Workers and capitalists of rural Pennsylvania unite

“He was a railroader,” Kevin tells me, and a “diehard Democrat … Every new person who showed up in Altoona,” Hallinan adds, “they took him out to the courthouse. And then made him register Democrat.”

Edward Hallinan didn’t drive the new arrivals to the courthouse himself. “He had a glass eye” and never learned to drive legally, Kevin explains, so Edward had his sons, Kevin’s dad and uncle, drive the immigrants and transplants from the rail yard to the courthouse.

“He was a crazy old sonuvabitch,” Kevin concludes.

Despite social distancing rules, Kevin, who works in construction, tells me all these stories at very close quarters. Only later in the night, when his wife Nancy scolds the two of us — “This is not a place where you f—ing talk religion or politics at a bar” — do I realize why. Kevin wants to talk politics, but he wants to keep it quiet. And how he’s voting next week? Kevin holds that even closer to his chest.

Kevin criticizes President Trump’s lack of sympathy and unkind words for immigrants and minorities, but he praises Trump as a rare politician who understands people like him. Yes, Kevin is a middle-aged, white male in a rural county in central Pennsylvania. But when Kevin states his identity, he uses two very specific nouns.

“I’m a worker. I’m a worker,” he says first, holding up his grease-stained hands. Central Pennsylvania has swung from Democratic to Republican because Trump gets workers, Kevin says, and this place is full of workers. That’s when I notice that his work shirt — gray, covered in dirt (he came straight to Molly Maguire’s after work) — has the name of the construction firm: Bagley & Hallinan. “I’m a businessman,” Kevin says. “Trump gets me.”

If you meet Kevin, hear his life story, see where he lives, how he dresses, what he does each day, there is no doubt he’s the prime demographic of Trump’s hardcore base. These are the people who came out of the woodwork to vote for Trump, perhaps after not having voted since Ross Perot. These white working guys at the small local pubs in places like Altoona are often registered Democrats who are not at all interested in the average Republican. Yet they feel loved by Trump. They are what flipped rural counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin from blue to red and delivered those states to Trump four years ago.

Yet Kevin, the working-class guy with an aluminum bottle in his hand, is also a business owner. It might seem like a contradiction, especially if you think within the old framework of labor versus management, and if you assume that divide explains political divides in this country.

But if you want to know how Altoona went from 50-50 to overwhelmingly Republican, or how neighboring Cambria County, anchored in Johnstown, went from voting for Barack Obama to voting 2-to-1 for Trump, then you have to throw out that framework and consider what people like Kevin Hallinan represent. The real divide in today’s politics isn’t labor versus management, or even six-figure earners versus lower-wage earners, it’s a cultural divide that correlates with work.

Beltway Republicans have always liked to draw the line between the folks who sign the back of a paycheck versus those who sign the front, but the Democrats’ old dichotomy is more telling these days. Do you shower before work or after work? The folks trending to the Democrats tend to shower and put on a crisp collared shirt for work, whereas for the folks trending Republican, work clothes are for getting dirty, even if your last name is on your work shirt.

Who’s the party of the wealthy?

For much of the Left, an essential part of their political identity is the belief that Democrats are the party of the working man and Republicans are the party of the rich. When the past couple of decades, and especially the Trump era, have provided bountiful evidence against that story, the evidence has been clumsily explained away.

Say Trump’s core support was the working class, and you’ll be shown exit poll data that the Trump voter has above-median income. Point out that Trump donors and voters come from lower-income places that are or were recently suffering economically, and you get some talk about the “ecological fallacy” or references to car dealers.

The working guys cannot be the Trumpers. It must be their bosses or the capitalists who are selling them used cars and renting them their apartments!

One premise here is there is a huge divide between labor and management in working-class middle America. The evidence suggests that this divide is small and shrinking, politically and culturally.

Bob is from Uniontown, and he’s lived there his whole life. He’s a 62-year-old electrician sitting at Smitty’s Restaurant and Grille at midday on Wednesday. He refuses to vote. Ever.

“Hell no,” he tells me. “I’m 62 years old. I just retired. They’re all liars. All they’re trying to do is cover their asses, just like everyone else.”

But he’s only kind of retired. Thanks to the pandemic, Bob’s employer doesn’t have enough work for him, so he’s been temporarily laid off. He hopes to put in a little more soon but then hang up the work uniform for good. Bob’s not in a union, and get this: He likes his boss.

“I been with my boss for 30 years. If I didn’t like him, I wouldn’t be there,” Bob explains, undermining the cynicism he expressed 45 minutes earlier. “My boss would give you anything you need. You just don’t lie, you just don’t steal.”

And you work hard. When I posit that people who don’t work (“reliefers,” Bob calls them) suffer for it, Bob shakes his head. “Nah. If you don’t work, you die.”

