. Their top is-

sue: energy.

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris

have been totally unclear,” Mr.

Steffee said, citing a comment Mr.

Biden made last year that he will

“end fossil fuel” even as he vowed

to protect fracking. “You can’t

have it both ways,” Mr. Steffee

said, adding, “My members and

my local, we’re done riding the

fence. We made a stand.”

Charlie Gerow, a Republican

strategist in Pennsylvania, said

the Trump campaign’s line of at-

tack is having an effect.

“I think Trump tying Biden to

the Green New Deal works in ar-

eas not only where fracking is sig-

nificant, but across the state. I

think it’s helping Trump in the

suburbs,” he said. He dismissed

polls showing Mr. Biden leading in

Pennsylvania by double digits.

“That’s just about exactly

where it was four years ago. Don-

ald Trump has always outper-

formed polls and certainly outper-

formed them in Pennsylvania,”

Mr. Gerow said.

G. Terry Madonna, a political-

science professor at Franklin &

Marshall College in Lancaster,

Pa., conducts frequent polling in

the state, and sees a critical differ-

ence between 2020 and 2016: Hil-

lary Clinton paid little attention to

white working class voters when

she campaigned, while Mr. Biden

makes them a singular focus.

Mr. Trump “is not doing as well

in these old mining and mill towns

as he did four years ago,” Mr. Ma-

donna said, “and he’s getting ham-

mered in the suburbs” in large

part because of his handling of the

coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Madonna said he is skepti-

cal of the importance of fracking in

statewide elections. But, he noted,

“when you win by 44,000 voters,”

as Mr. Trump did in Pennsylvania

four years ago, “you’ve got to be

careful because a little thing here

or there can make a difference.”

Ms. Harris was an original co-

sponsor of the Green New Deal

when it was proposed as a resolu-

tion, and in the Democratic prima-

ries her platform included ban-

ning fracking. Mr. Biden has said

the Green New Deal is a “crucial

framework for meeting the cli-

mate challenges we face” but has

not endorsed it. His plan calls for

spending $2 trillion over four

years to boost clean energy and

eliminate fossil fuel emissions

from the power sector by 2035.

He has pledged to end new per-

mits for hydraulic fracturing on

federal lands and waters, but said

fracking “has to continue because

we need a transition” to renew-

able energy.

“The Green New Deal is not my

plan,” Mr. Biden said during the

presidential debate last month.

When asked at the vice-presiden-

tial debate what the Biden admin-

istration’s stance toward the

Green New Deal would be, Ms.

Harris did not answer.

In western Pennsylvania, union

members backing Mr. Biden said

they want to help address climate

change and also continue building

gas infrastructure. They said they

believe Mr. Biden will find a way

to do both.

Jim Harding, a steamfitter in

Alleghany County who has

worked on gas sites for 30 years,

said he is leaning toward Mr. Bi-

den, and the attacks from the

Trump campaign on fracking

have not swayed him. He said he is

not worried that once in office Mr.

Biden will work with more liberal

Democrats to eliminate gas and

other fossil fuels.

“I think we have his ear,” Mr.

Harding said, adding, “If not, he’ll

hear from us, believe me.”

Trump’s Fracking Jabs Seem to Be Hurting Biden Little in Pennsylvania

By LISA FRIEDMAN

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Erie, Pa., on Saturday. He appears to be gaining traction in Pennsylvania despite steady attacks from President Trump.

CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Blue-collar workers

say protecting unions

is a greater concern.

WASHINGTON — President
Trump delivered a familiar warn-
ing at his rally on Tuesday night,
telling supporters that his oppo-
nent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., and his
allies would turn America into a
socialist state if given the chance.
“Biden has made a corrupt bar-
gain in exchange for his party’s
nomination,” Mr. Trump said. “He
has handed control to the social-
ists and Marxists and left-wing
extremists like his vice-presiden-
tial candidate.”
The lines were a riff on one of
Mr. Trump’s favorite attacks on
Mr. Biden — and an illustration of
its limits. Despite repeated efforts
on Twitter, on a debate stage and
in speeches, Mr. Trump has failed
to convince voters that Mr. Biden
is a socialist.
In the closing days of his cam-
paign, he has shifted to telling vot-
ers that Mr. Biden is instead a
pawn of socialists and that his
running mate, Senator Kamala
Harris of California, is “a commu-
nist.” In an address to several civic
economic clubs from the Rose
Garden on Wednesday, Mr. Trump
called the election “a choice be-
tween a socialist nightmare and
the American dream.”
A wide range of polls, including
some conducted for nonpartisan
media outlets and for conserva-
tive and liberal interest groups,
shows that Mr. Trump has so far
been unsuccessful in lashing Mr.
Biden to policy proposals like
Medicare for All, the Green New
Deal and a federal tax on the net
worth of high-wealth Americans,
all of which Democratic voters
and leaders have increasingly em-
braced in recent years, but which
Mr. Biden has stopped short of
adopting in his platform.
Evidence also suggests the so-
cialist label does not necessarily

