FFrom gold high-top sneakers to a “Women for Trump” tank top to a “Fight, Fight, Fight” patch ironed on to a poster depicting a 19th century cowboy outlaw, Trump at the Trump Store in Scranton, Pennsylvania Merchandise sales tripled in the days after the former and future president won a second term in last week’s US election.
It’s been a tough week for Democrats in Scranton, which has long had close ties to Joe Biden and has been hailed as his hometown and symbol of affinity with America’s working class. Splashing out was an added insult.
Store manager Thomas Rankin said he never believed polls predicting a close race. He believed that those who voted for Trump just kept quiet because they didn’t want to have a debate. “Many of the Democrats cheered as soon as they entered the booth! They could see through all the Democratic propaganda,” he said.
And then there were the rallies — Rankin, a former death row inmate, said he often went to concerts — and Trump held hundreds of concerts with his trademark mix of folklore, policy, and political rhetoric. .
“People came to them like they traveled to the Grateful Dead,” he said, and so did I. He drew people in just like the dead. People were having fun, but also interested in what he was saying. ”
Bitter truths abounded in Scranton last week as local voters for “Scranton Joe” Biden largely rejected Democratic bids to continue in the administration of Kamala Harris.
Lackawanna County, which includes Scranton, is at the top of Pennsylvania’s heavily populated Route 222 voter corridor. Once a Democratic stronghold, last week it tilted five points toward Donald Trump compared to 2020.
Harris narrowly won the county by less than 1%, but that was significantly lower than Biden’s 8% in 2020 and Barack Obama’s 30% in 2012. Hopes that Latino voters would support Harris did not materialize. Democrats lost Pennsylvania and all other battleground states.
Despite living in Scranton’s Green Ridge neighborhood for only the first decade of his life, Biden made the city an important aspect of his political narrative, or “Scranton Values,” and that the financial services industry Delaware, where he actually resided, rather than Delaware, the supporting state. He ended his 50-year career as a politician.
On Sunday, Biden concluded a limited campaign campaign for Harris at the city’s carpenters union hall and acknowledged: We are asking you to do something for yourself and your family. ”
But they didn’t, or there weren’t enough of them, and now internal party denunciations are in full swing, not just within the Democratic Party but on the streets of Scranton. “Democrats started too late to switch candidates,” said Robert Tostee, a former doctor at Wegmans, an upscale supermarket on the city’s west side.
“I’m not blaming Biden, I’m blaming the party. He’s 80 years old. Let him rest. They should have groomed someone else. They didn’t want this to happen. He must have foreseen it.”
Instead of blaming, Democrats should ask themselves, Tostee said. Do you support him?
In short, the Democratic Party was selling a platform, a set of values and policies that the majority of American voters did not believe in and were not willing to buy.
The Wegmans and Trump stores are across the street from a Walmart that was hit by a landslide and is now a quarry. But at the new Walmart nearby, the division between left and right, between Democratic elites and the working class who now vote Republican, was evident.
Larry Cornelius, a black voter who voted Democratic, predicted that President Trump’s promise to remake the economy in favor of working-class Americans would end in disappointment. “This isn’t going to go the way they think it will,” he said.
Three women were loading groceries into a car. “I feel like she was a chameleon, so we went to Trump,” one of them said. Her daughter said she is not upset about having the first female president. “No, it’s more important to me to buy a house so I can live on my own,” she added.
The final days of the 2024 election saw a flurry of counterclaims regarding trash. Democrats hope that a comedian’s racist joke about Puerto Rico at Trump’s rally in New York City will turn Latino voters in this part of Pennsylvania against Trump. was. But the issue is complicated by Biden later appearing to call people who voted for Trump trash.
Suhailey Echevarria, 29, owner of a Puerto Rican restaurant in Scranton, said she was not impressed. “I don’t even care because I know I’m not trash,” she said. As a mother of two young children, she didn’t want her children to hear about gay or transgender identities at school. “I want it taught from home, not by strangers,” she said.
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Echevarria said the inference that Black and Latino men are resisting out of some hidden misogynistic urge to vote for Harris is misconceived. “We want to live better and provide for our families,” she said.
Latino voters were in a bind. A vote for Trump means approval of this trash talk, Echevarria said, “but not voting for Trump means accepting economic hardship under the Biden administration.” Paying the bills won.
Isabel Sanchez, owner of Garibaldi’s Mexican Restaurant, said the choice was easy. “Kamala is good, but Trump is better for the economy,” she says. “We are Mexicans and we come to America to work.” Biden’s border policies have made life even more difficult.
At every turn in Scranton, it was hard to find a core Democratic message that wasn’t rejected because of the accompanying sense of entitlement and elitism. Democratic Party support has collapsed across the United States, and the “blue wall” in Rust Belt states has collapsed.
With even Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania forced to resign, Julie Zabrowski, a 57-year-old former nurse who injured her back working long hours during the pandemic, says Lackawanna is “deeply blue” for the Democratic Party. “But people just need change.” And Harris did not represent change.
“For me it was the economy, and we were able to do better under the Trump administration. I’m pro-choice, but that was one issue. It’s huge, but it’s not the whole story. ” Zabrowski said. As a Democrat who voted for Trump, she said she was frustrated by the transition from Biden to Harris without a primary.
“I didn’t have a choice, so I thought that’s what we’re here for,” she said.
At Local 524 Pipefitters Union, Rick Elliott said his daughter, who works in New York, was heartbroken by the election results. “I told her that whatever happens in this election will not directly affect you in the near future.”
Mr. Elliott is a Democrat, at least in spirit, and ventured that Mr. Trump would ease the political game between the two major parties. “He’s a businessman. He’s going to run away from all these politicians. We can’t listen to them and he’s not going to play their game.”
Felons won, but felons can’t vote. please understand that
Another man, a member of the motorcycle club Most Wanted Riders, may have captured some of the mood prevailing in Lackawanna after an election that took 18 months and cost $15 billion in advertising alone. I don’t know. He didn’t vote because he couldn’t vote.
“I’m a felon. I can’t vote. Felons won, but felons can’t vote. Think about it,” he said.
