In a sandwich shop on a quiet street in Scranton, Pennsylvania, stands a life-size cardboard cut-out of a smiling Joe Biden. Looking two decades younger, the president is frozen in time as the younger politician he once was.
Cardboard Biden has graced the doorway of Hank’s Hoagies for 15 years, said owner Tommy Owens, since someone brought it in to celebrate the ascendancy of Scranton’s most famous son to the great heights of political power, as vice-president of the United States.
“We thought he was done there!” said Owens, standing behind a glass counter stuffed with Biden memorabilia, including old campaign posters, badges, and a photograph of the president buying a hoagie, as Pennsylvanians call their elongated stuffed sandwiches.
“It wasn’t his best night,” added Owens, referring to the president’s disastrous performance in the nationally televised debate against Republican rival Donald Trump two weeks ago. “But the Democrats have to stick together. I’m still for him — I love Joe.”
But Hank’s Hoagies, where Biden’s star quality unquestionable, is a far remove from Washington, where for the two weeks since his halting debate performance the 81-year-old president has faced calls from lawmakers within his own party demanding that he drop out of this year’s White House race in favour of a younger candidate.
Biden left his birthplace of Scranton for Delaware when he was ten. But the hardscrabble east Pennsylvanian city occupies a special place in the president’s political image-making, a name he conjures to convey his blue-collar sensibilities despite decades as a US senator.
“Scranton Joe”, as he is sometimes called, is almost certain to need to win the swing state of Pennsylvania — one of the presidential contest’s pivotal battlegrounds — if he is to win November’s White House election.
Biden defeated Trump in Lackawanna county, which surrounds Scranton, by 54 per cent to 45 per cent in 2020.
But beyond Hank’s Hoagies, support for Biden’s candidacy seems to have thinned in Scranton, where local pride has turned to quiet alarm at his public gaffes and mental lapses.
“We all love Joe Biden,” said Gina Douaihy, who lives just across the street from Biden’s childhood home — a small grey house on Washington Avenue in a leafy northeastern corner of the city.
“But the man is 81. I don’t care how fit he is, I’m 72 and my cognitive brain is not what it was,” she said. “What you’ll find in this neighbourhood is a bunch of people who love him but think we need young blood.”
In downtown Scranton, the prevailing sentiment two weeks after the debate was a mix of disbelief that Biden could be running for a second term and fear that it might bring Trump back to the White House.
Stacey Giovannucci, who owns Tusk Tattoos on Biden Street — a thoroughfare some locals have petitioned to have renamed — said she probably would vote for Biden just to stop Trump, but was frustrated by the choice.
“I think I’d prefer foggy-eyed to straight evil,” said Giovannucci, who has worked in Scranton all of her life, offering her view of Biden and Trump. “I just can’t fathom that in this great country there are just these two people — what the fuck? It’s mind-blowing. It feels like a bad dream.”
In a nearby coffee shop, Roxana Curiel, a 38-year-old languages professor at the University of Scranton, agreed that it felt “awful” to have to “choose between Trump and Biden”.
Curiel, who has lived in Scranton for 16 years, wanted the Democrats to choose a younger candidate. “They have plenty of younger people who are more connected to the party,” she said.
Others in Scranton had even sharper concerns about Biden’s mental fitness.
“He’s too old,” said Mary Cordisco. “He shouldn’t be running the country,” said her daughter Kate, saying she thought he may have dementia.
“I think he’s losing his mind slowly,” said Khalil, a 25 year-old part-time worker at the Sheetz petrol station chain, who declined to give his surname. “He’s going downhill. I watched the debate, he was incoherent. It matters a lot, he’s the leader of the free world.”
The sentiment on the Scranton street might sting Biden, but it also tallies with that of Democratic megadonors, who are now threatening to pull their funding from the president’s campaign, and warn that funds for the party’s election fight are already “drying up”.
Potentially even more significant is growing list of Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill, 250 miles away from Scranton, who have urged Biden to drop out of the race. Their number had reached 19 on Friday evening.
Over at Scranton’s mall, Edwin Benitez, a part-time church pastor who owns an ice-cream shop called Heavenly Scoops, said support for Biden was waning quickly in the town, too. Around his church on Prospect Avenue, there were now more Trump signs than Biden signs.
“He should step down,” said Benitez, who has lived in Scranton since 2006. “If he can’t hold a conversation then he shouldn’t lead the country”.
Back on Washington Avenue, near the old Biden family home, Douaihy paused her gardening momentarily to smoke another cigarette on her porch.
She would still vote for Biden, despite his age, Douaihy said. “Absolutely. But I hope they give us an alternative.”