CENTERVILLE, Pennsylvania — Bill Nichols does not work in oil and gas. But almost all the customers at his feed and garden supplies store do.
“The companies buy a lot of grass seed, topsoil, and hand tools to work with,” he said as he tucked into his breakfast of eggs, bacon, a biscuit, and gravy at the Chuck Wagon diner. “About every business here owes their existence to oil and gas.”
The trucks parked outside the Chuck Wagon as the sun rises above the Pennsylvania hills are a sign that this is energy country. It was coal country until the mines closed. Now, it is fracking country, dotted with wells that use the new technology to force gas out of shale deposits and up to the surface.
Washington County, just outside Pittsburgh, was once blue-collar, union Democrat country. But in 2016, about 60% of voters went for Donald Trump, not far off the proportion that voted for Barack Obama in 2008.
That flip, in concert with a slew of other rural counties, helped Trump win Pennsylvania by about 44,000 votes. And if Trump needed them last time, he needs them even more this time.
The Trump campaign is running a “small counties” strategy to tally even more Republican votes in places like Washington County as it tries to offset the votes by Democrats in Philadelphia and its suburbs energized by four years in opposition.
“I think Trump will get 80% around here,” said Nichols, 71. “The Democrats don’t know what they’re doing.”
He is talking about last week’s presidential debate. It is difficult to imagine a line better designed to turn off voters in fracking country than the way in which Democratic nominee Joe Biden said he would “transition” away from oil and gas in order to tackle climate change.
The Trump campaign is already running television adverts hammering the idea that Biden wants to ban fracking. The president himself previewed the slot during a three-stop visit on Monday.
Played this video at today’s rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania—a must watch! pic.twitter.com/BC2h4oZhQp
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 26, 2020
Edward Urcho, 65, said it felt like a warning from history. People remembered a wave of closures under Obama about seven or eight years ago, when the region’s coal mines were regulated out of existence, as he put it.
“They put out the coal miners, the truck drivers, all the workers at the power plants, all the trades — boilermakers, pipefitters. There was a domino effect,” he said.
Now, he worries about his daughter, who does public relations for a gas company, and his son-in-law, who works on the pipelines.
The retired boilermaker has his own concerns too. He said: “If there’s no one working on boilers, then who’s paying into our pensions?”
The local Republican Party has partnered with oil and gas businesses in the county to encourage workers to register to vote and to remind friends and family to get out on Nov. 3.
“We explain that a Democratic administration would be catastrophic for the business … as if they didn’t know,” said Dave Ball, vice chairman of the county Republican Party.
He added that the area’s traditionally Democratic-leaning union workers, raised with socially conservative views and the belief that a fair day’s work should be matched with a fair day’s pay, were receptive to the idea.
“The pitch was our future. What do you want for your future? What do you want your family and their security? Look at what the president had delivered,” he said. “How is your 401(k)?”
The result is that, as of two weeks ago, the county has more registered Republicans than Democrats by a count of 1135, something Ball estimates has not happened since the 1930s.
Statewide figures show a similar trend. Although Democrats retain an edge, with 4.2 million voters, Republicans have closed the gap by more than 200,000 since 2016, with 3.5 million registered supporters.
Democrats complain that Biden’s position on fracking has been misrepresented by Republicans pushing to win Pennsylvania and other energy-rich states. They say it uses a clip from a debate last year in which Biden was trying to say he wanted to halt new oil and gas permits on public land, not a complete ban on new fracking.
Ball said the exact words did not matter to voters here.
“The whole program is anti-energy,” he said.
That sentiment may be unpopular at the Chuck Wagon, but there is a certain resonance across wider Pennsylvania for Biden’s position of regulation and transition, according to pollster Christopher Borick.
“The sweet spot politically is where you say you are not for moratoriums, that you won’t end fracking, but you want to regulate it, you want to tax it, make it transparent, limit where it can be done,” said Borick, who is director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion.
“But never call for a moratorium. That’s where all our polls have been.”
