LORDSTOWN – Seventeen-year-old Taylor Hudak, a senior at Lordstown High School, will be casting her first vote in November.

Her mother Tammy, a lifelong Democrat from Lordstown and employee at GM Lordstown’s fabricating plant, talked her daughter into going to the rally Thursday morning at the United Auto Workers Local 1714 hall featuring Vice President Joe Biden, stumping for Democrats Hillary Clinton and Ted Strickland, who is running for the U.S. Senate.

“I want my daughter to be an informed voter,” said Hudak as she waited for Biden to come to the podium. “She is taking a political debate class, and I think this experience will help her do her civic duty.”

Biden talked for a little less than an hour touting the attributes of middle class values, the people of the Mahoning Valley, and the potential danger of a Donald Trump presidency, especially in the matters of foreign policy.

The Republican nominee’s irresponsible statements about ISIS and his complimentary language about Soviet President Vladimir Putin, Biden said, has people from the Baltics to Iraq nervous about the intentions of America.

“You don’t know how many diplomats I have to tell them, he (Trump) doesn’t speak for America,” Biden said. “They usually call me a foreign policy expert, but from where I come from, an expert means someone who carries a briefcase.”

The jovial vice president sprinkled his talk around one liners and anecdotes about growing up in Scranton, Pa. Biden returned to the site of a 2012 campaign stop, lauding the United Auto Workers for being the first to come to the aid and invest in the American worker when the economy took a nose dive in 2008-09.

Biden, who was introduced by former Gov. Strickland and U.S. Rep. Timothy J. Ryan, D-Howland, said business people like Trump still believe the American worker makes too much money and has lost the desire to work hard. He said a Trump presidency would put more economic pressure on a middle class already struggling to make ends meet.

“He (Trump) doesn’t understand you any more than you can understand living in a 30,000-square-foot penthouse in a New York skyscraper,” Biden said.

Biden said Trump wouldn’t understand about getting 10,000 more miles out of a car or telling a child they don’t have enough money to send them back to college for another year.

“Trump is choking because that silver spoon in his mouth has often been joined by a foot,” he said.

The vice president also took on Strickland’s opponent, Republican U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, who Biden said was largely responsible for the economic troubles when Strickland as governor had to raid the state’s rainy day fund.

“He was (President George W.) Bush’s guy who wrote the (federal) budget,” Biden said about Portman.

Among the 200 people in the hall’s gymnasium were union workers and elected officials like Warren Mayor Doug Franklin and Trumbull County commissioners Mauro Cantalamessa and Dan Polivka, the county Democrat Party chairman, who spent some time privately with the vice president after the rally.

“He has quite a personality,” said Polivka about Biden who told stories about serving as a county commissioner in his hometown of Scranton, Pa. “He said it was too hard so he ran for the Senate.”

The vice president also met about two dozen Republican backers standing along Salt Springs Road as his motorcade drove up to the union hall. Area Republican Party leaders Randy Law and Mark Munroe were among those holding pro-Trump signs.

“It was a friendly protest and, we had fun,” Law said. “I believe the vice president saw our signs.”

Law said he objected to Biden saying that Trump was using irresponsible language in the foreign policy arena.

“I think they are using the playbook from the Reagan days and it didn’t work back then,” Law said.

Later in the day, Biden visited the Democratic Party tent at the Canfield Fair as his 27-vehicle parade drove through the large midway in front of the grandstand. Fairgoers lined three or four deep to shake his hand, get a hug from or pose for a selfie with the vice president.

At the union hall, Judy Puskar of Brookfield, a retired English and Spanish teacher, said she thought Biden would have made a good president.

“He speaks to every man and he has never forgotten his roots,” said Puskar, a member of the Trumbull County Democratic Women’s Caucus who voted for Biden as a delegate to the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

Puskar said she doesn’t know how Trump has assembled the support of some Mahoning Valley voters, but she is voting for Clinton.

“She is the candidate for the children and women’s rights,” she said. “She speaks to the middle class.”

One teenager said he skipped school to hear the vice president. After the speech, Chase Harchen, 17, of Boardman, got to talk to Biden.

“He asked me about my college plans,” Harchen said. “Imagine that, the vice president concerned about someone like me. He was so personable and genuine.”

Kasey King of Austintown, a member of UAW Local 1714, said she thinks people are tired of politics in general because so many people want to see government run like a business.

“But government is not a business, it doesn’t produce or sell anything,” King said. “It is there to serve the people.”