UNIONTOWN, PA — Fayette County is the pits.
This rural county in Southwest Pennsylvania has some beautiful homes in the mountains, as well as Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Fallingwater.” But Fayette is mostly defined by rural poverty —which means it is Trump country.
“The economy is bad, bad,” a man named Dave, in his 50s with a long gray beard tells me across the bar at Smitty’s Bar & Grill in Uniontown. “Everyone is on welfare. There’s just no jobs around here. What jobs there are don’t pay. You’re lucky if you get ten dollars an hour.”
Dave’s not wrong. At 8.5 percent, Fayette County has the highest unemployment in the state, and it’s getting worse — 1.4 points worse than 12 months ago.
Pennsylvania’s median household income is $53,115. In Fayette County, it’s $38,879. Fayette Co. residents are less than half as likely as other Pennsylvanians to have a bachelor’s degree— more than 28 percent statewide, compared to less than 14 percent in Fayette Co.
As bad as Uniontown is, Fayette City is worse. Main Street in this small town on the Monongahela River is rotting. The old Fayette City Community Center is dilapidated, with broken windows and rotting signs. The boarded-up storefront is the rule. The exception is a business still operating, such as Vargo’s, a clean, but thinly-stocked newsstand.
At Vargo’s on Tuesday morning, the Duda men — Mr. Duda and Junior — were passing the time. They live just down the road in Washington township. They shake their heads at the local economy.
Mr. Duda was a steelworker. “He worked 40 years at the mill,” his son brags. Now almost no jobs are left. “If you just drive down the river roads, from here through Monessen,” Junior says, “it’s all shut down.”
Donald Trump visited Monessen, a small town 10 miles up the Monongahela, and just on the other side of the county line, back in July. “We are going to put American-produced steel back into the backbone of our country,” Trump said on the grounds of the former steel mill. Back in the day, the Mon Valley (short for Monongahela) was booming. Trump pledges to bring back that glory.
“I’m a Trump man,” Mr. Duda told me, proudly, the moment I told him I was a reporter from Washington. “When Trump talks about the trade deals, he’s a hundred percent right. That NAFTA — that was the worst thing.”
NAFTA is a curse word throughout Fayette County. At Smitty’s in Uniontown, at least two patrons blame NAFTA for the area’s struggles.
Most don’t think the jobs are coming back. “I think they’re about gone,” Mr. Duda says of factory jobs in the area. “Areas like this,” the clerk at Vargo’s pipes up, “there’s never gonna be anything here.”
Voting Republican is a new thing for Mr. Duda, a former union official and lifelong Democrat. Duda tells me he voted Democratic for president every year through 2008. In 2012, he sat it out.
Duda is emblematic of Fayette Co. voters. Democrats have a registration advantage of 69 percent to 24 percent, and the Democratic nominee always used to win the county. The GOP, however, has carried the county the past two presidential elections. Trump could dominate here in November. He racked up 69.7 of the primary vote in Fayette, his highest percentage in Western Pa.
The crowd at Smitty’s was unanimous in their support of Trump, and they agreed on the No. 1 reason: “Guns.”
Dave, with the long beard, goes on about Hillary: “She’s gonna take our rights away. She’s gonna take our guns away. She’s gonna take our coal away.”
Sen. Pat Toomey, a conservative Republican in a tough re-election bid, hangs coal’s troubles around the neck of environmentalists. On manufacturing, he’s in a tougher spot, because Toomey — a free-trader — won’t join Trump in the protectionist talk. Instead, he says a stronger national economy will buoy depressed rural spots. “Fundamentally, it’s stronger economic growth,” Toomey told me in Pittsburgh. “If we were growing at 4 percent instead of 1.5 percent, we’d be created tens of thousands of more jobs in Pennsylvania every month” placing “upward pressure on wages.”
It’s not much of an offer to a depressed countryside, but Toomey says it’s better than what the Democrats offer: “just welfare … They want to put you on welfare. I think most of these people, they don’t want to be on welfare …”
Welfare and other benefits, such as Medicaid, disability and unemployment, are central in any talk here about the economy and politics.
