How to Win Pennsylvania
16 min read
Charleroi is a small mill town south of Pittsburgh whose dozen blocks, running along the tracks of the Norfolk Southern Railway, are nestled in a valley between the Monongahela River and the worn-down foothills of western Appalachia. Going back more than a century, Charleroi (nicknamed “Magic City”) has made glassware, with a peak population of more than 11,000, a unionized workforce, and a dominant Democratic Party. By the 1970s the factories had begun to disappear, and with them many of the people. By 2020, after half a century of deindustrialization, Charleroi was a town of vacant stores and about 4,200 souls, most of them Republicans. It’s the saga of the Rust Belt, writ small and ongoing.
When I asked Joe Manning, the borough manager, what moved Charleroi from blue to red, he replied: “2016. I know people who were lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool, staunch Democrats who, during that period, went out and changed their registration so that they could vote for Trump.”
Following Donald Trump’s victory that year, academics and journalists embarked on a search for an explanation. Progressives quickly lighted on racism as the sole answer. This conclusion was a costly mistake. Analytically, it ignored important causes that anticipated coming trends; politically, it alienated the unconverted and made discussion more difficult. Kamala Harris appears determined not to repeat the mistake as she downplays identity as a theme in her campaign. Race is only part of the reason for Trump’s persistent base of support, and one that’s grown less significant. The starkest division in American politics is class, as defined by education—the wide gap between voters with and without a college degree—which explains why more working-class Latino and Black citizens have begun to vote Republican. But in a more complex way, political behavior in the Trump era is determined by how class and race interact. The most convincing accounts of the 2016 presidential election found that the leading determinant of support for Trump was residence in a declining white community that had recently seen the arrival of nonwhite immigrants, which brought rapid cultural change and created a sense that the country was becoming unrecognizable.
In 2020, Getro Bernabe, an American-trained officer with the Haitian Coast Guard, fled Haiti’s gang violence and arrived in Charleroi looking for work. “It was like a ghost town,” he told me. “It looked like a beautiful place, but now abandoned.” In the past few years Charleroi has gained 2,000 immigrants, mostly Haitians drawn by empty houses and low-wage jobs, raising the town’s population close to its 1970 number. “The newcomers, the new residents in Charleroi, are like a glimmer of light to the economy of this town,” Bernabe said. “I like one of the core values of America—it is on the American coin.” He meant E pluribus unum, which he interpreted as referring to a unified nation of people from different backgrounds and beliefs. “That’s the beauty of America to me.”
Kristin Hopkins-Calcek, the borough-council president, has lived her whole life in Charleroi. “I watched the town deteriorate over time, and it was very hurtful for us that stayed,” she told me when we met in the council chamber. “Coming from owning a house here, watching my son fall into addiction, and seeing the fentanyl and Oxy problem that we had here, and the overdoses, the crime, and even to some extent the prostitution in town, and the ruination and the blight of our property, and the absentee landlords, and, it seems when you’re older, like the instant decline of our town—when the immigrants came in, it was a breath of fresh air. There were people on the streets; there were businesses opening.”
Charleroi is a fragile place: buoyed by the new grocery stores and bakeries of immigrant entrepreneurs, and new renters and taxpayers; strained by insufficient resources, traffic mishaps, and resentment. There’s no prosperous professional class in Charleroi. Its half-deserted streets and sidewalks are shared by two working-class populations: aging white residents whose families have lived here for generations, and younger Black immigrants who arrived in the past few years. This is Trump country—festooned with Trump flags, Trump yard signs, and, on the deck of a trailer in the woods outside town, a Trump banner boasting: IMPEACHED. ARRESTED. CONVICTED. SHOT. STILL STANDING. In a variety shop on Fallowfield Avenue, half the items for sale are Trump paraphernalia.
Last month, two disasters befell Charleroi almost simultaneously. On September 4, the Pyrex factory on the river, which has produced glassware since the 1890s, told its more than 300 union workers that the owners will close the plant by the end of the year and move operations to Ohio. Then Trump heard about Charleroi.
Joe Manning was watching the presidential debate on September 10 when Trump repeated a false story about Haitians eating the cats and dogs of Springfield, Ohio. “Oh my goodness,” Manning thought, “let it just be Springfield.” His wish went unanswered. On September 12, at a rally in Arizona, Trump locked onto Charleroi. “What a beautiful name, but it’s not so beautiful now,” he said. “It has experienced a 2,000 percent increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris. So, Pennsylvania, remember this when you go to vote. This is a small town, and all of a sudden they got thousands of people … The town is virtually bankrupt. This flood of illegal aliens is bringing massive crime to the town and every place near it.” At a rally in Pennsylvania on September 24, he repeated the attack on Charleroi: “Has your beautiful town changed? It’s composed of lawless gangs.”
