This is part of a series, This American Carnage, from Charlie Lewis, who is reporting from America on the 2024 US presidential election.
Pennsylvania, where the US Constitution was penned and which briefly housed the nation’s capital, is always a “battleground” state. It has voted for the ultimate winner in all but two of the past 12 presidential elections (it stuck with the Democrats through the Bush era). US President Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by 1.17% in 2020, Donald Trump by less than 1% four years earlier.
Its southern border is the Mason–Dixon line. In its west, the Allegheny River, flowing from the tributaries of western New York State, binds with the Monongahela, climbing up from the south, to form the Ohio River that stretches west all the way to Illinois. It’s at the intersection of these three rivers that Pittsburgh sits — it’s where the east coast opens out to the midwest, just as Pennsylvania marks the point where, politically at least, America’s north meets the south.
It’s fall here and the trees of Pittsburgh are a blaze of red and yellow and orange. Thanks to unseasonable warmth, I’m told, the leaves have changed colour every week, and in the days I’ve been here they fall like a steady, copper-coloured rain.
As you would expect, this year Pennsylvania, and particularly its second most populous city Pittsburgh, has been inundated with visits. Nowhere else in America has had as much political advertising flung its way as Pittsburgh. Democratic grandees such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have stumped here for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in recent weeks, and both presidential candidates are holding rallies in the city on Monday, the last day of the election. If that weren’t momentous enough, 30 miles north of the city, in Butler, a gunman came within inches of assassinating Trump in July — and in doing so, it briefly looked as though he had sealed Trump’s election victory.
Out of the centre of town, electronic billboards line the highways, flitting between endorsements of the two candidates. Then there are the sign wars: volunteers have taken to covering their Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance signs in Vaseline or WD40 to deter the people from stealing and vandalising them.
Naomi Siegel, who has campaigned as a volunteer for every Democratic presidential candidate since Obama in 2008, has a particularly impressive display in the front yard of her home in the leafy surrounds of Fox Chapel: 14 signs looking out over a plastic skeleton, next door’s Halloween decorations that haven’t been taken down yet.
This array is her third set, after the previous collections were taken and thrown in a nearby ravine. Indeed, she’s added a notice saying “Please steal, I’m cleaning out my garage” above an old Kerry Edwards placard, which is pretty solid. She tells Crikey she’d always lost the odd sign in election season, often to local kids acting up, but that it feels more organised this time.
“I got a call from the Fox Chapel borough saying, ‘Please take those down.’ Apparently someone had complained,” she says. “I asked them to show me what law I was breaking. I said talk to the borough solicitor, and I’ll talk to my friends at the ACLU and we’ll talk again after that. Within a few days, they called back and said, ‘Keep the signs.’”
Her group has sent thousands of postcards in Pennsylvania, Montana, Ohio, Nevada and Arizona. The attempts to persuade undecided voters finished long ago — every sinew of effort is now aimed at getting the Democratic vote out.
“At first, it was persuasion,” she says. “Since mid-September, it is all ‘get out the vote’. At this point, we’re not trying to convince anybody. No-one is changing their minds. We are really just trying to get Democrats to the polls.”
The day after Siegel and I speak, a shock poll puts Harris ahead in Iowa, a state that voted twice for Barack Obama but has voted Republican in the past two elections.
Siegel will not have read it, having sworn off reading polls in the lead-up to election day.
“I remember 2016, when Hillary had a ‘95% chance of winning’.”
In an election that essentially no-one wants to call one way or the other — pollsters are herding around neck-and-neck figures — both parties are convinced Pennysylbania might sway the whole thing.
Mason, an Uber driver and one of the many, many locals who have been generous with their conversation and time, points out the two interlocking trapezoids that adorn all Pennsylvania’s road sounds.
“So that’s a keystone shape, because Pennsylvania is called the ‘keystone state’,” he says. “The keystone is the stone at the peak of an arch, and without it, the whole arch collapses.”
Stay tuned for the next instalment of This American Carnage — where Crikey chats with Pittsburgh’s local striking journalists.
