Joe Biden gives his first election season speech in Ohio, says GOP ‘will bankrupt the middle class’

Joe Biden gave his first speech this campaign season in Ohio on Thursday, attacking all three GOP candidates and lauding Obama's rescue of the auto industry. 

Speaking to more than 500 United Auto Workers union members and local officials in Toledo, Ohio, Biden played the traditional role of a running mate, going after the President's Republican opponents by name.

“Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, these guys have a fundamentally different economic philosophy than we do,” Biden said, CNN reported. "If you give any one of these guys the keys to the White House, they will bankrupt the middle class once again." 

More from GlobalPost: Joe Biden meets Latin American leaders, won't back down on legalization

Ohio has picked the winning presidential candidate in the past 12 elections, voting Democrat three times and the Republican five times since 1980, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. Obama won the state in 2008 with 51.4 percent of the vote, but Republicans have since dominated political offices statewide, according to Bloomberg. 

As a key battleground state in the upcoming November elections, it was a natural place for Biden to kick off the Obama campaign's most visible effort to date to win a second term in the White House, according to CNN. 

Biden lauded Obama's efforts to rescue American automakers General Motors and Chrysler, and the hundreds of thousands of jobs both provide, the Chicago Tribune reported.

More from GlobalPost: Super Tuesday: Showdown in Ohio

"The guy I work with every day, the president -– he didn't flinch," Biden said of the auto industry bailout, the Tribune reported. "He knew that resurrecting the industry wasn’t going to be popular. He knew he was taking a chance. But he believed -– he wasn’t going to give up a million jobs in the iconic industry America invented."

Biden also criticized the Republican candidates' reception of the bailout, Politico reported. 

“Governor Romney [said] ‘Let Detroit go bankrupt… he called [the bailout] worse than bankruptcy,’” Biden said. “Newt Gingrich said [the bailout] was a mistake.”

Vice President Biden, who grew up blue collar in Scranton, Pennsylvania, is a perfect fit for pitching Obama to this demographic of America, Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University in Houston, told Bloomberg. 

“He’s made a career out of putting on a hard hat, eating doughnuts and talking to people on an assembly line,” said Brinkley, who is from Perrysburg, Ohio, about 10 miles south of Toledo. “That’s what his shtick is, so it makes perfect sense that he’s going to be really beginning his active campaign participation in Toledo.”

Biden has a series of four speeches planned on the campaign trail; his next stop will be in Florida. 

More from GlobalPost: Rising gas prices may harm Obama's re-election chances