The “2,000 percent” figure was nonsensical. The Haitians in Charleroi came legally, in search of jobs, and found ones that Americans wouldn’t take, such as food preparation on assembly lines in 40-degree temperatures. The town isn’t bankrupt, there are no gangs, and crime has not gone up, according to Hopkins-Calcek, who sits on the regional police board. “The most heinous crime recently was an infanticide,” Manning told me, “and the parents were both arrested, and they’re both as white as us.”
None of this mattered to Trump. He had found a small, tender wound in a crucial swing state and stuck a finger inside. Then he moved on to other targets, but the effect in Charleroi was overwhelming. Manning and Hopkins-Calcek received threats. A flyer addressed to “White Citizens of Charleroi” and signed by “Trinity White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” circulated, warning: “Arm yourselves white America, protect your families. White people are the only victims to immigrant brutality.” Passing drivers were emboldened to shout at Haitians, “Trump is coming!” Bernabe, who is the borough’s immigrant-community liaison, heard from people who were afraid to send their children to school and thinking of leaving the state. “All of a sudden, we’ve been seeing a certain fear among the immigrant people, like they feel like they are not welcome, comfortable,” he told me earlier this month. “You see them less and less outside.” Charleroi began to look like the ghost town it had recently been.
For Hopkins-Calcek, Trump’s damage brought back the nightmare of her town’s descent. “It got really quiet, and it got scary again,” she said, beginning to cry. “When they went back in the houses, it felt like it was bad again.” With the imminent departure of Charleroi’s legacy industry, along with its tax revenue, “I feel as if we’re being kicked when we’re down,” she said.
Trump never mentioned the Pyrex factory.
One afternoon earlier this month, I sat with five members of the United Steel Workers Local 53G in a McDonald’s near the Charleroi railroad tracks. They had spent most of the day negotiating the end of their livelihood with lawyers from Anchor Hocking—the glassware company, owned by a New York investment firm called Centre Lane Partners, that plans to close the Pyrex factory. Daniele Byrne, the local’s vice president, and her husband, Rob, an electrician, have worked at the Charleroi plant for a total of 71 years. Before Daniele, her grandfather put in 50 years and set his wall clock by the noon whistle. As severance, the company was offering two months’ health insurance, plus a day’s pay for every year of employment—about $8,000 for two-thirds of Daniele’s life.
She didn’t hide her disgust. “Here you go, be on your way, merry Christmas, happy Kwanzaa,” she said. “What’s the Jewish one?”
Rob asked if I had read Glass House, a book about Lancaster, Ohio, a fading industrial town three hours west, where Anchor Hocking has a glass plant and plans to move the Charleroi factory, along with up to half its workforce. “It’s about the 1 percent economy that started Trumpism,” Rob said. “How they control everything, buying and selling and making all these maneuvers. The billionaires keep getting more and more while everybody else suffers.”
The workers’ hostility toward corporations and billionaires didn’t translate automatically into support for a candidate or party. Their alienation from politics and distrust of elites was too great. The word I kept hearing, in Charleroi and around western Pennsylvania, was care—as in, “They don’t care about us.” It conveyed a deep sense of abandonment.
Half a dozen Haitians work at the Pyrex factory. Daniele, who’s in charge of scheduling, told me they were better workers than the American ones. “I don’t think the problem is the immigrants,” Rob said. But he and the others had complaints about the sudden arrival of so many foreigners in their small town: overcrowded school buses and classrooms, overextended teachers, government benefits the locals didn’t get, and—despite what I’d heard from town officials—higher crime. They claimed that a new immigrant-owned grocery store had put up a sign barring white shoppers. Finding this implausible, I asked Getro Bernabe about it later. He explained that the sign had advertised food from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, while omitting American food. When he rushed to the store and told the owner that local people were complaining, she was aghast: “My God, I didn’t think of that.”
“Please, put American,” Bernabe urged, but to avoid problems she replaced the sign with one that said simply Queen’s Market. When I visited the store, it was selling live crabs, dried fish, and other products that seemed a little unusual for western Pennsylvania. The owner, an American citizen of Sierra Leonean origin, had put a sign behind the counter that said Trump 2024. This detail, which went against the grounds for local displeasure, hadn’t become a story.
False rumors can be more revealing than true ones, and there are tensions in Charleroi that shouldn’t be either wished away or inflamed. “It’s not hatred so much as—” Daniele began.
“Envy,” Rob said. “Jealousy.”
