Democrats Spot Erosion of Trump’s Rural Dominance

MONACA, Pa. — Terri Mitko is sure there are former supporters of President Donald Trump who aren’t going to be voting for him again, because she lives with one: her husband.

“There was a whole ‘I don’t want to vote for Hillary’ contingent. And Hillary’s not running this time,” says Mitko, an attorney and chairwoman of the Beaver County Democratic Party. “Trump was a breath of fresh air and had this shtick going about draining the swamp. … Well, now we’re onto him.”

Beaver County, a hardscrabble western Pennsylvania manufacturing town in the midst of constructing a giant new plastics plant along the Ohio River, is one of the far-flung — “forgotten,” the president would say — areas that delivered a larger-than-anticipated margin for Trump in 2016. He carried it by 19 points over Hillary Clinton, netting 15,000 votes, about a third of the 44,000 total votes he won the commonwealth by four years ago.

As some polls show the race in Pennsylvania tightening in the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Democrats believe Joe Biden’s ability to shave Trump’s margins in rural areas such as Beaver will be determinative throughout the Midwest — from western Michigan to northern Wisconsin. They are small towns alongside rivers and railroads, tucked into valleys and farmland adorned with Trump regalia. The president will easily win these areas. But preventing him from running up the score — to 60 or even 70% of the vote — could be the difference between a second Trump term and a President Joe Biden.

“What Trump taught in 2016 is each and every one of our 67 counties is the most important county,” said Terry Noble, the chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party’s rural caucus.

Noble lives in Clearfield County, a predominantly agricultural community equidistant between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg that delivered 72% of its vote to Trump in 2016. “We don’t want Trump’s number coming out of Clearfield starting in the sevens,” he said. “We want it starting in the sixes.”

In 2016, Clinton banked on a strategy that maximizing turnout in Philadelphia and its suburban collar counties, while netting about 40% of the outstate vote would be enough. She delivered in Philadelphia, where she massively invested and spent election eve with Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi; the problem was she missed that rural marker in almost every county where she wasn’t the victor.

While former President Barack Obama won more than 40% of the national rural vote in 2008 and 2012, the Democratic share with Clinton as the nominee dropped to under 35%. And polling shows Biden’s lead in the state is based on a stronger performance in northeast Pennsylvania, which includes his childhood home of Scranton as well as western Pennsylvania.

“One big advantage Joe Biden has, and it’s definitely worth a lot of votes, is he’s the change candidate in a change environment,” said Sen. Bob Casey, who sees Biden settling into a slim, if not overwhelming, advantage. “It’s a 3-point state basically. And Trump is by far the strongest Republican nominee for Pennsylvania since Reagan.”

In interviews here, Democrats recall not even being able to get a Clinton sign, let alone an in-person visit. Her campaign’s calls to voters in the Pittsburgh area included incorrect information about their polling locations, according to Noble.

Today, rural party officials have the opposite problem; some are running out of Biden signs to distribute. That’s due at least in part to the Biden campaign’s continual stream of events and town halls, albeit virtually, focused on rural concerns such as technological deficits and access to health care. The campaign has tapped a captain for each of its 48 rural counties.

Local leaders feel more tended to with regular contact via texts and calls from staff dedicated solely to rural outreach.

“Rural and small town Pennsylvanians will decide this year’s presidential election,” declared Jordan Ball, Biden’s rural coalition director in the state on a recent zoom call with Democrats.

“We’ll stop the bleeding, we’ll narrow the margins.”

And yet, drive through the winding roads of rural southwestern Pennsylvania and it’s emphatically clear that it remains Trump country. Sign visibility is a perpetual matter of contention in campaigns, and as the saying goes, signs can’t vote, but if they could Biden would look like he was in trouble. One business in Westmoreland County even offers free Trump signs, “to make your yard great.”

“I swell with pride driving down my street,” said Diane Peluso, a Trump supporter. “There are four Biden signs and the rest of it, I mean it’s just not signs, it’s flags. It wasn’t like that in 2016. People are more gung-ho now than they were then.”

As a mixed-mask crowd of more than 300 waited on a picture-perfect autumn day to see Donald Trump Jr. at a park, a group of women hoisted red letters to spell out M-A-G-A, the campaign’s enduring slogan, and repeatedly shouted “Trump 2020!” at the top of their lungs. When the crowd stopped responding to their repeated calls, one of the women chided them for sounding like “Sleepy Joe Biden.” A pick-up truck carrying a “Trump the Traitor” banner circled in the adjacent parking lot.

The Trump campaign has increasingly placed a greater emphasis on Pennsylvania, as its standing in both Michigan and Wisconsin has declined. With its 20 electoral votes, Pennsylvania is the second largest battleground on the map after Florida — and worth double Wisconsin. The president has made five visits to the state in September alone — including a trip to Middletown on Saturday.

It’s the president’s eldest son, an outdoor enthusiast, who most frequently is assigned the rural spots. A recent two-day trip took him to northern Maine, northern New Hampshire and Johnstown, Pa., another depressed steel mill town about an hour and 20 minute drive from Pittsburgh, where the unemployment rate hovers above both the state and national average.

“Is this Trump country or is this Trump country?,” Trump Jr. said to cheers as he delivered his speech from the park’s band shell.

Trump triumphed in Johnstown’s Cambria County by a monstrous 37 points in 2016, only eight years after Obama won it narrowly. So the fact that Trump Jr. devoted time to such reliably ruby red turf at this late stage signals that the Trump campaign realizes it still has work to do to protect that margin. But it also sees potential for growth. The Trump campaign says it has registered more than three times the number of new Pennsylvania voters it added in 2016 and 2018 combined.

Cambria County, a disproportionately older community, along with Beaver and Erie, have been flagged by Democrats as the three to watch for indications of Biden’s improved performance compared to Clinton. Erie, which favored Obama before flipping to Trump, looks most promising for a Democratic revival, with Biden’s approval rating currently 18 points better than the president’s.

“I do think some of them are coming back, especially older folks as a result of the pandemic, are frightened and don’t feel there was a national response that was adequate,” said Don Bonk, a Democrat, longtime Johnstown resident and business consultant. “A lot of people who are Biden supporters are just not as vocal. They’re not going to get in fights with their aunt, their uncle. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. They’re just not making a sound about it … I sense a change. I definitely think there’s an erosion of the base.”

Bonk said Biden’s values of empathy and compassion would also have greater resonance in communities that have felt looked down on by national Democrats.

But Tom Corbett, a former Republican governor who served through 2015, warned against over extrapolating from Biden’s eastern Pennsylvania roots. Western Pennsylvania, dependent on an oil and gas economy, is much more Ohio than it is Delaware.

“He’s Scranton, he’s not western Pennsylvania. Remember that mountain range? We’re the Midwest out here,” Corbett said. “If he was Mr. Pittsburgh, it’d be another story.”

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