Dems look to win back wary working class
ThunderRidge’s big man Zach Keller has plenty of talent. Now it’s just a matter of showing it off.
JEANNETTE, PA.» When Joe Biden visited this corner of southwestern Pennsylvania in the final weeks before the election, his goal wasn’t to win it so much as to show the area’s overwhelmingly white working-class electorate that his party was at least willing to try.
“A lot of white, working-class Democrats thought we forgot them,” Biden said after touring a union training facility during a late September swing through Westmoreland County. “I get their sense of being left behind.”
Democrats have offered paeans like that since President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered the New Deal and cemented an alliance with working-class voters. That bond was rooted in the notion that the Democrats’ policies would improves workers’ lives.
But that relationship has steadily frayed, with many working-class voters now casting Democrats as the party of cultural elites who talk down to them and reject their values. Such resentment has even driven workers to vote against their seeming economic self-interest, given that GOP tax policy is often geared toward the well-to-do and business.
Now Biden and his party are hoping that by muscling through passage of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief and economic stimulus bill — with benefits heavily weighted toward lower- and middle-income Americans — they can win back at least a larger share of working-class voters.
The president is flying Tuesday to Delaware County, outside Philadelphia, to help promote the new aid.
Still, that proposition — which Republicans dismiss as a “liberal wish list” — will be tested in places such as Westmoreland County. More than 250 miles west, the county was a Democratic stronghold until
its industrial base withered.
“These are the kind of issues that are a little bit more meat-and-potatoes and that we should focus on in this area,” said Paul Adams, a former county Democratic official.
“Despite the fact that our sympathies may be with other issues,” Adams said, referring to larger efforts to tackle racism and promote gay rights, “it’s hard to get traction with that with the local population.”
Democrats are banking on direct payments of $1,400 to most Americans under the COVID-19 law as a strong counter to that criticism. The package also dramatically expands tax credits for families with children, bolsters unemployment benefits, reduces taxes on student loan debt and lowers costs of the Obama-era health law’s coverage.
Ed Rendell, a former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, said the legislation won’t singlehandedly solve the party’s problems with workingclass voters but is “a good first mile down the road.”
“It is incumbent upon us to make the case — which I believe has always been there to make, we’ve just done a (terrible) job — that we’re the party of the working guy,” Rendell said. “And the Republicans are using smoke and mirrors.”
By some estimates, the law could reduce the nation’s poverty rate by one-third. That may have an outsize impact on Westmoreland County, whose under-65 population receives more federal disability benefits than the national average and where less than one-third of residents have a college degree, according to federal estimates.
The town of Jeannette used to boast of being the “Glass Capital of the World,” but nearly all of those factories are long gone. A nearby Volkswagen plant shuttered in 1988, wiping out 2,500 jobs.
But the strong economic incentives in the relief bill are colliding with the structural support here for former President Donald Trump. Trump 2020 yard signs and flags — often carefully preserved against winter snows — still line the hilly roadsides beyond the hulking husks of the abandoned bottle works. The Democratic county sheriff became a Republican last summer, saying his old party wasn’t supporting law enforcement strongly enough during demonstrations that swept the country over police brutality and racism.
Like Biden, Trump campaigned in Westmoreland County, and he won the county by nearly 30 percentage points. But Biden got about 11,000 more votes here than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. That’s significant given that Biden won Pennsylvania by only about 80,500 votes.
Bill Bretz, chairman of the county’s Republican Party, said the new direct economic benefits are canceled out by other Biden administration policies. That includes nixing the Keystone XL pipeline, which has raised fears that Pennsylvania’s natural gas producers could face similar limits in the name of battling climate change.
“There’s a lot of people who are still registered Democrats, who still hold on to those working-class Democratic values,” Bretz said. “But their sensitivities are violated by the national Democratic platform.”
People such as Mary Wilmes, who owns a gift shop in the county seat of Greensburg, doesn’t like to rile customers with talk of politics. But she did offer praise for Biden and his work promoting the stimulus. “He’s giving you the sense that he cares about people,” she said.
“It’s not like before,” Wilmes added, “when what we had was, ‘It’s all about himself.’ ”
The white working class helped fuel Trump’s 2016 rise, but those voters have actually been gravitating to Republicans since 1992, according to research by Noam Lupu, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University. Working-class African Americans have remained steadfastly loyal to Democrats, but Trump saw his support among Latinos improve in 2020.
Trump won 62% of white voters without a college degree in November, according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of the electorate.
