“If I were to run for president, I’d be here a lot,” Joe Biden said at the end of the parade route, standing in front of the United Steelworkers Building in Pittsburgh. | John Minchillo/AP Photo Elections Biden hits the trail like he's running The former vice president spends Labor Day courting midterm voters in Pittsburgh, but also doing his own gut check for a possible 2020 run.

PITTSBURGH — Cue the jokes: Joe Biden is running. In fact, he spent much of Labor Day sprinting, more than a mile in total, doing intervals through the streets of one of America’s biggest union towns.

Biden was here for the city’s Labor Day parade three years ago, the one and only campaign event of his almost-but-never-launched 2016 presidential campaign. A year later, he was back with Tim Kaine, trying to transfer his connection with these voters to the Democratic ticket.


Monday’s parade kicked off what will be an intense nine-week stretch of campaigning for Democratic candidates in the midterms, but also an extended gut check on whether the country has the appetite for another Biden run — and for him to decide whether he has the appetite to make one.

Here, in a part of the country that helped tip the 2016 election to Donald Trump but has since delivered Democrats their only House special election win, this is what a potential 2020 bid would look like: classic retail campaigning in areas where Democrats have atrophied and which Hillary Clinton wrote off. When he was finished marching, Biden huddled with United Steelworkers President Leo Girard. There was even a videographer on the payroll catching every interaction, and a young man from the Republican attack group America Rising following along with his own camera, mumbling questions and then remarking with staged wonder into the camera that Biden wouldn’t answer them.

Former Vice President Joe Biden greets union workers and their families at the Pittsburgh Labor Day parade. | Edward-Isaac Dovere/POLITICO

“If I were to run for president, I’d be here a lot,” Biden said at the end of the parade route, standing in front of the United Steelworkers Building.

He ate ice cream, kissed foreheads, and repeated the same stories about his father and grandfather’s working-class roots. He talked about unity, decency and reasserting what he thinks America is: Don't just keep the faith, he told them, spread it.

“Let’s stop walking around with our heads down, wondering what the hell is going on here. It’s time to say, ‘Enough,’” he said after the parade in a speech at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union hall. “It’s not about politics. It’s about America.”

Biden has settled on a way of answering every question about Trump.

What does he make of the president’s petulant response to critic John McCain’s death and anti-Trump funeral services?

“Everybody knows who the president is,” Biden said.

What does he think of Trump saying he’s the real friend of American workers?

“Everybody knows who Donald Trump is,” he said in the same tone over an hour later.

For all the people urging him to run, Biden has not made up his mind. He has not taken many steps toward putting together the kind of national operation he’d need to run for president for what would be, depending on how it’s being counted, either his third or the fifth time. In 2015, his jogging down the street and glad-handing was meant to answer all the questions about his age and emotional state about the death of his son Beau. He and the group of current aides and volunteers from his old government staff who ran alongside him were glad for people to see the shape that Biden’s still in.

So far, the only event firmly on Biden’s midterms itinerary is on Wednesday in New Jersey with House candidate and Obama administration alum Mikie Sherrill. But many more requests are in, and Biden's team is working to get him out several times a week.

He’ll be all over the country — though deliberately, not to Iowa or New Hampshire, to avoid the conversations that would prompt — tapping into popularity that’s highest in precisely the parts of the country his party needs to win. He’ll be the most in-demand, most active Democrat on the trail, with the Clintons largely benched and Barack Obama limiting his own appearances. His wife, Jill Biden, will be out on the trail, too.

It’s a battle for the soul of America, Biden said, as he came out of the traditional pre-parade morning mass at St. Benedict the Moor church and donned his famous aviator sunglasses.

What’s at stake? he was asked.

“Everything,” he said. “It’s simple: everything.”

Biden wasn’t the only prospective 2020 candidate spending Labor Day in his electoral heartland, appealing to union traditions and a need for unity.

“We have a president who is not doing what almost every president in American history has done: When you make it into the Oval Office, you understand you’ve got a sacred responsibility to bring the American people together,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told a crowd at an AFL-CIO Labor Day breakfast in Manchester, New Hampshire. “Today we have a president, who for cheap political reasons, is trying to divide us up.”

Biden's own reaction, when asked about the rise of self-proclaimed socialists in his party largely prompted by Sanders' 2016 run: "I'm a Democrat."

In Pennsylvania, though, the focus is on turning the state blue again. Pennsylvania Democrats recite that Trump won the state by 44,000 votes as if they’re still doing penance. Everything this year is about proving that it can’t happen again.

There’s cautious optimism about elections this fall for governor and Senate. Democrats are favored heavily in both races.

“We want to reach out to and activate new voters, but we also can’t forget that we need to reach out to the persuade-ables who left us in 2016,” said John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, who marched with Biden.

But Sen. Bob Casey, who featured Biden on Sunday night at a fundraiser for his reelection campaign, said he doesn't think the former vice president is his party’s only hope in 2020.

“I think there are a lot of Democrats that can win Pennsylvania,” Casey said.

As for what he wants to see, Casey laughed.

“I want Joe Biden to make his own decision. I’ve purposefully not asked him,” Casey said.

Pretty much everyone else in Pittsburgh did on Monday, and Biden engaged most of them.

“When you came here three years ago,” a woman along the route told him, “I said, ‘Biden and Elizabeth Warren.'”

“Maybe,” Biden told her with a smile.

At the electrical workers hall, an older woman wearing a union hat and “Republicans for Conor Lamb” pin walked up to Biden.

“God has a strange sense of humor,” she said, her voice shaking. Maybe this was all about arranging the world so that he’d be president.

Biden kissed her on the cheek. He hugged her. He gripped her hand, and kissed it.

David Siders contributed to this report.

