Former Vice President Joe Biden’s supporters sounded off on the possibility of their hometown favorite running for president, as many questioned if he and his family can handle yet another run for the presidency.
Some Biden supporters in Scranton, Pennsylvania, who have been loyal backers of the former vice president in the place he has called home, are skeptical about if he and his family can handle running for president for the third time.
“When you talk about Biden in Scranton, you talk about him running for president; people will say, ‘Can his family go through all this, and will his age be a factor?’ And it’s not because of the office he’s choosing. It’s because we care about him, his health,” Evie Rafalko McNulty, a local Biden supporter and Democratic National Committee (DNC) member, told the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“It’s not how it’s going to affect us. It’s about how will his choice to run for president affect him,” McNulty, who also serves as a local elected official, added. “People are just genuinely concerned.”
Other Biden supporters shared that while they personally like Biden, they fear the national electorate might look at him as the “old guard.”
“A younger candidate might fare better, like Kamala Harris,” said architect Bill Byron, referring to the California Democrat senator who announced her intentions to run for the 2020 presidency Monday morning.
“I think that we do need young, fresh blood. We need energy, we need new ideas,” said Elaine Donly, a 64-year-old social worker who voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the 2016 Democrat primary.
“Quite frankly, the baby boomers and beyond have run this country long enough,” she added. “We’re in a quagmire here. We need to get out.”
Biden mentioned in January that he will announce by the end of the month if he will run for president in 2020.
But if the former vice president mounts a presidential bid for the third time, he may have to answer to explosive revelations about a $1.5 billion deal he and his son Hunter made with the Chinese government-backed Bank of China.
The deal was made just ten days after the vice president and his son returned from a trip to China aboard Air Force Two.
Breitbart News Senior Contributor-at-Large Peter Schweizer, in his book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, detailed how Biden may have helped Hunter secure the $1.5 billion deal with a China-based investment firm that had ties to a Chinese atomic energy company indicted for “nuclear power conspiracy against the United States.”
“The FBI arrests and charges senior officials in this company with stealing nuclear secrets in the United States. Specifically, they’re trying to get access to something called the AP-1000 nuclear reactor that is very similar to the ones that we put on U.S. submarines,” Schweizer wrote.
“So again, you have the son of the vice president, a close aide to the secretary of state who are investing in a company that is trying to steal nuclear secrets in the United States. It’s a stunning story, and here’s the thing: none of this is required to be disclosed because they’ve figured out a way to get around these disclosure laws,” Schweizer continued.