Vote USA 2020, in Pennsylvania in the “yard” of Biden who will vote for Trump- Corriere.it

Granddaughter of Austrian and Slovak immigrants, Donna Kowalczyk in Wilkes-Barre has been leading a Barber Shop. I find her intrigued by her story as told by Ben Bradlee Jr (a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the investigation of the Boston Globe that brought to light the first scandal of pedophile priests in Boston) in The Forgotten, a book in which he reconstructs the causes of Trump’s victory in 2016 by analyzing precisely what happened in this county in northeastern Pennsylvania. Donna told him that she, the daughter of a worker and with a disabled father, had always been the most liberal in a fully democratic and unionized family. Then factories and coal mines were closed, unions disappeared, while drug traffickers and car thieves came to their neighborhood. He still believed in Obama, but hope turned to disappointment. So it happened to Trump.

I ask him what has changed since 2016, if he regrets it. “No,” he replies. “I am a small entrepreneur and I voted for it with conviction. She had admired him since the 1980s, when he was on television with Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters praising his managerial skills. He did the right things in trying to bring jobs back to America. There were positive signs before the coronavirus that put us all on the ropes. In Pennsylvania, the governor, who is a Democrat, has taken too severe precautions.: Can you imagine what happened to me working on the heads of my clients ”.

Donna is a Trumpian but not a crazy fanatic: her Democratic neighbors are her friends and if one son, a real estate developer, is a Republican, the other, a software developer, votes for Biden. Does not believe in conspiracies, considers QAnon crazy, admits that Trump sometimes exaggerates, but justifies it: without forcing it is difficult to really change. Similar reasoning to what I have heard from other county Republicans.

Further south, in Hazleton, a former industrial city that has become a center for low-paid services and where Hispanics have grown from 5% to 52% of the population in the last twenty years, Marty Beccone (distant origins from Sardinia) He greets me with a Margarita at his 4th Street Pub. He is also a former Democrat who voted for Trump and will vote for him again, appreciates his direct language, the policy against illegal immigrants and his rejection of rigor on the pandemic: « For me it was hard. I got away with food delivery home, but most of the business, the people who come in from 8pm to 2am to drink and socialize, has almost stopped. I do not deny the danger of the virus: I have the stories of a niece who is a nurse in the hospital and of friends who work in nursing homes where there have been several deaths. More dangerous than the flu, sure, but I don’t even know anyone infected. It seems to me a phenomenon that is also emphasized for commercial reasons: a hospital that reports a Covid case immediately receives $ 5,000 more a day. And work? “The county has also become impoverished because illegal immigrants who accept very low wages crush wages. But don’t say that we are hostile to immigrants. Half of my clients and many friends are Latino. And many of them vote for Trump. The problem is illegal immigrants.

Lou Barletta, a four-term congressman from Washington who now, defeated in the Senate race, aspires to become governor of Pennsylvania, also insists on this: “This is a country built by immigrants: my family came from Calabria. But while legal ones are an advantage, illegal immigrants are a problem. When I was Mayor of Hazleton I found myself in a few years with a population doubling without any increase in tax revenue: how do you handle a situation like this? You have to cut the public services and people get angry. “Even Barletta, an iron Trumpian, believes that the county will make Trump triumph again and help him win Pennsylvania: he also does not believe in the polls, although he admits that the” Biden’s state workers “like them better than Hillary Clinton. The measure of the failure of the Democrats is given by the fact that these simple people identify much more with a billionaire who should be far from his world than with their old party. ”. But for Kathy Bozinski, the leader of the county’s Democrats, the Republicans are very wrong: “They don’t understand that this is no longer 2016: the environment has changed. They say that only Trump excites. But there is a large influx of volunteers at my Wilkes-Barre office. Almost all of them are women who are fed up with Trump and how he treated the coronavirus. ” Kathy is convinced that there will be a setback starting in 2016 also because two years ago the county voted for the current governor: a Democrat. Other progressives hope, more realistically, to drastically reduce Trump’s leadership in the county, to contribute to the success of Biden, which, in Pennsylvania, will certainly prevail in the large urban areas of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

This is the scenario that Thomas Baldino, a political scientist at Wilkes University, also designs: “The county will remain Republican: people feel that the Democratic Party has moved away from their sensibilities. But Trump will not repeat the result of 2016 when he took 58% here against 38% for Clinton.. His edge will be eroded, perhaps more than half, by Biden, who was born and raised near Scranton and celebrates his working-class roots far more than Hillary. ‘