In Pennsylvania, the trend is most pronounced in its northeastern corner. In Lackawanna County, registered Democrats have historically outnumbered Republicans three to one, but, over the past several years, the margin has dwindled to two to one, according to Chris Patrick, the local Democratic chair. “To see this flip in this area is extraordinary,” Christopher Borick, a political analyst at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, told me. Many of the defectors are white voters without college educations. “Even before 2016, you have lifelong white working-class voters in both northeastern and southwestern Pennsylvania who have a ‘D’ on their registration but have been voting for Republicans,” Borick said. Catholic voters in the region are also leaving the Democratic Party, largely because of the Party’s increasingly liberal stance on reproductive rights. “Now you’ve got an Irish Catholic Presidential candidate struggling to win his own town and his own county,” Borick said. (He thought that the recent death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the possibility that a Trump appointee would move to restrict abortion access, might cause more Catholics to defect, though it might also motivate Democratic turnout. “For those voters concerned above all with reproductive rights on both sides, it’s probably a reinforcing issue,” he said.) Cognetti, the Scranton mayor, told me that residents have also become more skeptical of institutions and more sympathetic to Trump’s self-presentation as an outsider. “Basically, every institution of authority in Pennsylvania has let people down in some way in the last decade,” she said. “The sex scandals at Penn State and in the Catholic Church, along with elected officials all over the state going to jail. The absolute crumbling of trust in authority is real, and that can’t be ignored.”
In 2016, the Republican Party noticed that many of these voters, even those who remained registered as Democrats, voted for Trump in large numbers. After the election, the Party began an intensive outreach program, involving canvassing, mailers, and targeted advertising. “We have seen, over time, the Republican ground game be more effective in Pennsylvania,” Borick told me, and this has resulted in an uptick in Republican registrations. Registration is a Party’s most powerful tool, Borick added: the G.O.P. will now be able to remain in touch with these newly registered voters in the lead-up to the election, coördinate getting them to polling stations, and encourage them to vote for down-ballot Republicans. Local Party leaders also hope that, more subjectively, the registrations will shift residents’ political identity, encouraging them to think of themselves not as independent-minded Democrats but as Republicans, and thus cementing their loyalty in the long term.
The day after I visited the Republican headquarters, I drove to Old Forge, fifteen minutes outside of Scranton, where Trump was holding his rally, at a building-supply store. Hundreds of people packed the streets outside. A d.j. spun “God Bless the U.S.A.” at full volume on the side of the road. “I don’t care who you are,” he announced into a microphone. “President Trump, the most powerful man in the world, is coming to Old Forge.” Stange, still in a suit, despite the August heat, stood nearby, sipping a Red Bull.
Outside Valley Auto Parts, I met a nineteen-year-old named Mackenzie Mitchko, who was attending the rally with her mother. She wore Gucci sunglasses and a tie-dyed “Make America Great Again” T-shirt, and waved a flag that featured a sketch of Trump and the slogan “Fuck your feelings.” “A friend gave it to me, when he heard we were coming to this rally,” she told me. Her family had been longtime Democrats, but, a decade ago, the factory where Mitchko’s mother worked, making CDs and DVDs, moved to Mexico, and her job disappeared. In 2015, the family heard Trump speak, and was attracted to his promises to protect workers. Last fall, when Mitchko was attending college at Concordia, in Bronxville, New York, she felt that the other students there scorned her support for Trump. “I didn’t talk much about how I felt about the President there, because people told me I was uneducated,” she said. This only entrenched her beliefs. After finishing her first year, she left college, in part because she felt out of place politically, and decided to stay home and study to become a dental hygienist. Earlier this year, she switched her registration from Democrat to Republican. This is the first Presidential election in which she is old enough to vote.
Mitchko’s father had recently become famous on social media for handing out fourteen thousand Trump yard signs from their garage. On the day of the rally, he had been asked to join the President’s entourage, and his wife and daughter tried to spot him in the motorcade. The family’s support hadn’t wavered during the pandemic, and they were unimpressed by criticisms of how Trump had handled the crisis. “This disease is in a hundred countries,” Mitchko told me. “Why is it his fault that we have it here?” A spike in infection rates in the U.S. over the summer seemed to them to be a Democratic ruse to scare people into voting by mail, so that Democrats who worked for the Postal Service could manipulate ballots. “We’re voting in person,” Mitchko told me.
Several new Republicans I spoke to, including the Mitchkos, had redoubled their support for Trump following this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. One woman, who preferred to be identified only by her first name, Cathy, hadn’t voted since she registered as a Democrat, seventeen years earlier. “I’m voting for Trump because of safety,” she told me. She thought that the way Democratic governors and mayors were yielding to social unrest signalled the disintegration of American order. “They’re not allowing the President to bring in federal agents, and that’s not what our forefathers wanted,” she told me. Dave Elliott, Scranton’s former police chief, told me that he, too, was concerned about the protests. “I supported Clinton because he was pro-police,” he said. He had once liked Biden, too, because the senator spoke the language of law and order. “Now he has completely flipped,” Eliott said. “He’s vilifying police officers today and turning criminals into victims.” He would be voting for Trump in the upcoming election.
One evening, I visited another new Republican, a carpenter named Mike Mazza, at his house, beside a highway about thirty minutes north of Scranton. Mazza is an amateur taxidermist, and in his home he had mounted several buck heads, from animals that he’d shot himself; on a table stood a lamp of braided antlers. We sat on the porch, which was painted pale green. Mazza had grown up as a Democrat, but, in 2019, a local township supervisor was indicted for violating the Clean Water Act, and the subsequent scandal made Mazza disillusioned about politics. (The supervisor pleaded not guilty, and the case is ongoing.) Mazza thinks that Trump is fighting this kind of corruption in Washington. He has also become a devotee of QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory holding that a Democratic cabal of pedophiles is trying to take down Trump. He believes, among other things, that faith in God will protect QAnon followers from the coronavirus. Mazza had hung an oversized banner on his porch featuring a large “Q” and the QAnon slogan, “Where we go one, we go all.” As we were talking, a woman he didn’t know pulled into the driveway in a white Escalade and beeped. “Where we go one, we go all!” she shouted from the window. Mazza told me that this happens as often as three times in a day.