Frank, a retired welder drinking cans of domestic beer at Smitty’s mid-afternoon Tuesday told a story of woman at the local supermarket. She was trying to buy dog food with her food stamps. When the cashier said that wasn’t allowed, she grabbed a couple of T-bones out of the fridge, Frank says, and declared “I guess my dog is eating steak tonight.”
Fayette Co. has the highest portion of its population on disability of any Pennsylvania county besides Philadelphia. Dave at Smitty’s is one of them. He’s had a back problem since 1993. An operation back then helped for a while. Now it’s so bad, he can’t work, though. He receives $600 a month in disability and $74 in food stamps, he tells me.
How does he pay the rent? “I take care of my mom. If it weren’t for that, I’d be out on the street.”
Can’t he get a job that his back will allow him to do? If he can sit a bar stool for an hour, can’t he sit at a desk?
“I can’t sit at a bar stool for an hour,” Dave replied. “Right now I’m numb because my son died this morning.”
Dave’s son, the Smitty’s crowd all said, gave up drugs a couple of months ago. He was climbing the ladder at his construction job, having graduated to operating a GPS bulldozer.
Dave has long been a regular at Smitty’s but for years he was playing pool and drinking soda. Monday he was drinking mixed drinks at the bar, standing every few minutes to stretch his back.
The autopsy was scheduled for Monday. Nobody at Smitty’s had heard results by Tuesday early afternoon.
“Heroin & Pills — that’s all Fayette County is,” one client at Smitty’s pipes up when I ask whether drugs are a problem. “It’s a shame you can’t even walk down the street without seeing a needle.” He says he saw one at a school bus stop recently.
Lexi was drinking at a shopping center in Uniontown Monday night. When I asked her about Fayette County’s struggles, she had a simple answer: “It’s drugs. They’re destroying us inside and out. Just to support their 16 bastard children.”
Fayette is far from the worst of Pennsylvania’s rural counties when it comes to overdoses, but it’s bad. The other pathologies of crumbling rural America infect Fayette as well.
Neighborliness and community spirit are weak, according to Smitty’s clientele. “I got a loaded .22 right by my door,” Dave explains. “I don’t trust nobody in my apartment complex.”
Lisa the barmaid says of her neighbors, “I don’t talk to none of mine. I got one who lives behind me who I think deals drugs. I got quacks who live below me.”
One college student in Uniontown told me she’s going to leave when she’s done with school. Fayette City’s population is shrinking rapidly. Junior says basically none of his classmates from 2000 are still around.
“Our chief export is our kids,” says Art Halvorson, who’s running to represent the region in Congress.
People have stopped going to church, too. From 1990 to 2000, one study found a 34 percent drop in Catholic church attendance, and smaller, but still large drops in Protestant attendance. By 2000, less than one in five county residents was in church on any given Sunday.
The number of self-identified Christians has fallen in half in the County from 1980 to 2010. Nothing’s replacing that. There’s no significant population of Muslims or Jews. These aren’t people ditching church for yoga, book club, or youth soccer. These are people checking out of their community. And these institutions are withering away. Holy Spirit Catholic church closed in 2008. Dozens of others in the county have shut down.
The older folk can remember different times in Southwest Pa. Coal was king. Steel mills hummed. And the culture was strong. Maybe, some hope, Trump can make Fayette County Great Again?
“I think he would help this area,” Junior says timidly at Vargo’s, which is almost the last business standing on Fayette City’s Main Street.
His father agrees. “I’m not saying Trump has all the answers. But everybody’s out there trying to grab a little bit of a light.”
The clerk at Vargo’s, in his mid-thirties like Junior, pipes in. “Right here in the Mon Valley,” he waves his left arm at the wasteland of a Main Street in a disappearing town, “no matter who gets elected, things aren’t going to change.”
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
