Chris Coons interned for then-U.S. Sen. Joe Biden as a young man.
Since 2010 Coons (D-Del.) has held the Delaware Senate seat the president once did, and has become a key Biden ally.
And yes, Coons said the president frequently waxes nostalgic about his hometown.
"Joe Biden is so proud of his roots and his childhood in Scranton, and the values that he learned there," Coons said. "The part of Delaware that Joe moved to, Claymont, also is a tight-knit, strong community."
On Monday, Coons had a chance to deliver a message on the president's native turf during a campaign event on South Blakely Street in Dunmore, just outside Scranton.
Coons served as a national co-chair of Biden's reelection campaign, a role he said he is "honored to be continuing" in support of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Just days after the Democratic National Convention wrapped up in Chicago, Coons thanked local volunteers and met with Northeast Pennsylvania officials including Lackawanna County Commissioners Bill Gaughan and Matt McGloin, state Rep. Kyle Mullins (D-Blakely) and Dunmore Borough Council President Janet Brier.
In a one-on-one phone interview after the event, Coons spoke about the importance of Pennsylvania to the Harris campaign, key issues he's hearing about out on the trail, as well as his personal reflections from being in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Highlights of that conversation, edited for length and clarity, follow.
Q: Obviously there's the personal connection with President Biden, but why the campaign focus on this part of Pennsylvania?
A: The commonwealth literally is the hinge point, the keystone for Democrats' hopes to win back the House, to hold the Senate, to win the White House. And the counties right around Scranton — Luzerne, Lackawanna — are absolutely central. If we do well in the area around Scranton, we're going to win. And if we don't do well, we're going to struggle. So this is a critical part of the state.
As someone who's been close to Joe Biden for years and is very active in the campaign and had a role at the convention, when I got asked if I'd be interested in coming up just to say thank you to volunteers, just to touch base with people active in grassroots organizing, I jumped at the chance. I was thrilled.
Q: Even with strong energy and poll numbers, Vice President Harris has told her supporters that they and the campaign can take nothing for granted in the next 70 days.
I think there are a lot of Democratic voters who are haunted by the specter of 2016 and the fact that Secretary (Hillary) Clinton's poll numbers appeared very strong until the end. What would your message to Democratic voters be?
A: Well, first, my core message is, we've got to take the energy and excitement of the convention and translate it into action on the ground.
We've seen a record number of people come out and volunteer. I just met somebody at the local campaign office in Dunmore who's never volunteered for politics at all. He watched the convention, got excited and decided he wanted to get up and come on in and go out and knock on doors.
We've had a record number of small-dollar donors who are first-time donors, and we've got folks who are in there making phone calls, sending out texts, going and knocking on doors. We need that kind of energy to persuade independents, to go stand on someone's doorstep and ask, what do they care about? What's motivating them? What are their concerns? And then be able to answer their questions about what Kamala Harris has to offer.
Q: What are the issues you're hearing about most?
A: Costs. People really care about how much housing costs, prescription drug costs, gas costs, grocery costs. They want to know that we've got a concrete plan.
There are dozens of states in our country that have laws on the books about price gouging in response to a public disaster or public health crisis. And so when Vice President Harris said we're going to start using some of these laws to rein in prices if they've increased too quickly and too far, that's rooted in what states have been doing all along.
Vice President Harris put out a concrete menu of proposals for how to reduce cost of housing by increasing housing production so that housing becomes more affordable. And in my view, most importantly, just two weeks ago, President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris held an event where they celebrated that for the first time, the out-of-pocket costs of some of the most expensive prescription drugs ... are going to come down.
That's the number one thing that I hear from voters: What they want us to be doing is to address the costs that they face.
Q: One of the counter-arguments has been that price controls, as critics are calling them, would be damaging to the economy. They would amount to socialism. What would you say to that, Senator?
A: I'd say, go take a look at laws already on the books in dozens of states. These aren't price controls. The suggestion that what she's been proposing is Soviet-style price controls is profoundly mischaracterizing.
What she's proposing is stopping price gouging, such as the way in which grocery prices have gone up by double digits following the pandemic and have not ever come back down.
To be fair, grocers have very thin margins, and I've heard from a number of family-owned groceries in my state who are concerned, but we're not talking about the average business that raises its costs to directly reflect its increased input and labor costs.
Q: I'd like to turn to another issue that we hear a lot about among the folks that we've been talking to ahead of the election: women's healthcare and bodily autonomy.
Former President Trump has been saying that he will not sign a national abortion ban, that he prefers leaving the issue to the states.
What would you say about that?
A: Former President Trump made it perfectly clear that he was driving towards shifting the Supreme Court to be the most conservative court in our lifetimes. He was proud that he accomplished that result.
In the end, they were able to overturn Roe v. Wade, which is the most significant loss of reproductive freedom in more than 50 years. President Trump crowed that he's the one who killed Roe v. Wade with the results of his actions.
I think folks ought to remember how states across the country, now that he's "leaving it to them" are imposing draconian restrictions, complete bans on abortion care at any time of any kind, no matter what the impact is on the life and health of the mother.