Longtime residents felt as if they didn’t matter. The Pyrex closing got far less attention than Trump’s commentary on Haitians. Every four years, the political and media class takes an interest in towns like Charleroi for a few autumn weeks. “If Kamala comes here, she’s right now in the battle of the Haitians because she wants the immigrants here and he wants them gone,” Daniele said. “They forget about us and go straight to the immigrants again.” She added, “I don’t pay attention to politics; I’ll be honest. I think they’re all crooks. I’d sooner watch Barney Miller. I can’t wait ’til November’s over so I can watch regular commercials about what razors to buy.” The workers didn’t hate all politicians—just the ones who made promises they didn’t keep and exploited the problems of people like them. Pennsylvania’s Senator Bob Casey is pushing the federal government to examine Anchor Hocking’s acquisition of the factory in a bankruptcy sale earlier this year for a possible violation of antitrust law. This effort won credit even from the scathing Daniele Byrne.
Two nights after we met, Rob and Daniele went to see the Steelers play the Cowboys in Pittsburgh. A friend had gotten me a ticket, and early in the first quarter, people near me suddenly began turning to look behind us and cheer. Thirty feet above, a man in a black blazer and black cap was standing in a luxury box, waving a yellow Steelers towel and grinning. It was Elon Musk—fresh from hopping around onstage at Trump’s return to the scene of his shooting in nearby Butler, now basking in a football crowd’s adoration of wealth and celebrity.
When I told Daniele, she said: “Ah, the fucker.”
The convergence of working-class decline, corporate greed, and nativist anger will shape next month’s election in places like Charleroi and throughout the Rust Belt. Northwest of town, Pennsylvania’s Seventeenth Congressional District is represented by Congressman Chris Deluzio. He’s a first-term Democrat, having narrowly won in 2022 in a competitive district of farmland, Pittsburgh suburbs, and mill towns along the Ohio River. Deluzio is a 40-year-old Navy veteran and attorney, neatly groomed, polite, and analytical in a way that doesn’t scream “populist.” But he’s running for reelection on the bet that his pro-labor, anti-corporate positions will prevail over the hostility toward immigrants that Trump and other Republicans are stirring up. (The campaign of Deluzio’s opponent, State Representative Rob Mercuri, didn’t respond to my request for an interview.)
“The Wall Street guys bankrolling Trump and my opponent are the guys who devastated these communities,” Deluzio told me as we drove between campaign events. “They tried to strip us for parts for decades. The mills didn’t just leave; they were taken away by an ideology and a set of policies that said cheaper and weaker labor rules and cheaper and weaker environmental rules is what they’re after. Your family’s hard work and sacrifice didn’t matter to these guys.” After a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying toxic chemicals derailed last year in East Palestine, Ohio, just across the state line from Deluzio’s district, he drafted legislation to tighten the regulation of rail freight, which Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance co-sponsored. The Railway Safety Act, opposed by the Koch political network, is currently stalled by Republicans in both houses of Congress. Even though few of Deluzio’s constituents were directly affected by the spill, it’s the kind of issue that he hopes will distinguish Democrats like him from pro-corporate, anti-regulation Republicans.
Deluzio argued that Trump villainizes new immigrants to distract local people—themselves the descendants of immigrants and legitimately anxious about rapid change in their towns—from the true causes of their pain: monopolistic corporations and the politicians they fund. He acknowledged that the national Democratic Party failed for years to make this case and pursued trade policies that undermined it. An idea took hold that college-educated voters would soon outnumber the party’s old base of a moribund working class. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” Senator Chuck Schumer predicted in 2016, shortly before Trump won Pennsylvania, and with it the presidency.
The Biden administration has tried to earn the loyalty of working-class voters with pro-union policies and legislation to create jobs in depressed regions. But people I spoke with in western Pennsylvania seemed to have only a vague idea how the Democratic Party is trying to woo them back. The rising cost of living mattered more to them than low unemployment and new manufacturing and Harris’s tax plans. When underinformed and undecided voters say that they want to hear more details about a candidate’s policies, it usually means they don’t believe that policies will make any difference in their lives. To overcome ingrained skepticism after decades of disinvestment, a politician has to show up, look voters in the eye, shake their hand, and then deliver help—or at least be seen to care enough to try.
Curtis and Annie Lloyd live in Darlington, a rural borough on the Ohio border a few miles from the site of last year’s chemical spill. When the Lloyds saw a gray cloud rise into the sky near their house, they found it almost impossible to get solid information about the freight disaster: The county paper is a ghost of its former self, and social media predictably swarmed with conflicting and false stories. But Trump paid a visit to the area, Annie told me, while President Biden didn’t for more than a year—and that made a stronger impression than Deluzio’s effort, thwarted by Republicans, to pass regulatory reform. “People are living their lives, and they don’t delve that easily into policy,” she said. “All they know is Trump was here buying everyone McDonald’s.”
