State of uncertainty
America’s political fault lines run through Pennsylvania, a state key to Trump’s 2016 win that is once again poised to play a crucial role
JOHNSTOWN, PA.— Patrons on the patio of the Stadium Pub and Grill looked out across the Conemaugh River at the parking lot outside the train station, where risers were being set up early on a late September evening. Over a beer, they remarked on the sudden spate of political attention their town was receiving.
“One thing, they’re really reviving venues,” one guy said. “When Donald
Trump Jr. was here last week at the bandshell — when’s the last time anyone saw anything at the bandshell? Now over there …” He gestured to the train station.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was due to make an appearance outside the station a few hours later, and a line of cars stretched for miles seeking entrance to the socially distanced rally that would conclude his train tour of western Pennsylvania.
With less than a month to go before the U.S. election, Pennsylvania is under the national microscope. American political watchers obsess about electoral college scenarios, and recent conventional wisdom says Pennsylvania may be the most likely to be the tipping point state that throws victory to one candidate or another on Nov. 3. A state that had voted for Democrats stretching back to 1992, Pennsylvania sent its 20 electoral votes to Donald Trump in 2016 by a margin of fewer than 50,000 votes.
This has meant some time in the spotlight for the small, industrial city of Johnstown, population 19,195. It’s a picturesque place surrounded by green mountains, where old stone institutional buildings sit near factories on streets bracketed by the Conemaugh and Stonycreek rivers. It has an incline funicular carrying people and cars up Yoder Hill’s 72-degree slope. It’s also the poorest town in the state, with a poverty rate near 40 per cent and an average annual income of $24,294 (U.S.).
Like the state as a whole, this union town has a historically Democratic electorate that voted for Trump in 2016. And while those at Biden’s rally show why he’s fighting for votes here, the gang on the patio explained why they’re sticking with the president.
“Trump’s helped out around here. People I know who live around here are coal people, energy people. Biden gets back in, they’re going to destroy the energy industry,” said Paul, a selfdescribed “union guy,” while his friends at the table nodded. A woman at the next table shouted out periodically that Trump was the regular guy for the regular people.
Paul said he’s for lower taxes, and against socialism, and that career politicians like Biden had a lot of time to demonstrate what they could do for Johnstown, and haven’t done much.
Many in Canada, I told him, struggled to understand the enduring appeal of a president who could fairly be described as outrageous, chaotic and divisive.
“Yeah!” Paul said, smiling. “Yeah. He’s not a politician. And I think that’s more in line with a lot of American people, especially a lot of rural people.
“Everybody’s tired of politicians,” he went on. “Is he bold, brash and outrageous? Oh, yeah. But if you look past all those things, he’s at least trying to do what he said he would do.”
In the two days following the first presidential debate, I travelled across Pennsylvania to get a sense of the electorate in the state that could decide the election. I heard two points of consensus: that the debate had been a debacle, and that people were afraid of what was coming after the election.
Aside from that, agreement was hard to come by.
The partisan divide that’s emerged so starkly across the United States is mirrored in the Keystone State: in the big cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, voters are overwhelmingly Democrats and think that Trump has been a disaster. But in rural areas, people don’t just have Trump lawn signs; they drape their houses in numerous Trump flags and banners, wear hats and T-shirts with Trump slogans, even plant ornate hillside gardens beside the highway spelling out Trump’s name.
And in the suburbs, traditionally Republican but trending Democratic in the past few election cycles — well, that’s where experts say the real fight is. Recent polls indicate that the Whole Foods vote is leaning heavily to Biden, but Trump has been making an appeal directly to them — talking about “suburban housewives” who love him, and offering racebaiting suggestions that Biden would “destroy” the suburbs.
