ERIE, Pennsylvania — Tyler Titus attracted a considerable amount of national attention two weeks ago when the city school board president narrowly won the Democratic Party primary for county executive here. The attention came not because the race was close but because Titus’s win marked a first for an openly transgender candidate for office to come this close to a countywide executive office.
The LGBTQ Victory Fund, which had endorsed Titus, raised over $33,000 for the candidate, and provided campaign advice, said of the win, “Tyler’s primary victory amplifies the disconnect between voters who are embracing qualified trans leaders and the bigoted politicians who attack trans people for their own perceived political gain.”
The group added that its continued campaign will aim for “improving the lives of people in the county.” Titus will need to focus on that rather than on historic firsts to win over voters in a county still trying to navigate its economic future. Erie faces problems that began long before the pandemic exacerbated them.
The county has approximately 177,000 voters, of whom 96,000 are Democrats and 69,000 are Republicans, according to the latest Pennsylvania State Department records. One might conclude from this that it’s a sure bet for the Democrat to win. That is usually true, but not always. Since 1978, when the county received its home rule charter, there have been six county executives, two of whom were Republicans.
So why does this race matter so much, and why does this county matter so much? Well, for starters, Erie is a bit of a bellwether in Pennsylvania. In 2016, former President Donald Trump narrowly won the county and went on to win the state narrowly. In 2020, President Joe Biden narrowly won the county and went on to win the state narrowly.
National press flocked here in 2016 to examine why Trump won, but they didn’t stay long enough to understand what matters to Erie voters at the most granular level. In 2020, they didn’t stay here long enough to find out why Biden won either — they were just relieved that Biden won.
The 16501 ZIP code in the center of the city of Erie was named the poorest in the state in 2018. To this day, it remains one of the poorest ZIP codes in the country, according to census data. When the pandemic hit, the despair here grew. Schools were closed. People were scrambling to figure out how to work and care for their children. The opioid crisis, which had ebbed since 2017, began to rise again, with drug overdoses climbing and access to care for substance use disorders destabilized.
The county coroner’s office warned in December, as the death toll from drug overdoses spiked, that isolating people and taking away all social interaction from their lives made recovery from addiction impossible.
Erie is a complicated county. It is a port city rich in significance for industrial manufacturing. It is also rich in historical significance. It was here, during the War of 1812, that Commodore Oliver Perry raised his famous flag, reading, “Don’t give up the ship.” That proclamation has become the region’s motto, often repeated when things are at their worst and people are nearly ready to give up.
Lake Erie’s shoreline along the peninsula has long been a beach vacation destination for blue-collar families from Pittsburgh, Youngstown, and Wheeling, including my own. People would pack up generations of family in their cars and come here to spend the week in simple cabins. There was no boardwalk or salted taffy, but for many of us, it was like being at the ocean.
Today, the shoreline is still filled with families at the beach. They crowd into Sara’s diner for ice cream, milkshakes, and hot dogs. But now there is a winding, flat bike path popular with cyclists that follows the miles of the bay side of the lake and is enjoyed by millions of tourists every year.
There is also the family-owned Waldameer Park, a throwback amusement and water park where teenagers growing up here often work at one time or the other.
Tourism isn’t the only plus, the healthcare and insurance industries, along with the concentration of universities and small precision manufacturing, have been an economic godsend to a county whose entire heavy-manufacturing base disappeared over the past 40 years. As each factory left, another family was broken up in the relocation.
For social justice advocates, this race for county executive will be about making transgender history. They will make it a national story about culture wars, but they don’t vote here. Talk to Erie voters, and they will tell you their vote will go to the candidate who will lead the county in the right direction.
Mike Mikus, a western Pennsylvania strategist and Democrat, cautions that when you run for an office like this, all politics is local, “and convincing voters you have good managerial skills is key.” Mikus worked on Allegheny County Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald’s three successful runs for his position.
“In races like mayor and county executive, it’s about your bread-and-butter issues and being able to run a government in an efficient manner that helps people,” he said.
In a closed primary race like this one, cultural issues are more attractive to a far-left electorate. In general, voters want someone who can not only get the trains to run on time but also convince the trains to come and stop here.
Mikus, who worked on Titus’s primary opponent’s race, said that access to broadband is a big issue here, “and, of course, jobs.”
The county is also expected to get a big chunk of money from the pandemic relief and, in theory, from the infrastructure bill, if it passes. A winning candidate will have to convince voters that he or she will use the money efficiently and wisely and not for ideological causes disconnected from reality.
“The thing about county-level governing is there aren’t really many sexy issues,” Mikus said. “It is managerial, and you have got to be good at it. Your job is to keep taxes low, attract new businesses, and, equally important, provide services like transportation.”
What happens in this race will attract lots of social justice cash and a lot of national attention. But it will be decided on issues that have nothing to do with whether or not history is made.