Fifteen miles away, in the town of Rochester, I met a woman named Erin Gabriel at the headquarters of the Beaver County Democratic Party. The office was a hive of activity, with canvassers on their way in or out and Harris/Walz signs stacked against the walls. Gabriel told me that politics was personal to her. While working full-time and chairing the county party, she cares for her three disabled children (her teenage daughter, Abby, who suffers from a devastating neurodegenerative disease, was sitting in the next room with headphones on). “Every single government policy affects my children,” Gabriel said. Without the Affordable Care Act, Abby would have no health insurance for the rest of her life. During Trump’s presidency, Gabriel’s congressman, a Republican, promised her that he would do everything he could to protect Abby’s access to health care. Then he voted for Trump’s bill to overturn Obamacare.
“That’s when I got really active,” Gabriel said. “This is visceral to me.”
For a moment, southwestern Pennsylvania has outsize power and attention. Yard signs appeared everywhere; cashiers in bakeries counted sales of their Trump and Harris cookies. National politics is tribal and hardly open to persuasion. Local politics feels different—less hateful and more flexible, with plenty of ticket splitting. Rico Elmore, a young Republican councilman in Rochester, told me, “We have to find the commonalities and say, ‘We may be different on criminal-justice reform, on taxes, on immigration, but we can come together. My streets need paved; you believe they need paved. Let’s get it done. Let’s find those common goals and work towards that.’”
Elmore, a Black Air Force guardsman, was at the rally in Butler where Trump was shot, and rushed to render first aid to Corey Comperatore, the man who was killed; Comperatore’s family then invited Elmore to speak at Trump’s second Butler rally. He’s a rising star in local Republican politics, and in 2022, in an unsuccessful race for state representative, he knocked on 13,000 doors. He found even Democrats willing to listen, and from both sides he heard something that almost everyone I met, even the strongest partisans, also voiced: an overwhelming desire to move past polarization. Elmore wondered whether America is headed for the fate of the Roman empire. “Are we at that point in history? What are we doing to prevent that from happening? We are becoming a nation that is being divided and will fall. We cannot stand divided.”
On a crystalline October afternoon, Chris Deluzio went door-to-door in a new subdivision of Allegheny County. He was wearing a half-zip pullover that said NAVY—a way, it seemed, to let constituents know that his status as their congressman and a former scholar at the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security didn’t mean he wasn’t one of them. Both Democrats and Republicans lived on the cul-de-sac of single-family homes. At one, a young man in a USC cap named Aaron was working on a truck in his driveway. “You already got my vote,” he told Deluzio. Aaron described himself as a moderate Democrat from California who couldn’t stand what Republicans were doing. “I grew up with Latinos my entire life, I love ’em. I actually miss ’em, being out here, and the way they talk about ’em, it bothers me. If I were on the Republican side, I’d be on the Schwarzenegger middle of the road.”
“Does that exist anymore, those guys?” Deluzio asked.
“From what I see on that side, no. I see it in the blues, but just not on that side. It’s just gone too far.”
The next house had a Trump yard sign, but Deluzio rang the doorbell anyway. A big-bodied older man with a crew cut answered. He was a police officer in Ambridge, a town on the Ohio River. I had driven through Ambridge, where steel was once fabricated for the Empire State Building: another depressed mill town, with dollar stores, vape shops, and a World War II memorial park with a Four Freedoms monument that belongs to an earlier century.
The policeman, whose name was Mike, said that he had met the congressman in Ambridge. Deluzio reminded him that he had the endorsement of the county’s police union. “I keep an open mind,” Mike said. “I just have a problem with the border and the crime, because I see it down in Ambridge. It’s just a big immigration problem.” Most of the town’s immigrants came from Latin American countries like Venezuela, Mike said, and they brought “DUIs, drunkenness, domestics, a lot of fights.” He would vote on crime and border security.
An elderly woman called out something from the back of the house.
“My mom, she’s on Social Security,” Mike said, “and these people are getting $4,000 a month, and that’s more than she gets. She’s upset they get more—and I’m gonna tell you, my mom voted Democratic her whole life. She switched to Republican.”
I’d heard complaints in Charleroi about government handouts to immigrants. Joe Manning, the borough manager, had explained, “I don’t have a line item in my budget for Haitians. They don’t need my resources. They’re all gainfully employed.”
But Deluzio didn’t question Mike’s story, or argue with him about crime and immigration, or try to persuade him of anything. He had made a connection. Maybe that would be enough.