Travelling across Pennsylvania and talking to people who proclaim unyielding support for Trump, you hear his rhetoric echoed in fears about “what’s happening” in cities. But most regular Trump voters on the street don’t talk with the conspiracist’s manic intensity that’s sometimes heard at his rallies. There’s a striking banality to their allegiance — talking to me, they were friendly and often expressed embarrassment about the way Trump talks. Some told stories of having good-natured rivalries with friends or spouses who were Biden supporters.
They said Facebook videos had them worried that mail-in ballots presented an opportunity for fraudulent voting. They were overwhelmingly antiabortion and consider the movement to outlaw it a ballotbox issue. They are very concerned about the looming threat of “socialism” and high taxes. They believe Trump, as a businessman, will be better for the economy, especially manufacturing jobs. Some volunteered that the country needs a better health-care program and they think Trump — though he’s provided no plan, while fighting to dismantle the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act — is more likely to deliver it. They unapologetically support Trump’s opposition to environmental regulation, believing it will help the local coal industry. They viewed COVID-19 as something like a hurricane — a disaster that would have been just as bad no matter who was president.
And while very few said the words “fake news,” they chalked up Trump’s scandals to media outlets that don’t like him, and who make a big deal out of his uncouth presentation — a presentation some feel is part of his charm.
Like those who dislike Trump, they seem exhausted with politics after his first term. Their conversations with me were characterized by a matter-offact cynicism about politicians of all stripes. If they’re all liars and it’s hard to know what to believe, they suggested, you might as well stick with the guy who drives the establishment crazy and talks about things they feel are the material of their cultural fabric, like coal, manufacturing, gun rights and opposition to abortion.
Retired state trooper John Elliott was sipping a coffee on the sidewalk of Bedford’s storybook main street while a couple of senior citizens with horns practised marching band standards in the park a few blocks away. In Bedford County, Trump won 83 per cent of the vote in 2016. “I appreciate the president and I support the president,” Elliott said. “Sometimes he doesn’t say things that are well-taken or in context. But I think he has the backs of the people, as far as what they know is right.”
Elliott talked about the fear people in tiny Bedford have of civil unrest. A few months earlier, after a Black Lives Matter marcher walking from Milwaukee to Washington was shot by a Trump supporter outside the town, there were rumours the protesters would come into Bedford to “burn down the police station.” Local residents armed with AR-15 rifles showed up to defend the town. The protesters never arrived, but the incident showed the local anxiety about the protests, Elliott said. “When you live in a city or in a community, you expect to be safe. Small businesses like these, when they’re afraid to even open up for fear of people coming in and vandalizing and looting them, when they’re not even part of the issue, that’s not right to me.”
Every politician has skeletons in the closet, he said — we just don’t hear about most of them. In Trump’s case, “it’s coming out all the time. The four years he was in office, he was nothing but lambasted the whole time ... and he just blows it off. I give him credit for that. He just lets it go over his head and then continues to say what he wants to, and puts his foot in his mouth. Personally, I support what he does.”
It’s a long way from Bedford to Philadelphia’s south side — more than three hours on the interstate, and even further psychologically. Trump talked during the debate about the need for poll watchers to keep an eye out as “bad things happen in Philadelphia,” but things seem pretty good during a quick visit.
The neighbourhoods around the Italian market are among the most vibrantly urban in
North America: Black and white and Latino people filled sidewalks in front of lowrise row houses on narrow streets lined with parked cars. The parks were full of soccer and basketball players at dusk on a Thursday. People sat at tables on sidewalks eating cheesesteaks and tacos. Neighbours were out on stoops in face masks.
The windows of houses were filled with signs that say things like “Another union household for Biden-Harris” and “Black Lives Matter” and “Hate has no home here” in multiple languages.
The people I met in Philadelphia described Trump as a threat to democracy, to the rule of law, to any sense of unity and stability in the country. Here, in one of those “Democrat-run” cities Trump says are succumbing to anarchy, people expressed no fear of crime or civil unrest — instead, they said they were afraid of Trump’s reaction to them.
