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Swing-state Pennsylvania is the stage for a clash of presidents on Saturday as each party’s biggest stars work to energize voters just days before voting concludes in high-stakes midterm elections across the country.
Former President Barack Obama opened the day at a Pittsburgh rally with Democratic Senate hopeful John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania lieutenant governor who represents his party’s best chance to flip a Republican-held Senate seat on Tuesday.
Later in the day, President Joe Biden shared the stage with Obama in Philadelphia, the former running mates campaigning together for the first time since Biden took office. In neighboring New York, even former President Bill Clinton, largely absent from national politics in recent years, was out defending his party.
The trio of Democrats were the first presidents, but not last, to speak out on Saturday as voters across America decide control of Congress and key statehouses. Former President Donald Trump finished the day at a rally in working-class southwestern Pennsylvania.
“If you want to stop the destruction of our country and save the American dream, then on Tuesday you must vote Republican in a giant red wave,” Trump told thousands of cheering supporters, describing the United States as “a country in decline.”
Biden, Trump, Obama, and Clinton—four of the six living presidents—focused on Northeastern battlegrounds on Saturday, but their words echoed across the country as the parties sent out their best to deliver a critical closing argument. Polls across America will close on Tuesday, but more than 36 million people have already voted.
Not everyone, it seemed, was on message Saturday.
Even before arriving in Pennsylvania, Biden was dealing with a fresh political mess after upsetting some in his party for promoting plans to shut down fossil fuel plants in favor of green energy. While he made the comments in California the day before, the fossil fuel industry is a major employer in Pennsylvania.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the president owed coal workers across the country an apology. He called Biden’s comments “offensive and disgusting.”
Trump seized on the riff in western Pennsylvania, charging that Biden “has resumed the war on coal, your coal.
