Pennsylvania is the most important battleground in this year’s election. A former manufacturing powerhouse that has played a pivotal part in the development of American democracy since the colonial era, the Keystone State is today a laboratory for the biggest trends redefining politics: above all, working- and lower-middle-class voters’ shift from the Democratic Party of their forebears to the GOP. Not to the generic Republican Party—to Donald Trump’s party.
Summarized briefly, the worldview of this crucial voting bloc goes something like this: The Biden-Harris economy is battering my finances, no matter what the government statistics say; illegal immigration and crime are a big problem; the public-health response to Covid abridged my traditional liberties in intolerable ways; Trump might be an insufferable asshole, but he often has a point. And I’m not weird for feeling or voicing any of this.
And therein lies the risk in the rhetorical strategy—denounced by Sen. Bernie Sanders but eagerly embraced by Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz—in framing the nominees on the other side of the national divide as “weird.”
With 19 Electoral College votes up for grabs in a state whose politics have proved notoriously difficult to predict, both campaigns are devoting a great deal of attention to Pennsylvania. As Charles McElwee, the founder of RealClearPennsylvania, himself a native of the state, told me, “it’s a place of culturally fractious regions, where the margins are so different by region, that if one group turns out more than the other, it can result in random and split outcomes.”
In 2016, Trump carried the state by a one-percentage-point margin. Four years later, Joe Biden bested Trump by a similarly narrow margin. As of this writing, the RealClearPolitics average has Trump ahead by a single percentage point. Yet that raw projection, which accounts for Biden’s disastrous debate performance, must be taken with other factors, including the overwhelming popularity of the state’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, who made Kamala Harris’s veep shortlist; and Sen. John Fetterman, whose influence seems to wax the more he distances himself from die-hard progressives. The curious presence of RFK Jr. also can’t be dismissed.
“Both campaigns are devoting a great deal of attention to Pennsylvania.”
Nor do polling averages begin to capture the complexity of the state’s triple polarization between three broad camps: solidly social-conservative, traditional Republican voters arrayed across some four-dozen rural counties; Democratic-leaning black voters in the urban cores of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, now increasingly joined by professionals and affluent suburbanites with Ukraine flags pitched in their front yards; and finally, heavily Catholic voters in old industrial regions “who were historically Democrats” but who “liked Trump’s message [in 2016], and continue to like his message,” as McElwee put it.
I’m-not-weird voters dominate that last camp. Needless to say, high turnout among this group is critical for Trump’s campaign, while Kamala Harris must hope that they stay home or uphold their ancient Democratic loyalties. What motivates them? How did they go from hating George W. Bush and Mitt Romney and voting for Obama to now backing Trump?
To find out, I traveled to Northampton County, in eastern Pennsylvania close to the border with New Jersey and about an hour and a half’s drive from New York City, to meet Donald Russo and his sister, Elise Gasda. Retired lawyer and local-newspaper columnist Donald, aged 71, and paralegal Elise, 69, are the uncle and mother, respectively, of my friend Matt Gasda, the rising New York playwright and essayist who, needless to say, doesn’t necessarily share the politics of his elder kin.
Reporting on US politics over the past decade, I’ve met many voters who match their political profile—but none who so perfectly embody the generational, cultural, and economic forces driving away erstwhile Obama voters and Bush haters from the Democratic Party.
“My mom and dad were both die-hard Democrats,” said Elise as we sat down for beers at an outdoor biergarten in Bethlehem, a legacy of the Moravian migrants who settled this area before the founding. The city is home to the now-abandoned smoke stacks of Bethlehem Steel—the industrial giant that forged much of Manhattan’s towering skyline before free trade depressed its business beginning in the 1970s, finally putting it out of its misery in the 1990s.
“The Democrats were the party of industrial democracy and the welfare state.”