Frank, sitting a few stools down from Bob, is a retired public employee and a Democrat, and he’s voting Trump. “Trump talks like we do,” Frank says. “Although I wish he’d keep his mouth shut sometimes … I like the way he talks.”

An hour or so later, Bob admits, without making eye contact, “I hope Trump wins.”

The American experience

I meet David Husic in a cornfield in Martinsburg, where we both park for the Trump rally in that tiny farm town. Husic and his wife Magdalena, an immigrant raised in communist Hungary, are pro-life Christians. Husic has a simple explanation for Trump’s dominance of central Pa. “These are hardworking people.” He points to Magdalena and says, “We believe in the whole American experience … Hard work. Hard work that made America. Hard work to fix the problems in America. OK, so we’re definitely pro-American, just like Mr. Trump, and he was the first president that really exhibits that.”

Husic, like Kevin in Altoona, is both a working man and capitalist. He and his brother used to own a farm in Bedford, but now he runs a small landscaping and contracting business. He no longer has employees, as he’s winding down a bit in retirement age. His wife is an aesthetician, doing facials.

Tax cuts and deregulation are benefits to the hard-working Americans, as the Husics tell it. Getting rid of burdensome red tape and high tax rates is what David means when he says, “Hardworking people just want a crack at it.” Magdalena, who fled communism as a child, uses the word “capitalist” not to mean the right to get rich, but the right to do the work you want to do and be valued for it.

It was the same from the coal miners who show up at the rally. All of them are unambiguous about their support for Trump. There is no complicated story to tell, no cultural analysis needed.

“He supports what I do in the coal mines,” says Josh from Somerset County, who works for Rosebud Mining. Is Trump really bringing back coal mining as promised? “We’re doing all right, so that’s all that matters to me.” I tried to pry other perspectives out of Josh as we left the rally, but it was pretty simple. Josh mines coal. Trump wants to keep that going. Joe Biden doesn’t. One guy wants him to be able to work, and the other guy doesn’t. “I just work underground. That’s all I do.”

Trump, a wealthy businessman, was always an odd working-class savior. But it’s among the working class that I’ve heard the most praise for Trump as a businessman. Doug Zuchowski, a coal miner at the Trump rally, says he supports Trump because “I think he’s a businessman. To run this country right, you gotta run it like a business,” he says. “If everyone’s working, the country’s gonna make a profit.”

Like Bob the Uniontown electrician, Josh and Doug don’t see a difference between the interests of Rosebud Mining and their own interests. Rosebud, which operates mines in Cambria and Somerset counties, wants to pay Josh to mine coal, and Josh wants to be paid to mine coal.

In this part of Pennsylvania, the interests of labor and capital seem to align. Whether your work shirt bears your last name, like Kevin Hallinan, or your first name like Josh the coal miner, the working-class guys both just want jobs. Frackers, both the CEOs and the front-line workers, want to frack. Coal miners want to mine. Electricians want to get back to work. Kevin Hallinan and David Husic want to remodel bathrooms and backyards. It seems Biden doesn’t want them doing any of this, whether in the name of the environment or the pandemic.

These men deeply value hard work. You can see it in how they talk about their jobs and in how the crowd at Smitty’s talks about the “reliefers.” They value their hard work so much it’s part of their identity. They don’t feel the culture always values their work, and if they are coal miners or frackers, they know Biden doesn’t value their work. And that makes this Trump Country.

Take Bob and Frank in Uniontown, Kevin in Altoona, and Josh, who works for Rosebud, and you get the story of Trump’s 2016 win. In these four adjacent rural counties south and east of Pittsburgh, Trump massively outperformed past Republicans.

In 2008, Fayette County was 50/50 — John McCain beat Obama by 169 votes. In 2012, Mitt Romney won by 4,000 votes. Trump in 2016 won Fayette County 64% to 33%, with a margin of nearly 17,000 votes. In Somerset, with only 35,000 voters, Trump netted 5,500 over Romney’s 2012 margin. In Cambria, Trump netted another 13,000 out of 70,000 votes cast. And in Blair, Trump added 9,000 votes over Romney’s margin of victory.

These four working-class counties, with shrinking populations and histories rooted in coal, steel, farms, and railroads, gave Trump a boost (compared to Romney) that was more than his statewide margin of 44,292 votes.

The median household in these counties earns about $46,000, which is $15,000 less than the national median. Less than 20% of those over 25 have college degrees, compared to the rest of the country, where the number is over 30%. Over in Altoona, Hillary Clinton won only one precinct, the precinct that includes the campus of Penn State Altoona.

Biden country

There’s a fantasy among liberal editors that the working-class guy who voted for Trump feels duped. They want to believe that Trump exploited these guys and really just delivered tax cuts to the rich. The truth is that Trump’s tax cuts went to nearly every middle-class person with a job. (Also, it was a tax hike for some of those New York City newspaper editors.) Also, if you’re Bob, Kevin, David, or Magdalena, you aren’t bothered that your wealthier neighbors in the mountains have some more money to spend. That just means more electrical work, more remodeling, and more facials.

