PITTSBURGH — To date, Darrin Kelly, the president of the powerful Allegheny-Fayette Central Labor Council, says not one of the Democratic candidates running for president has reached out to him to ask or listen to what union families in western Pennsylvania are looking for in a nominee to challenge President Trump in November. “Not one,” he says abruptly.
That omission is obvious in just about every proclamation about the energy sector coming from the mouths of most of the candidates seeking the Democratic nomination, whether it is Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren pledging to ban fracking or Joe Biden’s recent proclamation that workers in the fossil fuel industry need to learn how to program: “Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for god’s sake!”
Youngstown State political science professor Paul Sracic said there is one thing that is strikingly clear about all of the Democratic candidates running for their party’s nomination. “They are spending way too much time listening to elites that sit on their staff or advise them, or worse yet, taking the voters pulse from Twitter, and zero time listening to Midwest swing voters.”
“It doesn’t matter who politicians talk to, but it sure does matters who they listen to,” Sracic said. He cautions that these repeated mistakes, in particular, Biden’s statement on fossil fuel workers, are no different than Hillary Clinton’s tone-deafness in 2016.
Biden also pledged in that same speech to eliminate fossil fuel use and put energy executives “in jail” if they did not comply.
Nick Deluliis, president and CEO of CNX, a natural gas company headquartered in Pittsburgh, is, in theory, one of those executives Biden would jail. He responds with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, saying he could “maybe” see why the former vice president would want to indict the natural gas industry.
“The shale gas industry in Pennsylvania is guilty of decarbonizing the state by over 20% in the last decade and a half, and the shale revolution is complicit in reviving the manufacturing sector in western Pennsylvania,” Deluliis said. He adds that the energy sector has restored the middle class and family-sustaining jobs in disadvantaged communities across Pennsylvania. “And natural gas is blameworthy for bringing disruptive technology to the fore and driving down the cost of gasoline and electricity for consumers. And let’s not forget the industry should be answerable for breaking OPEC’s and Russia’s stranglehold on global energy markets and strengthening the U.S.’s geopolitical posture.”
Deluliis said, “If these are now crimes in this upside-down political landscape we’re living in, consider us guilty as charged.”
Whether it is the call for fracking bans or making demeaning quips about coding, it is those kinds of remarks directed at the families and the communities in western Pennsylvania that Allegheny County chief executive Rich Fitzgerald specifically urged the candidates running for the nomination not to do in a letter he sent this past this year to all of the campaign headquarters: “To win voters back in this region outside of Allegheny County, in Beaver, Washington, Butler and Westmoreland counties we need two things from the candidates; talk about the things that unite us and show up outside of the urban areas like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and just listen to their concerns.” Fitzgerald is a popular Democratic county chief who was about to be sworn in for his third term.
A Democrat has to win Pennsylvania to win the presidency, and he or she has to win western Pennsylvania to win the state, something the party did consistently between 1992 and 2012. In 2016, Trump became the first Republican to win Pennsylvania since George H.W. Bush’s first run in 1988, squeaking past Hillary Clinton by just more than 44,000 votes.
Trump deserves credit for his win by going to economically disrupted places such as Erie, Scranton, Mechanicsburg, Altoona, Ambridge, and Johnstown and asking for residents’ votes, whereas Clinton centered her presence in the urban centers of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
The assumption was those disrupted places were going to just follow the lead of their big-city Democrats because they always showed up for a Democrat. What outsiders missed was the harm Clinton did to herself with comments such as calling Trump supporters “a basket full of deplorables” or saying, “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
They also missed that Pennsylvania had become 0.4% more Republican every presidential cycle. Bill Clinton won 28 of the state’s 67 counties in 1996, but that power had eroded in 2012 to just 13 of the 67 counties won by Barack Obama.
Jeff Brauer, a political science professor at Keystone College in Factoryville, said, “Biden’s recent declaration that coal miners could become computer programmers while advancing clean energy stances is, at best, out of touch with the plights of these states and its workers.”
“At some level, it’s difficult to believe that Biden, the scrappy kid from Scranton who has made his political career connecting with working-class voters, would suddenly be so detached from these same voters’ everyday realities. He seems to be making the same fatal mistakes of the 2016 Hillary Clinton run with her pronouncements that she will be putting coal miners out of business,” Brauer said.
“At the moment, Pennsylvania is his to lose, and he will lose it if he continues to appear to be out of touch with blue-collar workers,” Brauer said.
Whether it is Biden, Warren, or Sanders, whoever the eventual nominee is cannot win over these swing voters with this type of rhetoric, warns Jeff Nobers, the executive director of the Builders Guild of Western Pennsylvania.
“I think what you have seen over the past couple of years, for voters here, the Democrat/Republican designation has eroded and what has become most important is what’s going to happen with jobs and what is going to happen with the economy, and energy has become critical to the economy here, ” Nobers said. His organization represents 16 different unions and contract organizations and more than 60,000 individual workers from the 33 counties of western Pennsylvania.
These are all of the counties (with the exception of Allegheny) that overperformed for Trump in 2016 and helped put him in the White House.
“Clearly, when you look at Sen. Warren or Sen. Sanders or Joe Biden and their statements on the fossil fuel industry, where many of my workers are prospering, obviously because they keep saying these things they are going to do everything they can to diminish that industry,” Nobers said. “That would have a significant impact not just on union construction workers, but also geologists, engineers, chemists, computer scientists, everyone that works in the industry and you are telling people I am closing your industry down and don’t care about your job or your community.”
“So you might agree with Sanders or Warren or Biden on many other factors, but I know in talking to some of the members they say if you are going to threaten to take my job away, I can’t vote for you,” he said. While those members might not like all of the things Trump does or tweets, Nobers said, the president’s support of the industry goes a long way toward earning their vote.