Working-class Italian migrants who arrived at the turn of the 20th century, Elise’s and Don’s grandparents quickly resolved that “they were going to be Democrats,” Don added. Especially after the Depression, the Democrats were the party of industrial democracy and the welfare state, and “Grandma used to walk around saying, ‘Son of a bitch, Hoover.’” Elise added: “We had a plaque of JFK on the wall.”
“In 2016, I was solidly Democratic,” Elise recalled. “In 2020, I would still never vote for Trump. I was still reading The New York Times and The Washington Post, which I don’t touch now.” There were Trumpy relatives who urged her to give the brash developer and reality-TV star a second look, “but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t vote for Trump. So I voted Hillary and Biden.”
So what changed? The short answer is: The Covid lockdowns and other restrictive pandemic measures, as well as the establishment’s heavy-handed response to the Trump phenomenon—all circa 2020 and 2021: “That era opened my eyes about many things. I got the vaccine cause my husband has leukemia, and I believed what I was told: Unless I want to kill my husband, I had to get the vaccine—”
“How many did you get?” Don interjected.
“I just got the initial Moderna two-shot deal,” Elise replied. “Just the initial two-dose.”
“You might just make it.”
Ignoring her brother’s gallows humor, Elise went on: “I just saw such a self-righteousness: ‘You don’t care about public health, you don’t care about other people’s health if you don’t get the booster.’ It opened my eyes to this divisiveness: ‘If you don’t agree with this, you’re a bad person.’”
Then there was the Silicon Valley-led censorship regime of recent years: “I remember Trump was kicked off Twitter. I remember saying to my husband, ‘Sorry, I don’t like the guy either, but that’s not good.’ To my mind it was like, No, you can’t kick a person off [social media] because half of the population doesn’t like him, and at the time, he was the commander-in-chief. My husband couldn’t believe that I had that opinion. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, I saw him as an American hero.”
Compounding all this, for Elise, was her sense of being ostracized over her shifting views on politics and public health: “My friends are … all liberal Democrats. If I said anything about vaccines or masking, they would jump down my throat. My friend is a nurse, and she would say, ‘I’m a nurse,’ implying that she cares about other people dying more than I do. Or if I said the vaguest things about Trump—not saying I support him, but entertaining the vaguest idea and saying, ‘That’s interesting’—they would get so angry. I remember one friend said something that hurt me a lot, ‘Elise, we don’t know who you are anymore.’”
Don added: “They know what they believe, and they don’t want to discuss it. Think about that! ‘I don’t want to discuss it.’”
Don’s own political journey has been more circuitous. But his, too, reflects the emerging tradition of Trump-supporting Democrats. In the early 1970s, when he was still an undergraduate student, he joined a local peacenik group attached to the antiwar liberal George McGovern’s doomed presidential campaign: “The local Democrats wanted nothing to do with McGovern,” he recalled. The peace group “had us go to Allentown among the blue-collar workers. We were these hippie looking types with long hair. I was a bit like that. And the group’s leaders told us, ‘Tell them Nixon is committing genocide in Vietnam!’ And I said, ‘I’m in these people’s houses. They’ve got pictures of their sons in uniform. I’m not gonna tell them they’re sons are genocidaires! Let’s talk about what’s happening to the unions, with the labor movement, how the Nixon administration hasn’t been good for the steel industry. Let’s talk about bread-and-butter issues.’ I hate Nixon, too, but…”
After earning his law degree in 1978, Don was elected to the state’s Democratic Committee. All along, however, he found himself gravitating toward a former Hollywood union boss and California politician who was just then expanding his political footprint beyond the Golden State: Ronald Reagan. “I liked Reagan,” he recalled. “My mom hated Reagan. But Reagan really appealed to a certain kind of Democrat.”
“I think he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Elise interjected.
