The handful of people who turned up at an arts center in downtown Harrisburg, Pa., last month for a Democratic Party karaoke fundraiser stumbled onto a haunting scene—a cold, empty concert hall with the backdrop of a movie-theater-sized screen crackling with visual static. It was reminiscent of the iconic TV-comes-alive scene from the 1982 Steven Spielberg horror classic Poltergeist but missing an ethereal blonde girl to announce, “They’re not here.”
Where was everyone? Drinking cheap beer and whiskey out of plastic cups at the bar downstairs without a candidate button or sticker in sight.
The anecdote is, to say the least, out of step with the fevered expectations of plugged-in political partisans. When people ask me what it’s like living in Pennsylvania in the Election Year of Our Lord 2024, there is often a hint of expectation in the question, as if I am living in Ground Zero for political strife, something out of the trailer for Alex Garland’s Civil War. But my first instinct is to shrug.