Judgment has become as much a part of the COVID-19 pandemic as a pile of crumpled masks. Seeking to avoid criticism, some people (and organizations) have been known to photoshop masks onto faces in their social media posts. Others, seeking to criticize, have blown up once-friendly group chats over COVID-questionable invitations — Heidi Cruz’s neighbors providing only the most high-profile example.
Those who’ve been hunkered down for months can’t stand seeing their friends’ selfies from inside bars and restaurants and airplanes. Friendships have ended over arguments about the safety of attending a protest or going on a date. And it’s not only doublemaskers condemning maskless “covidiots.” It’s the eye-rolling reserved for anyone still wiping down their groceries.
Even vaccines, which ought to be cause for celebration, have become a source of tension, magnified by distinctions in eligibility criteria — smokers versus teachers, diabetics versus trash collectors. Looking at my state’s vaccination schedule, I seem to rank after “shipping port and terminal workers” but before “bottled beverage industry workers.” Somehow, it feels like a comment on my worth.
So along with anxiety, confinement and isolation, we’ve suffered 12 months of resenting other people’s travel photos on Instagram and their roomy home offices on Zoom. Twelve months of fraught conversations with friends and family over whether going to the grocery store means you’re still quarantining — or selfishly risking the health of an underpaid Instacart shopper. A whole category of derisive internet meme is devoted to people who wear their masks below their noses.
The acrimony is understandable. Passing judgment probably had a useful evolutionary function back in the days when humans were running from sabertoothed tigers, says Tasha Eurich, an organizational psychologist. Humans survived only with one another’s help, and it was useful to have a sense of what was right and wrong for the group. The pandemic has thrown us back into a world where the collective looms large: With a deadly disease in the air, each person’s decisions affect other people’s health.
At the same time, local authorities have often left people to make up their own minds as to what’s risky and what’s not. This creates a perfect breeding ground for censure. Expect it to get worse as more states drop their COVID restrictions.
Righteous indignation has an addictive quality, says Eurich. But all this side-eyeing is exhausting. “There’s an empirical link between being overly judgmental and the amount of stress we feel,” she said. Getting worked up about other people’s behavior “is like drinking poison and waiting for your enemy to die.”
If shaming is so costly, why do people still do it? Eurich says it’s psychologically easier to decide that so-and-so is a bad person than to accept the dissonant idea that a good person might make a “bad” choice.
Shaming also offers an illusion of control. “He went to a bar, so of course he got COVID” is a way of keeping distant from someone else’s situation — and hoping our own choices are protecting us. It shields us from recognizing how little control we really have over a noisy, indifferent and sometimes dangerous world.
The pandemic has undermined our mental well-being. By any measure, rates of anxiety and depression are up. And judgment is just wearing us down further.
It’s also undermining public health. Yes, norms around behaviors like masking are good. But if people know they’ll be judged for testing positive, they’ll avoid getting tested. Associating getting COVID with being irresponsible nudges people to lie to contact tracers, to household members (“Yes, of course I wore my mask the whole time”) and even to symptom-checkers.
Earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic, historians noted that after the 1918 flu pitted fearful neighbor against fearful neighbor, the people who’d lived through that era really didn’t want to talk about it. I’m starting to understand why.
Eurich says ideally we’d be able to muster some compassion for each other — and ourselves — in this difficult time. “Forgiveness is a superpower. It actually helps us function in the best possible way,” she says. “Empathy is the antidote to ruminating about other people’s choices.”
But she concedes that some people might find such perspectivetaking a bridge too far. For them, a different approach can be nearly as helpful: The next time someone makes an unwise choice, make a conscious decision to refrain from thinking of them as a bad person. This sort of motivated choice reduces anger and, after 12 months of pandemic, can provide a vacation from judgment.
As vacations go, that’s not one on my bucket list. But with real travel off the table, a visit to the Isle of Indifference doesn’t sound bad.
Martin Truex Jr. pulled away in the final laps Sunday at Phoenix Raceway for his first NASCAR Cup Series victory of the season and 28th overall.
Truex beat the four championship finalists from last year. He had failed to advance into the season-ending finale for the first time in four years and could only watch as Chase Elliott beat Joey Logano, Denny Hamlin and Brad Keselowski for the title at the desert oval. All four tailed Truex across the finish line.
Phoenix Raceway will again host the championship race in November.
“To come here and win this, I wish it was November,” Truex said. “Hopefully, we can come back in November and have a shot at the championship.”
