Joe Biden may launch 2020 campaign on Rocky Steps at Philly Art Museum, per report

Biden will reportedly announce his candidacy for President next Wednesday, according to The Atlantic

Joe Biden is, at long last, running for president of the United States in 2020 — well, reportedly.

Biden is expected to make his announcement with a video on Wednesday, according to a new report from The Atlantic, which suggested he's considering making a splash with a visit to the hallowed Rocky Steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

From The Atlantic’s report:

“Biden’s announcement video will draw, in part, on footage shot two weeks ago outside his old family home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he likes to bring people and tell stories about how his grandfather would sit at the kitchen table, talking about making ends meet. But the campaign is still making key decisions on what will happen next, including whether to go cute for a launch event by doing it on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, famous for the training montage from Rocky, or go for a powerful challenge directed right at Trump by heading to Charlottesville, Virginia, where the president infamously blamed “both sides” of a neo-Nazi march in August 2017.”

It doesn’t sound like a sure thing, but Biden, 76, has been hammering home the image of Pennsylvania in the run-up to the election as a keystone (sorry) in his identity.

A New York Times report in early March said Biden was considering making Philadelphia his campaign headquarters, if and when he decided to run for president.

The former vice president and Delaware senator, and Pennsylvania native, has been struggling to reach a decision about his potential candidacy for months, and has spent the last two months responding to allegations from women of unwanted touching throughout his political career.

When Biden visited his hometown of Scranton last month, he made jokes about having consent to touch people while continuing to weigh his options.

Pennsylvania, of course, is regularly considered a “swing state” in presidential elections, colored by a Democratic strongholds in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and large swaths of Republican voters in the middle of the state. 

President Donald Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016, but Pennsylvania flipped Republican House seats and re-elected Democrats in Gov. Tom Wolf and Sen. Bob Casey in the 2018 midterm elections.


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