ERIE — There are two smoker’s huts at the St. Joe Apartments. The senior community’s front unit is for MAGA, while the back is where the Democrats light up.
“It is so polarized,” 65-year-old Beverly Petrusco told me. “They [the front unit] think we are all radical crazies.”
Welcome to Erie, Pennsylvania, the swing county of the nation’s swingiest state, where even the grandmothers are polarized by politics. St. Joe has Bingo every Wednesday at 4 and Sunday Mass at 10 a.m. But most evenings, a trio of Erie grandmothers convenes at the backside smoker’s hut. Along with Petrusco, 70-year-old Sherri Donnelly and 75-year-old Carol Wroczyneski come for the nicotine but stay for the community.
Wroczyneski said of their trio, “Everyone knows the ‘girls in the back’ will talk to you and are nicer than the ones in the front.”
These self-described “centrists” are no low-information voters. Their smoker’s hut is a veritable faculty lounge of facts about Project 2025, the Donald Trump-Vladimir Putin relationship and House Speaker Mike Johnson. But their politics, at its root, is summed up by Donnelly’s sense that “Trump is mean and arrogant.” Faithful voters who never miss a midterm or local election, they say that Trump, in Wroczyneski’s words, has made them “read more and be more aware.” Trump also caused a rupture between Petrusco and a brother who called her a “lib-tard.”
They didn’t speak for two years.
The politics in Erie and northwest Pennsylvania are raw. Drivers give 81-year-old Joyce Mallet obscene gestures for her “Women for Trump” flag. Mallett, according to her husband, “gives it right back to them.” At Kamala Harris’s Oct. 14 rally in Erie, thousands chanted “lock him up, lock him up” whenever Trump’s visage appeared on the jumbotron. Blocks away, a white monster truck was on the streets flying four giant Trump flags.
Nearby, a middle-aged man on a bicycle slowly passed my wife and said, “The worst thing we ever did was give women the right to vote.” My wife, a Ph.D.-holding scientist of international renown, gaped in disbelief.
Most every psephologist pegs Pennsylvania as the likely tipping point state of the 2024 race. Bordered by Lake Erie, Ohio and New York, Erie County lies 420 miles northwest of Philadelphia and 100 miles due north of Pittsburgh. Home to only 2% of the Pennsylvania electorate, the county is slightly whiter, poorer and less educated than the state average. But the city of Erie is just urban and nonwhite enough to give the county a (slight) Democratic tilt.
All but once since 1948, the presidential candidate who won Erie County also won Pennsylvania. In the most recent 25 statewide contests (both federal and state), Erie has voted for the winner in 23. In 2016, Erie went for Trump. In 2020, it swung to Biden.
In 2024, all political eyes look to Erie.
Hillary Clinton famously failed to visit Erie in the autumn of 2016. “Hillary wasn’t big on yard signs eight years ago,” recalls Sam Talarico, the Erie County Democratic Party chair. The Clinton campaign never distributed signs to its Erie contingent. Trump did not repeat Clinton’s political malpractice. His signage and personage dominated the landscape. Since 2016, he has been to Erie five times. In late September, Trump rallied nearly 2,000 faithful at the Erie Convention Center.
On Oct. 14, Harris came to Erie. It was, in one sense, a leap into the unknown. Sure, Joe Biden made a COVID-era campaign stop here in 2020. But the intentionally sparse audience was masked and socially distanced. Clinton and Barack Obama came to Erie — but during the primaries. So the Harris rally, unbelievably, was the first post-Labor Day rally a Democratic presidential candidate has staged in Erie for a generation.
The Harris team opted for the city’s largest venue, Erie Insurance Arena. On the day of the event, a wise local journalist asked me if Harris “could even fill the arena.” Hours later, Erieites answered: 6,500 cheering supporters filled the arena to capacity. Another 1,000 or so were turned away. Among those faithful were Donnelly, Wroczyneski and Petrusco, who waited hours in the chilly October night to cheer their candidate.
Dean Brown, an Erie transplant from Los Angeles, remarked about the crowd, “I’m surprised. I’m just shocked.” His cousin, Khadija Horton, was less surprised. “I feel like there is a surge of enthusiasm,” she told me, “since July [when Harris replaced Biden].”
Hours after the event, I ran into a Democratic state representative. He was beaming. Nobody expected Harris to fill that arena to capacity, with thousands waiting in the streets. Days later, the former congresswoman and star of the January 6 Committee, Liz Cheney, drew over 4,000, the largest crowd in the history of the Erie Convention Center.
Crowd sizes are a flawed metric, admittedly, with which to gauge a race’s final outcome. Mass events only tell you so much. But the Harris and Cheney events suggest that this is not 2016. Erie Democrats are jazzed. Ultimately, door-knocking, canvassing, and shoe leather will decide who wins here. A state senate race, Erie’s highest profile local contest, offers some tea leaves.
In 2016, Republican Dan Laughlin flipped a Democratic seat. In 2020, he cruised to reelection. Thousands of Erieites voted Biden at the top and Laughlin down ballot. A contractor who sports a yellow Carhartt jacket, the senator has built a brand as a moderate Republican with whom working-class voters could relate. In the spring, the smart money was on Laughlin.
But his Democratic challenger, Jim Wertz, has knocked on over 30,000 doors, where older Republicans purportedly invite Democrats inside to listen. Neutral observers report that Laughlin has done little of the canvassing and door-knocking required in a close race.
This reality is repeated at the top of ticket. The Harris campaign and Erie Democrats boast over a dozen paid staffers. A local Democratic operative admitted to me that Biden took the county in 2020 because the local GOP was so inert. Four years later, Erie Republicans are running a more vigorous campaign shop than 2020, but even with a bevy of volunteers, they are still outgunned and outmanned. Phone calls to the Erie Democratic headquarters get returned. When Erie journalists tried to cover a debate watch party at the GOP headquarters, Republicans turned them away.
Energetic campaigns that look outward generally win; inward-looking operations often lose.
The horserace politics of 2024 can be fun; polarized grandmothers are not.
“Tip O’Neill’s ‘all politics is local,’ that is clearly long dead,” says Stephen Knott, an emeritus professor of national security at the Naval War College. “All political roads [now] lead to the White House,” and “presidential candidates appeal to the fired-up base.”
These bases, which make up a mere 20% of the entire electorate, are most effectively reached via hot-button national issues. Base voters give us the fringe candidates and hyper-polarization that has become so entrenched today.
The answer to hyper-polarization is neither Trump nor Harris. Defang base voters by fixing the primary system. Push politics back to the center, where it belongs, and St. Joe’s smoking huts will no longer be blue or red.
(Jeffrey H. Bloodworth is a professor of American political history at Gannon University and a Fellow with the Truman National Security Project.)
