Standing in line waiting for President Joe Biden to appear at a rally in Philadelphia on Thursday, Lawrence Otter’s frustration with the president’s poor performance in the polls is clear.
In the minds of Democrats, the president has done everything right. Economic growth is up, unemployment is down, and inflation has pulled back from its peak in June last year.
“I don’t understand why it isn’t resonating,” said Mr Otter, a Pennsylvania resident and lifelong Democrat who worked on Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign.
Mr Biden is fond of telling audiences that he is “growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up,” and that joblessness is at a 50-year low.
This week, Mr Biden launched his “Pennsylvania push” – a three-day blitz of one of the most important battleground states in the nation that included a trip to Scranton, his home town.
“When I look at the economy, I don’t see it through the eyes of Mar-a-Lago,” said Mr Biden on Tuesday, comparing his own background to Mr Trump’s. “I see it through the eyes of Scranton.”
Surveys show that the economy is consistently the biggest issue for US voters, so the president should be streets ahead of Donald Trump, his Republican rival.
The polls, however, tell a different story.
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