A woman sitting on her stoop lamented the state of a country where people can’t even talk to each other anymore — and where the president wouldn’t even convincingly denounce white supremacist militias. “I disagreed with George Bush’s policies, but I never doubted he was a decent person, or was at least trying to do what was right,” she said.
Beth Howard, a mother of three who works in clinical research and lives in the area, told me she and her neighbours cannot “fathom” what Trump supporters are thinking. “It’s very hard to comprehend. I try not to get too comfortable being in this bubble, because that’s where I was at four years ago. And I was completely gobsmacked and blindsided. So I’m trying to pay attention to what other people in the country are saying and doing and trying to convince as many people as I can to vote.”
Howard said the Black Lives Matter protest movement has inspired her to think public opinion about racial injustice might finally be changing. “I hate the way the administration responds to this stuff, you know, by shouting law and order, and pretending like shooting at people with rubber bullets is the way to solve the problem.”
The biggest issue for Howard in this election, by far, is that it feels existential. “This election is about the future of our country’s democracy,” Howard said. “It’s a slippery slope from the way things are right now to just the complete upheaval of the entire groundwork that’s been in place. Not guaranteeing a peaceful transfer power is like — it’s mind-boggling.”
The suburbs lie, geographically and politically, between this urban-rural divide. Much like the swing states that famously decide which candidate wins the most votes in the U.S. electoral college, many analysts think suburban voters could decide this election — especially women, who in the 2018 midterm elections voted for Democrats in large numbers. Women in places like Berwyn.
A 30-minute drive from downtown Philadelphia, Berwyn is made up of winding, leafy and sidewalkless streets, where children’s sports equipment and Halloween decorations fill front yards. You see the odd Biden or Black Lives Matter lawn sign, but even more signs about a township zoning issue. In 2016, the county around Berwyn voted for Hillary Clinton over Trump by 53 per cent to 43 per cent. In the 2018 midterm elections, turnout was way up and voters chose Democrats in both statewide races on the ballot by at least a 20-point margin. Biden’s hope rests on maintaining or increasing that swing.
In a parking lot outside a Whole Foods and an Orange Theory fitness, I heard more support for Biden than for Trump.
But it wasn’t universal. Gia Scott, loading groceries into the trunk of her car, called the debate “embarrassing” and “immature.” But it changed nothing for her. “I am a Trump supporter. I don’t really like him, but I agree with his policies.
“I think everybody around here, probably, are gonna vote for him, but they’re afraid to say so, to put like signs out. But they’re gonna vote for him.”
If polls can be trusted, it seems voters are moving in the other direction. A Monmouth University survey released Tuesday showed Biden leading in Pennsylvania 54 per cent to 42 per cent (with only two per cent undecided), up from a fourpoint advantage reported by the same pollster a month ago.
School teacher Melissa Joseph is skeptical the gap is so big. “I’m nervous,” she said. “I think this is gonna be a very close race. And I think there’s going to be a lot of contention on both sides, all the way up through the election, including after, and it makes me nervous.”
American democracy itself is at stake in this election, Joseph says, a dangerous situation in a country she believes has lost the ability to find the kind of compromises she teaches her students are a pillar of their system of government.
I told her that some analysts say suburban women around Philadelphia — women like her — could decide the election.
“For me, there’s no decision to make. I think that the only choice in this election is Biden,” Joseph said. “I don’t agree 100 per cent with Biden, but it’s between the two choices. And I think between our two choices, he’s the only direction that we really can go in order to start moving our democracy back to where it needs to be.”
“For me, there’s no decision to make. I think that the only choice in this election is Biden. I don’t agree 100 per cent with Biden, but it’s between the two choices.” MELISSA JOSEPH SCHOOL TEACHER
“I appreciate the president and I support the president. Sometimes he doesn’t say things that are well-taken or in context. But I think he has the backs of the people, as far as what they know is right.” JOHN ELLIOTT RETIRED STATE TROOPER