carry as much negative weight as

Mr. Trump assumed. When poll-

sters ask Mr. Biden’s critics to

name their concerns about him,

“socialism” ranks low on the list.

“It’s a word that people bring up

more now. It doesn’t mean that it

has an impact,” said Margie

Omero, a principal at the Demo-

cratic polling firm GBAO, which

has polled for progressive groups

this year but is not working for Mr.

Biden’s campaign. “If Trump’s at-

tacks worked, he would be doing

better. But he’s not.”

Still, Mr. Trump and his cam-

paign appear to see the issue as a

potential winner, particularly

among Latino voters who came to

the United States from Latin

American countries that were

governed by socialist or commu-

nist rulers. Mr. Trump’s son Don-

ald Trump Jr. led a “Fighters

Against Socialism” bus tour in

Florida last weekend.

Mr. Biden has continued to re-

but the attacks on the campaign

trail, including in Florida.

“There’s not one single syllable

that I’ve ever said that could lead

you to believe that I was a socialist

or a communist,” Mr. Biden said in

a recent campaign stop there.

Pollsters and analysts across

the political spectrum say there

are several reasons Mr. Trump’s

attacks have failed to dent Mr. Bi-

den’s popularity, which has grown

among voters in recent months in

spite of the “socialism” barrage.

Some are about Mr. Biden: Demo-

crats, in particular, say he has

built a longtime brand as a moder-

ate, bolstered by his refusal to en-

dorse many of the most liberal

economic policy plans of his Dem-

ocratic rivals in the primaries.

Some are about Mr. Trump, who

even some conservatives say has

been unfocused in his attacks and

poorly positioned to define Mr. Bi-

den on policy terms — because of

Mr. Trump’s history of making his

political attacks personal.

Some of it appears to also be

about the “socialist” policies

themselves. Despite months of at-

tempts by the Trump administra-

tion, Republican lawmakers and

conservative advocacy groups to

forecast a descent into a Stalin-

like regime of stringent govern-

ment controls on business and

limits on personal freedom if

Democrats win, many of the plans

favored by the most liberal wing of

Democratic leaders remain popu-

lar with wide groups of voters,

polling shows.

A new poll for The New York

Times by the online research firm

SurveyMonkey reveals the dura-

bility of many of those proposals

in the face of repeated criticism

from the right. Nearly three in five

respondents say they support “a

national health plan, sometimes

called Medicare for All, in which

all Americans would get their in-

surance from a single government

plan.” That level of support is es-

sentially unchanged from polling

the firm conducted in July 2019,

and it includes backing from more

than two-thirds of independent

voters.

A slightly higher share of re-

spondents supports the govern-

ment providing free tuition to any

American who attends a two- or

four-year college or university, in-

cluding more than 7 in 10 inde-

pendent voters, the poll shows.

Support for those programs ap-

pears to grow from a desire by

many voters for the government

to move more aggressively to

curb America’s economic inequal-

ities. Three-fifths of Americans

support efforts by the govern-

ment to reduce the economic gap

between wealthy and less well-off

Americans. Just under three in

five support efforts to reduce the

gap between Black and white

Americans.

A supermajority — two-thirds

of respondents, including a solid

majority of Republicans — sup-

ports a 2 percent tax on house-

holds whose total net worth, in-

cluding stocks and real estate, ex-

ceeds $50 million. Support for

such a proposal, which was a

plank in Senator Elizabeth War-

ren’s bid for the Democratic nomi-

nation, has increased from where

it was a year ago.

“Taxes on the rich is an objec-

tively popular policy,” said Sean

McElwee, executive director of

Data for Progress, a progressive

think tank that has polled exten-

sively on support for liberal policy

plans. “Over the long term, the

wind is in the sails of progressives,

in terms of demand from the pub-

lic.”

