Dispatch from the heart of the swing state.
“I vote for the convicted”
October can be a brutal month. I’m going to my native country (Union) in central Pennsylvania I saw a sign with the above message outside a house deep in the mountains. His gloating brought me back to past Octobers—2016 and 2020—waiting for the ax to fall. From a numb distance, I can still almost remember the last orderly time, in 2012. Mitt Romney would do bad things, but he was unlikely to threaten the brutal, anti-majoritarian “democracy” we took for granted back then.
My home is Lewisburg, home to Bucknell University (and a federal prison, but we don’t talk about that). It’s always been a beautiful campus, but now it’s boarded up and dark blue; Last time, Biden got 70 percent. But the county is all red, with a plain that divides the city against the countryside, with signs dominating roadsides and yards. Democrats won just 37 percent in Union County in 2020 — slightly better than 35 percent four years ago. As with all of rural Pennsylvania, Harris-Walz’s goal in our 10-county north-central region is simply crashed into the edge of the Republicans. Run for governor against incumbent January 6, 2021 Doug Mastriano in 2022. Josh Shapiro won nearly 43 percent in the Union, and anything like that in rural PA will doom Trump.
Returning home to Union County to campaign and help put up big Harris signs on country roads brought a deep appreciation for the Democratic base that lies beneath the party’s layers of consultants, bureaucrats, fundraisers, pundits and elected officials who feed at the trough of institutional power. The townspeople, whether in Manhattan or Lewisburg, call anyone without a college degree, as well as all white people from rural areas and small towns, Trumps. These classist stereotypes are challenged by the Harris voters you meet here on the doorstep. In identifying them for our latest GOTV push, I found several hundred working-class men and women joined by middle-class independents in affluent suburbs. And it’s not in trendy Lewisburg—we’re campaigning in rusty old towns in several counties like Sunbury, Selinsgrove, Danville and Mifflinburg. In places like this, Harris-Waltz signs are confused with Trump-Vance signs, and our constituents gesture sheepishly at their neighbors.
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Democrats here are people who still try to stand up for decency, if you’ll excuse the fancy old word. These are people who would never vote for a convict, let alone brag about it. My impression is that the Trump years have hardened them in a quiet, Pennsylvania way; they are used to being chased, yelling. There is no longer any vagueness about where you are, no soft middle ground.
Undoubtedly, there are many surprises. I’ve run into a number of female Democrats in the past who supported Trump because they “don’t like the way the country is going” or “the border has been open for years” and Harris did nothing about it. Except they’re white, they don’t fit into any cohort, from the affluent woman in yoga pants to the bandana-wearing Harley rider.
But just as often I was happily surprised. Our “big sign” team just put it up on the big road at the farm for Pam Weaver, a fierce Democrat who lives in her parents’ house, and there are many like her. She reminisced about all the crap she and her mom got in 2020 with their Biden sign and specified that we put the sign outside her porch so she could keep an eye on it.
The second sign speaks of something else, more sad. We went to Juniata County to fix the sabotaged sign. It’s hardly news that Trump takes pleasure in wrongdoing, but what we used to call “toilet humor” is now so inconspicuous in public, even triumphant, it’s just depressing. How will parents explain why this sign is “funny” to their children in this small community?
The most heartening thing I’ve heard is that there are far fewer signs of Trump than last time, and that widespread hostility toward Democrats is waning amid half-disguised signs of encouragement. last wednesday The New York Times reported that County of Lancasterwhere I used to teach turned red. The focus was on how the Democrats’ exhibit and booth received a better-than-usual response at the annual Ephrata Fair Parade. That same day, I was riding with Gary Kendall, a retired engineer and expert sign installer, and he mentioned in passing that he had noticed the same phenomenon while working a booth at the West End Union County Fair a few weeks earlier, as some “older women even giving us thumbs up.”
Since we don’t campaign for Republicans (unless they live with Democrats), I haven’t seen any overt hostility other than barely polite rejections from independent candidates toward Trump. The closest call was when I and another volunteer were in Snyder County, Middleburg, where Shapiro got less than 32 percent and Biden less than 26 percent. In a house decorated with Trumpernalia, our program showed a 21-year-old gender-neutral Democrat, so we went up on the porch and knocked. A middle-aged man came out and barked at us (didn’t we see his “No Solicitation?” sticker) and as we hurried out we heard him yell “damn the Democratic Party!” either to yourself or to someone else. Still, not exactly a threat of mob violence
Friends who read my e-mail reports on this job ask me to predict what Pennsylvania will be like on November 5th, to which I say I’m not that stupid. The Republican base is very solid, almost monolithic, and all we can do is chip away at its edges while making sure that everyone who opposes Trump gets elected. The mood on our part—and perhaps theirs as well—is submissive, even stoic. But if you believed in the Democrats as a “coastal elite” cut off from working people, think again. Here in central Pennsylvania, we are many, many different people—farmers and laborers, professors and techies, retirees and passionate young people. And no one backs down.
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