2024 Elections

As Kamala Harris makes her final dash, the president sticks close to home.

President Joe Biden is greeted on the tarmac by Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti and her daughter Brooke Anne, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, Nov. 2, 2024. “I’m not just asking for me. I’m going to be gone. I’m asking you to do something for yourself and your families,” Biden said. | Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

By Adam Cancryn

11/03/2024 01:31 PM EST

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SCRANTON, Pennsylvania — For Joe Biden, this is how it ends: surrounded by a sea of familiar faces in a modest union hall, minutes from his childhood home but miles from the real action.

The president this weekend made his closing pitch in a 2024 campaign that he began more than a year ago with grand ambitions, only to watch it slip away from him in the intervening months — gradually at first, and then, in one disastrous debate night, all at once.

Where Biden once envisioned a race that built toward his triumphant reelection, Kamala Harris has since replaced him at the center of the political world, in a sprint to Election Day that could usher in a new generation of Democratic leadership or a Republican ready to wipe out his legacy as quickly as possible.

And instead, Biden is spending the closing stretch of this neck-and-neck race and the last presidential campaign season of his 52-year political career hopscotching between campaign spots in this pivotal swing state and his Wilmington, Delaware, home, stumping for his vice president in some of the places he’s guaranteed to be beloved and — crucially — can do no harm.

“I’m asking for your support for Kamala and Tim Walz,” Biden told an admiring crowd of roughly 150 supporters who had paused their get-out-the-vote efforts, cramming into the headquarters of the local carpenters union for a view of the president who, as several there put it, had always had their backs. “I’m not just asking for me. I’m going to be gone. I’m asking you to do something for yourself and your families.”

As Biden commuted back to Delaware shortly afterward, making a customary visit to church before calling it an evening just after 6 p.m., his vice president and hopeful successor was jetting to New York for a surprise appearance on “Saturday Night Live.”

The three Pennsylvania events were expected to be Biden’s closing moments on the campaign trail before returning to the White House on the day before the election. It was a marked contrast to the mega rally Barack Obama held in Philadelphia to close the 2016 race to succeed him, although it wasn’t as secluded........

© Politico