Mr. Trump and his party have

tried to sow concern about social-

ism for several years. In the fall of

2018, as midterm elections ap-

proached, Mr. Trump’s White

House Council of Economic Advis-

ers produced a 72-page report

warning of the dangers of socialist

policies to the American economy.

The White House promoted it in a

news release with the headline,

“Congressional Democrats Want

to Take Money From Hardwork-

ing Americans to Fund Failed So-

cialist Policies.”

In the abstract, the messaging

would appear to fit with Ameri-

cans’ views about economic pol-

icy. Polls show a significant major-

ity of Americans approve of “capi-

talism” and disapprove of “social-

ism.” But there are movements

toward “socialism” in subgroups

of the country. Majorities of young

voters, and Democrats over all,

have a favorable view of the con-

cept.

Some of the split comes from

disagreements over how to define

the term. Americans who favor so-

cialism tend to associate it with

Scandinavian countries like Fin-

land or Denmark, whose eco-

nomic and social welfare systems

are more commonly referred to as

the “Nordic model,” the Pew Re-

search Center has found. Its oppo-

nents tend to associate it with

Venezuela.

That range of definitions has al-

lowed Republicans to lump a

growing number of policies fa-

vored by liberal groups under the

“socialism” banner. In a recent at-

tack, Mr. Trump’s first example of

Ms. Harris’s so-called “commu-

nist” views was her position on

immigration policy, accusing her

of wanting to “open up the bor-

ders” of the United States.

“In my district, I hear a lot of

fear about the dramatic turn the

Democratic Party has taken to-

ward socialism,” Representative

Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Re-

publican on the Ways and Means

Committee, said in an interview.

“My constituents are fearful when

they see proposals to defund the

police, abolish our immigration

and customs enforcement, when

there is burning and looting in cit-

ies, concerns over the Green New

Deal.”

Those attacks have not stuck to

Mr. Biden. The American Action

Forum, a conservative think tank

led by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a for-

mer head of the Congressional

Budget Office and top policy ad-

viser on the 2008 presidential

campaign of Senator John Mc-

Cain, has conducted polls of

swing-state voters in recent

weeks. In Ohio, the group asked

voters why they had concerns

over Mr. Biden. Only 4 percent

cited “socialist” — compared to

nearly a quarter who cited con-

cerns over Mr. Biden’s “do-noth-

ing” record or his mental fitness.

Mr. Holtz-Eakin said Mr. Trump

had not been an effective messen-

ger for the socialist charges. “One

of the striking features of the

Trump campaigning and govern-

ing style is he makes everything

personal. There are no abstract

policy paradigms — it’s personal,”

Mr. Holtz-Eakin said. “So that’s

how people responded. That’s

how people evaluate things.

They’re evaluating Biden person-

ally.”

Democrats, including the Biden

campaign, say the attacks do not

work against Mr. Biden because

he has built a reputation with vot-

ers as a more moderate Demo-

crat, though his campaign’s plat-

form proposes boosting taxes on

the rich and corporations and

spending increases that far ex-

ceeds the scope of previous Dem-

ocratic nominees for president.

Supporters say that brand has

allowed Mr. Biden to parry attacks

by Mr. Trump and others that seek

to tie him to his contemporaries

who embrace the socialist label,

like his onetime rival for the Dem-

ocratic nomination, Senator

Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

“The fact of the matter is I beat

Bernie Sanders,” Mr. Biden said at

the debate, when Mr. Trump was

pressing him on support for “so-

cialized medicine.”

Data for Progress polling from

this spring found Americans

placed Mr. Biden near the middle

of an ideological spectrum that

ranged from “pure capitalism” to

“pure socialism,” while they

placed Ms. Warren and Mr. Sand-

ers farther to the left.

“Voters kind of know what a so-

cialist is and what a socialist isn’t,”

said John Anzalone, a partner at

ALG Research, who is polling for

Mr. Biden’s campaign this year.

“They’re comfortable with Joe Bi-

den, and they’ve known him for a

long time, and they know he’s not

a socialist.”

The President Paints His Rival as a ‘Socialist.’ Many Voters Aren’t Buying It.

By JIM TANKERSLEY

Betting big on a label

that isn’t denting the

popularity of Biden.

Ben Casselman contributed re-
porting.