Hillary Clinton made much during the Democratic primaries of her ties to Scranton, Pennsylvania, a medium-sized industrial town that she promoted as a symbol of blue-collar values. But while Mrs Clinton could claim only that her father lived there, another Democratic presidential candidate had deeper roots in the town.

Joe Biden was born in Scranton in 1942, the first of four children in a working class but upwardly mobile Irish-Catholic family. He moved to Delaware, where his father was a car salesman, at the age of 10 and has lived there ever since.