“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
Since he started running for vice president with Barack Obama 14 years ago, Joe Biden has gone out of his way to associate himself with one city: Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Biden’s family lived in the blue-collar town in northeastern Pennsylvania—a swing state—for generations. And even though he reportedly moved from the town when he was 10 or 11 years old for a new life in Wilmington, Delaware—a state he represented for six terms in the U.S. Senate—he’s acted like a lifelong Scranton resident.
I guess Scranton roots work better for his image as “Lunchbox Joe.” But people who know about Biden’s multiple mansions aren’t fooled—and neither are the people of Scranton.
A new poll shows the voters of Joe’s adopted hometown want to run him out of town on a rail.
A whopping 60 percent of voters in the eighth congressional district—the district that encompasses Scranton—disapprove of Joe Biden and the job he’s doing in office. On the other hand, only 38 percent say they support the job being done by their “hometown boy made good,” according to the poll, which was conducted by Cygnal.
That’s a huge fall from his position less than two years ago, when Biden beat President Donald Trump in Lackawanna County—the county where Scranton is located—by nine percentage points: Biden won 54 percent of the vote vs. Trump’s 45 percent, in the traditionally Democratic area.
His victory was powered by a visit to his childhood home in Scranton on election day 2020; he said, “I was thinking about my mom and my dad” when he visited. He looked inside a bedroom on the third floor of 2446 North Washington, where his family asked him to sign his name as a young boy.
“My mom always says, if anyone knew Joe like she knows Joe they’d never vote for Trump. You know and I think Scranton is gonna have a great turnout and I, I think Joe is gonna win Pennsylvania, win the White House,” said the home’s current owner.
Well, that was then.
Scranton, like the rest of the country, is feeling the squeeze from Biden’s liberal economic policies.
Residents had enough of Biden’s historic inflation levels, the highest in 40 years.
“It has to end. Somebody has to take the bull by the horn and just do something. It’s just pathetic. It really is,” Karen Lafalce of neighboring Carbondale told WBRE.
That was in February, when prices had “only” risen 7.5 percent from the previous year—not the 9.1 percent rate from June.
Biden famously told the country this week that prices rose “zero” percent from July 1 to July 31… but prices were still up 8.5 percent from a year earlier. Prior to this year, the nation hadn’t seen an inflation rate of 8.5 percent since the early 1980s, when the late President Ronald Reagan was cleaning up the 1970s-era stagflation left over from Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
Gasoline in Scranton rose to more than five dollars a gallon on average in June.
But it’s not just gasoline: Lots of houses in this area rely on home heating oil to get through the brutal winters. Those prices are up by double digits, thanks in part to Biden’s sanctions in Russia (which Congress hasn’t authorized).
What created all that inflation? Joe Biden’s policies led to what Republican critics call “Bidenflation”… and the people of Scranton know it.
Another culprit was likely the fact that Biden kept flooding Americans who refused to work with bonuses to stay unemployed. Then he pumped even more stimulus cash into an economy that Donald Trump had already revived in 2020.
“All that cash is being injected into the economy has created inflationary pressure and we’re seeing that showing up now in the statistics,” Penn State Institute for Real Estate Studies Director Brent Ambrose told WBRE this winter.
Unemployment in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre/Hazelton metropolitan area in June was 5.5 percent, according to figures from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. Compare that to the national average of 3.6 percent, and you can see the area isn’t exactly experiencing a Biden boom.
The only thing really taking off in the economically depressed area are flights full of illegal aliens. Last December, congressmen from the area documented “ghost flights” full of illegal immigrants touching down in the dead of night at the Wilkes Barre-Scranton International Airport.
“Why at night? Why the secrecy? You know, to pick Christmas night, New Year’s night, and no one knows where they’re going,” asked longtime Republican leader Lou Barletta.
“Scranton voters have completely abandoned Joe Biden,” said National Republican Congressional Committee spokeswoman Samantha Bullock.
It’s not just Scranton. Biden’s approval rating in the Keystone State of Pennsylvania has fallen from 60 percent in July 2020 to 47 percent this June.
Joe Biden won’t care too much. When he retires—or is retired—he’ll ride into the sunset at one of his beachside properties in Delaware and enjoy his golden years.
Meanwhile, Scranton—like the rest of America—is desperately mining the depths of Joe Biden’s America, looking for a silver lining… and finding that the mine went dry long ago.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”