I think President Trump needs to own what he's created, which is effectively a nationwide rollback of reproductive freedom and an empowered grassroots Republican campaign in state after state across the country to further go after access to contraception and IVF and to further restrict reproductive freedom.
Q: In a number of states, including Ohio, whenever abortion has been on the ballot since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the popular vote seems to be overwhelmingly in favor of protecting it. Do you think we could see a similar backlash from voters at the national level in November?
A: Absolutely. I think Republicans have been chasing this objective for a generation, and they have underestimated badly just how motivated women voters are — and frankly, male voters who care deeply about freedom — but more than anything, how motivated American women are to reassert their reproductive freedom rights.
There's a lot of folks who privately — for themselves, for their own family — would not choose abortion for religious reasons or personal reasons, but who are uncomfortable with the power of the state being used to criminalize abortion, to monitor pregnancies, to literally get into the personal business, the private lives and the relations that women have. And they feel as if this is overreach, that this is legislating personal morality to a degree that just isn't comfortably in keeping with their sense of the balance between privacy and public policy.
Q: There were Republicans — notably former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, but also others — who attended the convention.
It appears Vice President Harris is trying to build a coalition, to bring on board folks from the other party, or who might not traditionally vote for a Democrat. Do you think she'll have success with that approach?
A: Absolutely.
I think folks who are weighing this carefully should ask themselves one question: Joe Biden's vice president, his trusted partner, Kamala Harris, is now my party's nominee for president. But Donald Trump's (former) vice president won't even vote for him. Why not?
My hope for the Republican Party is that Donald Trump will lose and lose by a lot, so that the traditional Reagan Republican Party that I grew up with, and that I've known most of my life, will be revived, and this MAGA party that is isolationist and nihilist and populist will decline in its hold on Congress.
Q: You were in the Capitol on January 6th, What was that day like for you?
A: Frankly, pretty traumatic.
We were in the Senate chamber. We didn't realize that there was this huge mob that had come all the way up from outside the White House, surrounded the Capitol and were physically assaulting it. We had no idea that was going on outside. We were in the middle of a heated debate, as Republican senators were standing up and beginning the process of challenging the electoral votes of different states.
In fact, it was my dear friend James Lankford (R-Okla.) who had stood up and begun speaking, and frankly, I was glaring at him right as a specialized unit of the Capitol Police burst into the chamber. These are guys wearing head-to-toe combat gear and carrying large assault rifles.
And one of the Capitol Police I knew well stood up and said, "senators, we must evacuate this chamber right now for your safety and your lives."
And then another guy came bursting through from the hallway right behind me. He was plainclothes, and turned around and pulled this huge weapon from under his overcoat and pointed it at the door. And then through that open door, I could hear the mob coming down the corridor of the Capitol from the House side.
I remember going to Senator (Dianne) Feinstein (D-Calif.), who was the most senior member of the Senate at that point, I think, and speaking to her and her aide about, how do we get out of here quickly, and then literally running for our lives, down a staircase, down a corridor into the basement and down a tunnel to a place where they basically hid the entire Senate for the next couple of hours.
At one point one of the Capitol police officers stood up and said, "one of you idiots has been texting a picture of where we are. We want to make this clear to you, this is not secure. There are not enough of us here to protect you all. Do not disclose your location. We cannot guarantee your safety if you do."
It was a pretty chilling moment.
And once we got to this other place, they rolled in some TVs, and it was literally only then, when they started showing us the CNN broadcast, that I think most of us realized just how close a call we'd had.
We didn't realize that the that the perimeter of the Capitol had been overrun, that several Capitol police officers had been savagely beaten and shot at.
And I'll conclude with this: One of my favorite Capitol police officers, Howie Liebengood, tragically took his own life because of the trauma that he endured trying to defend the Capitol.
I've never gotten over that, and Howie's widow has started a foundation in his honor. This was a tragic day for our nation, for all of us who served there, and particularly for the brave law enforcement officers who protect and defend us in the Capitol.
Q: How does it make you feel when you hear former President Trump saying that he's going to pardon those with January 6th convictions?
A: Of all the dangerous and unmoored and immoral things that he says that scares me the most because these are folks who have been duly investigated, charged, convicted by a jury of their peers in a court of law in the United States, and they're serving jail time for an assault on the United States Capitol.
The idea that they should all be pardoned is irresponsible and reckless, and I shiver to think about what they would do the next day.
I would expect them to then start wreaking vengeance on the judges and the investigators and the elected officials who held them accountable.
And I don't think it's too far of a stretch to imagine that anyone who wants to pardon all these people who he claims are unjustly charged hostages wants to empower them to do us harm.
Q: To wrap up today, Donald Trump was in our area for a rally just over a week ago, in Wilkes-Barre Township. Can we expect to see Vice President Harris here in Northeast Pennsylvania during the campaign?
A: I'm going to be urging that. I had such a great reception today, and I am hopeful that you will see Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and Tim Walz campaigning, not just across Pennsylvania, but in this critical heartland in Northeast Pennsylvania.
I met a lot of great folks today, and I am looking forward to coming back, rolling up my sleeves and campaigning again — and if I understand you right, I ought to bring a presidential candidate with me when I come.