“Bottom line is, I was a Democrat, but I voted for him [Reagan]. And then in 1981, I changed my party affiliation to the GOP. And I was a Reagan Republican in the 1980s.” But soon he found himself politically homeless again with the rise of the Bush dynasty. “After Tiananmen Square, [then-national security adviser] Brent Scowcroft and the [George H.W.] Bush crowd said, ‘Well we’re just going to do business with them.’ I despised them, the Bush crowd. So I became a Democrat again. I was a Democrat for 20 years. I’m 71, and out of all my life, I’ve only been Republican 10 years total out of that!”
Though he voted for Trump in 2016, it wasn’t until 2020 that Don finally switched his registration to Republican (again). Not that he has any affinity for the mainstream, establishment GOP—he loathes it, in fact. It’s Trumpian populism that ties Don, and many others like him, to a party that otherwise is not a natural home for the children who grew up in homes featuring small shrines to FDR and JFK.
“Trump’s more populist than Republican,” he said. “People forget that there has been a populist strain going back to William Jennings Bryan. FDR definitely was like that. JFK was a little bit like that. The idea of the Republicans being the party of bankers, country-club types was instilled in me. And despite the shifts, I could still see the Republicans as the country-club party and identify with Democrats.”
It was Trump’s message on immigration that first attracted Don: “In 2016, when he came down that escalator, honestly right there I was a fan. Then he starts talking about the illegal immigration—‘they’re not sending us their best, they’re sending us their worst’—and of course the media were incensed, but come on, he was saying things that people like us notice, it’s common sense. … Why are we letting them in?”
Elise agreed: “From my point of view, the media skewed everything he said as hate speech. But now, when I look back on the things he said, they weren’t so outrageous. He’s not a threat to democracy. His supporters weren’t crazy.”
“Don also despaired of the establishment’s hard-line approach to Trumpian populism.”
Like his sister, Don also despaired of the establishment’s hard-line approach to Trumpian populism. “I come from a generation of Boomers who were anti-establishment: The FBI and CIA are dangerous and oppressive. We went through Vietnam and Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover—absolutely horrible individual—so how is it that [Democrats] take everything single word coming from Washington as gospel? Pfizer, the Biden administration, the spy agencies!”
Does the shape of the economy factor into this shift?
“I just don’t get the sense that people are tuned into the economy,” said Elise. “Most of us are in our 60s. We own our homes. My husband’s a retired school teacher, so we receive a paycheck. So we’re all living somewhat comfortably, although it is paycheck-to-paycheck.”
Don wasn’t buying it: “But if you go to the grocery store, for $80 you get enough food just to make lunch tomorrow?”
“I know a lot of people who don’t have enough money,” Elise chimed in.
“And meanwhile, how much money are we going to give to Ukraine? We’re not supposed to talk about the economy. ‘Oh, everything’s just wonderful! Jerome Powell at the Fed he’s going to keep tinkering with this so interest rates don’t make themselves felt.’ I go to the grocery store, if I have to spend $100, I will spend $100, but it doesn’t go far. If you’re middle class or even upper middle class, you’re feeling yourself squeezed.”
Elise nodded, “We are solidly limited in what we can do.”
Don added: “In the ’80s and ’90s, my generation, young professionals, yuppies we used to call them, could go to the Caribbean, timeshares in St. Barts. You don’t see that anymore. There’s not [any] extra money. Granted, the very, very wealthy will always do fine. But others…. For the 98 percent of us who look at our bank accounts, we say … we don’t have as much extra income as we used to.”
“I thought the economy was great under Trump,” Elise added. “Now I’m feeling tight.”
Don, needless to say, plans to vote for Trump come November. Elise, however, still can’t muster enthusiasm for a full Trumpian turn. “I am solidly in the camp of RFK Jr.,” she said. “To me, he makes sense. And honestly, if he weren’t in the picture, I tell you, I might not vote. I might not even walk up to the poll and vote. If it weren’t for RFK Jr., I almost, for the first time in my life, wouldn’t vote.”
Then, lowering her voice and looking over her shoulders, she added: “But if I did vote, I might vote for Trump.”