The 40-year-old Truex struggled earlier this year, finishing 25th at Daytona. But he’s raced much better in recent weeks, finishing third at Homestead and sixth at Las Vegas last week.
He was dominant during the final half Sunday and became the first driver from last year’s 16-car playoff field to qualify for the postseason. Truex blew past Logano on the final restart with 25 laps remaining and was never challenged again.
It was good day for Toyota and Joe Gibbs Racing, which had the winner in Truex and Hamlin in the third spot.
Kyle Larson — who raced to his first victory with Hendrick Motorsports last week in Las Vegas — had to start at the back of the field after a pre-race inspection failure. He worked his way back to the front and briefly led about halfway through the race.
But soon after he made a critical error, getting flagged for speeding on pit road. He had to pass through pit road as a penalty, causing him to fall to the back of the lead lap in 22nd place. He finished seventh.
Logano — who led 143 laps — won the second stage after leading the final 35 laps during a long stretch of green-flag racing. But he couldn’t hold back Truex, who won his ninth race with Joe Gibbs Racing.
Hamlin was fast early in the race, leading for 31 laps until the competition caution midway through the first stage. B
Off a turnover, Castle View had an easy layup in its crosshairs. ThunderRidge’s Zach Keller had different ideas, chasing the Sabercats player down and pinning the ball against the backboard.
Then everything stopped. Keller let out a scream and the whole gym went silent as he lay on the ground.
Keller has big basketball aspirations and the immense talent needed to reach them. The only question mark over the past two seasons has been whether the 6foot-9 center can remain healthy enough to stay on the court.
Devastating injuries are a part of sports. For many they can ruin a season. For high school athletes, they can derail a future. Keller saw that first hand with his oldest sister, Paige, who was once a promising talent herself on the basketball court.
“She now has two screws in her foot, and the colleges kind of wrote her off because she was injured and she didn’t really come back the same,” said Keller, whose parents were Division I athletes and sister Amanda plays volleyball at Bridgeport University in Connecticut. “So I want to make sure that I prove to the colleges that I’m fine.”
That’s what made his mid-season injury so scary for Keller and those around him.
It served as a reminder basketball can be taken away in an instant. Fortunately, it was only a low ankle sprain, and he has since recovered after missing a few games. He played sparingly in ThunderRidge’s first two Class 5A state playoff games — blowout wins over Rocky Mountain (8156) and Douglas County (80-55) — and should be available when
the Grizzlies play in the Great 8.
But this isn’t the first time the big man has dealt with a serious injury. He missed almost the entirety of his sophomore year when he opted to have hip surgery on a torn labrum before his prep season began.
“We were expecting Zach to emerge on the scene and be a high-impact player immediately and we’ve had a lot of sophomores do similar type things,” ThunderRidge head coach Joe Ortiz said. “But obviously that was a tough break.”
Keller’s sophomore season appeared to be out the window. But he attacked rehab and came back earlier than expected, averaging 6.4 points over eight games.
“I came back two months earlier than I was supposed to,” Keller said. “And so I’ve always wanted to get better every single day since then. I kind of opened my mind up to (the idea that) basketball can be taken away at any moment. So I can’t take it for granted. And that’s kind of how I look at life from now on.”
Keller’s quick recovery was enough for college coaches to start believing again. Utah, TCU and Boise State have already reached out with scholarship offers and others have been keeping in close contact, including Colorado, Colorado State, Wake Forest
and Virginia Tech.
Keller is ready to make a name for himself in high school basketball. ThunderRidge is good enough to make a run to the championship at the Broadmoor World Arena this weekend. The Grizzlies were picked No. 2 in the state before the season. But injuries have hurt them more than even Ortiz could’ve expected.
“Nothing easy,” Ortiz said. “We lost our backup point guard because he moved for family reasons. Our starting point guard has only played two games this year, he’s a three-year starter … Our third-string point guard is a freshman and will probably be a threeyear starter. He’s been out with a broken collarbone. We’re down to point guard number four and so we’re getting tested big time.”
The fourth-seeded Grizzlies (10-2) next host fifth-seeded Chaparral (12-3) in the 5A Great 8. Win that and they will likely have a matchup with the top team in the state, the Cherry Creek Bruins, in the semifinals.
“I love playing with (my teammates). I know even if I didn’t come back, they could make a good run in the playoffs,” Keller said. “And I would say, have a good chance to win it.”
Now that Keller is back with the team, it makes them even more dangerous.