From TPM Reader PJ …
I live in Western PA, and do my best to do some driving tours of the areas outside of the metropole I live in during campaign season, and what I see are a lot fewer signs out in those area for Trump. Also can back up this thing about mailers….our household, which should not in any sense be thought of as GOP-curious, is receiving a TON of these pro-Trump and anti-Harris fliers. One of the biggest talking points is that Harris is going to gut Medicare and Social Security (because inflation makes all spending go less far, I guess?) while Trump will defend Medicare and Social Security (these materials actually feature quotes from him telling the GOP to keep their hands off of our entitlements).
I will be interested to see what my driving tours reveal as we get closer to election day. In 2016 it was the signage plus attending a couple Trump rallies that put me in the “huh this is a real thing” camp (not that I thought he’d win the general or anything).
As to the bigger point about PA: it remains a state that is still shedding population. And while more of the workforce is unionized now than was a decade or so ago, a lot of those gains are in already Dem-leaning white collar fields (higher education, public-ish stuff like libraries, museum workers,etc). We have an aging population/workforce. We have plenty of rural population distribution with very low density. We’ve had some of the most serious painkiller addiction issues, lots of substance abuse. We know these are all ongoing issues that the pandemic exacerbated and if there are groups who had less chance to come back from it, its precisely those to whom illness, isolation, and addiction delivered crippling blows. For every Pittsburgh or Philadelphia (in many ways the last decade or so has been a real renaissnace for those cities) you’ve got a dozen smaller towns that are broke and can’t be fixed.
I have a lot of suspicion about right-wing talking points about a working class realignment and the argument that minority voters are craving what the GOP has on offer. But two areas where I am a little less skeptical are:
1) Educational polarization: rightly or wrongly (wrongly if you know what’s what about affluent suburbs and exurbs) this is often laminated onto an urbane vs. hick framework. But the trend itself seems to have been accelerated by Trump. You have a lot of people out in those areas who are (not incorrectly) processing that live in the city is better, associating that with the higher educational attainment, linking that to an elite system, and seeing in Trump someone who is opposed to that. These are also, I think, low-propensity voters but they have voted for Trump. So maybe its pollsters bending over backwards to make sure they think about these as potential votes (gravitational pull of whiteness in imagination?) or maybe they’re gonna be big in this election.
2) Latino population in PA is growing over time. I a little bit buy the argument that those demographic shifts are real. The American Dream ethos has shown a remarkable flexibility about inviting people into its coalition. PA is such a tight state (and the Latino vote in the state at this point is almost as big as the Black vote) that this could make the difference, too.
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