(Bloomberg) — President Joe Biden declared Tuesday that the state of the union is strong. In his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, the view is gloomier.
The city looks like a success story. It’s experienced a recent economic turnaround thanks in part to the growth of e-commerce outfits like Amazon.com Inc. and Chewy Inc., a pet supplies company with a distribution center in the area.
Yet locals say something about the nation doesn’t work any more — inflation is soaring, wages aren’t keeping up, labor shortages appear everywhere, government is dysfunctional and the American dream seems just out of reach.
“If you put your fingers on the pulse of America, it’s not healthy,” said Shane Cawley, a local ironworker who introduced Biden on his last visit to Scranton in October.
The actual mood in America? “Scared, desperate,” Cawley said. Inflation is “out of control” and Americans are increasingly frustrated with a bitterly divided political class, he said. “Not just frustrated. Angry, straight angry.”
America’s been in the dumps before. President Jimmy Carter declared the nation to be suffering a “crisis of confidence” in a 1979 speech, the year before he was defeated for re-election, remarks that came to be known as the “malaise speech” even though he never used the word. In January, Vice President Kamala Harris invoked the term herself, saying in a PBS NewsHour interview that “everybody is frustrated” with the pandemic and “there is a level of malaise” in the country.
Whatever the diagnosis, the U.S. public is in a sour mood — and Biden, as president, is bearing the blame. His approval rating has slid steadily since August, after the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, to just 41% on average, according to an analysis of polls by FiveThirtyEight.
National surveys of the nation’s attitude reveal a country at wit’s end. Nerves are frayed and patience is exhausted after two years of a pandemic that has only sharpened partisan divides. While people tend to be more optimistic about their own lives and communities, inflation has become the overriding economic concern of most Americans, eclipsing Biden’s progress restoring jobs and growing output. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and fear the conflict could widen is only adding to American anxiety.
“The state of the union is: on the precipice of a mental health crisis, if we haven’t already tipped,” said Vaile Wright, a psychologist and senior director of health care innovation at the American Psychological Association. The group’s members have reported a surge in demand for their care, particularly for anxiety, depression and trauma. Biden nodded at the issue himself in his State of the Union address. “I know you’re tired, frustrated, and exhausted,” he said, urging Congress to expand access to mental health care “especially among our children, whose lives and education have been turned upside down” by the pandemic.
Read more: Biden Unity Plea Collides With Reality of Bitterly Divided U.S.
Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, a Biden ally who’s also a Scranton native, said that he expects the national mood to improve by the fall as the pandemic recedes. In an unexpected move, Biden called for Americans to return to their offices and resume more normal lifestyles in his State of the Union address.
“There’s no question that when you have inflation like we’ve seen, that that’s going to be a burden,” Casey acknowledged in an interview. “I do think that we will be in a different place in November — late October, early November — than we are now, at least on one important indicator for a lot of people, and that’s Covid itself.”
Midterm U.S. elections are Nov. 8, and Republicans already expect to win control of at least one chamber of Congress.
The stress is evident in Scranton, a city the president cites often in speeches. Its economic slump when Biden was a child led his family to relocate to Delaware. Scranton and communities like it, particularly in the South, Midwest and Appalachia regions, routinely score low on the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index, which tracks economic opportunity, health care access and other lifestyle measures.
At a recent event in the city with Casey, local officials thanked the Democrat for $2.1 million headed their way for transit projects, thanks to Biden’s infrastructure law. But they said they need more funding for operating expenses, as it’s getting harder to hire and keep bus drivers.
The city of 76,000 sits at an interstate highway crossroads in northeast Pennsylvania, nestled among hills whose coal fueled Scranton’s growth before the sector collapsed more than half a century ago. It’s reinvented itself as a logistics center, business that accelerated when the pandemic fueled a boom in online shopping.
Local employers now offer signing bonuses and hourly wages topping $20 an hour. This year, Scranton officially shed its “distressed” financial status with the state for the first time in decades.
And yet the outlook among many in Scranton about the state of the country is grim. Eric Pusey, a pharmacist in the area, said that without the Paycheck Protection Program, enacted under former President Donald Trump and extended under Biden, “we would not have survived, there’s no question about that.” But now, inflation and staffing shortages have small businesses struggling to simply survive, he said. “I think the state of the union is a disaster.”
Before the pandemic, Kathleen Pearage’s day care centers had waiting lists because of a lack of space. Now, her constraint is staffing — parents find themselves on waiting lists because she can’t hire enough workers. Grants and government funding kept her business afloat through the pandemic, she said, but the money is poised to run out.
The current circumstances, she said, are “probably the worst, most-rough time we have ever experienced.”
Biden has proposed new federal support for child care that would subsidize costs for parents while raising pay for caregivers, a plan Pearage welcomes. But it stalled last year along with the rest of the president’s “Build Back Better” agenda after congressional Democrats couldn’t reach agreement on the legislation.
Pearage’s confidence the bill will ever pass is shaky. “I don’t know that he has the support to be able to pull off what needs to happen,” she said.
Cawley, the ironworker, was looking forward to the child-care measure as well. He and his wife are expecting their fourth child this year, which will push daycare costs for his three youngest children to about $650 a week, he estimated.
“It seems like right now, with the political climate, that there’s no common ground that we can meet on,” he said.
Representative Matt Cartwright, a Democrat who represents the city and was one of a handful of lawmakers in his party who won re-election in 2020 in a district Trump carried, said he’d like to see Biden boast more about policies that are largely popular, despite the failure of Build Back Better.
“The funny part about Build Back Better is that everything in there, people like. If you go through the details of what’s in that, people want all of it,” he added. “Maybe the answer is: do these things one at a time.”
Ukraine is a mild concern in Scranton. People interviewed for this story said generally that they think Biden could be tougher on Russia, but also that the war is not for the U.S. to fight. But across the city, inflation is top of mind.
Rising prices are “killing all of us — from a labor standpoint to, in our industry, lumber and plywoods,” said Pat Fricchione, chief executive officer of Simplex Industries Inc., a homebuilder in Scranton that saw its business surge as people fled larger cities during the pandemic.
“There’s such a scarcity of labor,” he said. “Now, all of a sudden, in order to attract new employees, everyone has to pay more. So, that obviously has fueled the fire as far as inflation.”
Read more: Inflation Pain Means Biden Gets No Credit for Roaring EconomyLocally, there’s no sign of imminent relief.
Joe Fasula, co-owner of the Gerrity’s Grocery Store chain, said his stores are still receiving 90-day notices of supplier price hikes — a signal that prices will continue to climb for months.
“If inflation keeps going, and if we see that wages do not keep pace — which they’re not — at some point people are going to hit a wall financially,” he said. Bob Durkin, head of the local Chamber of Commerce, pointed to the government’s pandemic relief spending as a factor.“It’s not going to be you know, the 1970s — I can’t believe that,” he said. “But it has to have been affected by the infusion of money that went into this economy short-term.”
Biden himself has become a flashpoint in the city. He won the county that includes Scranton by 8 points in 2020, and flipping Pennsylvania from Trump was key to his victory over the former president.
But residents disagree on whether Scranton is truly his hometown — “I don’t think the general population looks at him that way,” Fasula said — and a move last year to rename a major street for the president was protested by some business owners. It succeeded anyway.
Communities like Scranton are on the front lines of a demographic shift that poses risks to Democrats, as the party bleeds support outside large urban areas and among White voters. Biden hasn’t lost the town. Cawley says he’d consider voting for him again, especially if Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024.
“I legitimately believe he wants to help and do some real good and make some real change. And it’s not easy,” he said.
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