So if Trump is doing so well among the blue-collar white guys in Pennsylvania, why is he trailing in the statewide polls? Some of it is because he’s not running against Clinton anymore. The African American voters and liberal voters who couldn’t stomach Hillary and didn’t think Trump had a chance in 2016 are probably less hesitant to back Biden.

More importantly, perhaps, Biden has his own swing population. While blue-collar Pennsylvania is moving hard red, White Bread Pennsylvania is moving hard blue.

I stopped in Wexford on Tuesday night during Game 6 of the World Series. Wexford, like much of western Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh, is very white. Only 3% are black or Hispanic. But there, the similarities with places like Fayette County end.

When I landed in Wexford, after consulting Yelp, I first tried the Wexford Pub, but that turned out to be literally inside a Whole Foods. So I settled on Poor Richard’s Public House, which is ironically named: Wexford’s median household income is more than $132,000, and nearly 75% have college degrees. Yes, that’s 3 times the median income of Altoona and nearly 6 times the rate of bachelor’s degrees.

All three patrons at Poor Richard’s are Biden voters. This is unsurprising in this wealthy, white suburb. Hillary won this precinct narrowly and was very close in the rest of the area. Biden will likely win Wexford by a bigger margin this year, as the wealthy, heavily educated population has soured even more on Trump.

“The lies. The behavior. The lack of any sort of discipline,” says Jerry Haughey, a consultant drinking at Poor Richard’s, tells me, shaking his head, thinking of Trump. “I can’t vote for someone who treats someone the way this guy treats people.”

Compare that to working-class clientele at Smitty’s, where “he talks like us.”

The bourgeois virtues inculcated in the prestigious private schools and stellar public schools of places like Wexford, and rewarded in the consulting firms where people like Jerry work in jobs like “business development” — Trump shows none of those virtues.

Wexford is just barely in Allegheny County, which may carry prestige that drives up home values. One woman, when I mentioned Butler County just to the north, said, “Oh no, Butler County.”

Butler County is definitely more Republican than even this part of Alleghany County, but that’s probably on the wane, too.

Trump won Butler 65% to 30%, largely on the strength of its rural precincts. Check out the wealthier precincts near the Allegheny County line, in Cranberry Township and in the city of Butler, and Trump was closer to 55%.

Emily, the Biden volunteer I met at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, is from Butler County, and she’s confident Biden will outperform there. High-income, suburban, white Republicans, especially women, seem to be tacking toward the Democrats, especially in the Trump era. This is most glaring in the collar counties around Philadelphia, where Democrats have taken over the county councils.

These used to be Republican strongholds. Now? “They’re not for him,” says former State Republican Chairman Rob Gleason, “because they have rich people living there.” This is not your father’s upper-middle class.

“I’ve been lucky to do OK in my life,” Jerry says in Wexford. The lockdowns don’t affect his consulting work too much. Fracking and coal mining lower his energy bills, sure, but they don’t provide income and meaning like they do in Somerset, Beaver, and Fayette counties. And Trump’s vulgarity and lack of professional competence just matters a lot more.

So while plenty of voters are politically staying where they have been for years — much of the wealthy white is permanently Republican, and most of the black and Hispanic electorate are still voting Democrat — the real interesting divide in American politics is Poor Richard’s versus Smitty’s. It’s not labor versus management. It’s the consultant-managerial-professional class versus the guys who finish work covered in coal dust or grease. The latter gave Pennsylvania to Trump in 2016. The former could give it to Biden this time.

Culture of work

Kevin Hallinan in Altoona tells me repeatedly he’s still undecided, just a week before Election Day. It may just be his being polite given his wife’s aversion to politics. The fact that this lifelong Democrat, grandson of a union man and party operative, is even undecided tells you something.

There’s another grandson of Edward Hallinan who runs a business here in Altoona. That’s John Joyce, the local dermatologist and Republican member of Congress. Joyce is the guy you expect to become a Republican. He’s a professional small-business owner. He probably makes decent income and likes low taxes.

And if you want to hold on to the fiction that Democrats are the real party of the working man, you could throw in Kevin, Joyce’s cousin, as a capitalist. You could do the same for David Husic and, frankly, every farmer in Blair County — they all profit from owning land. And then you could write off Bob and Josh and Magdalena as possessing false consciousness if you insist.

Or you could realize that class politics in America isn’t about income as much as about culture. And one part of the culture feels that they’re perpetually demeaned by the elite culture.

“Fourteen people could get murdered overnight in Pittsburgh, but the news channels will still drive down here and tell a story about a guy who killed his wife with a turkey,” complains Bob. “Nobody talks about Uniontown unless it’s to say something bad.”

And central to this blue-collar rural culture, and to identity, is hard work, whether you’re the guy hanging the drywall or cutting the paychecks — or both.