WILLES-BANE – «The polls that give Biden in the head? They are worth nothing. Not in this county, at least. Conservatives are individualists, they often steer clear of opinion polls. Facts matter to me. Luzerne County, a region of mines and factories that has always been democratic, four years ago she passed with Donald Trump who beat Clinton by a huge gap: 20%. He will win again because he serves our interests and speaks our language ».
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Granddaughter of Austrian and Slovak immigrants, Donna Kowalczyk in Wilkes-Barre has been running a hair salon. I meet her intrigued by her story told by Ben Bradlee Jr (Pulitzer Prize journalist for the investigation of the Boston Globe which brought out the first scandal of pedophile priests in Boston) in The Forgotten, a book in which he reconstructed the causes of Trump’s victory in 2016 by analyzing precisely what happened in this county of Northeast Pennsylvania. Donna told him that she, the daughter of a worker and with a disabled father, had always been the most liberal in an entirely democratic and unionized family. Then factories and coal mines closed, the unions disappeared, while drug dealers and car thieves arrived in his neighborhood. He still believed in Obama, but the hope became disappointment. So it moved on to Trump.
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I ask her what has changed since 2016, if she regrets it. “No,” he replies. «I’m a small entrepreneur and I voted for it with conviction. I had admired him since the 1980s, when he was on TV with Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters praising his managerial skills. He did the right things trying to get jobs back to America. There were positive signs before the coronavirus which put us all on the ropes. In Pennsylvania, the governor, who is a Democrat, has taken too severe precautions: you can imagine what happened to me working on my clients’ heads “.
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Donna is a Trumpian but not a wild fan: her Democratic neighbors are her friends and if one son, a real estate developer, is a Republican, the other, a software developer, votes Biden. Doesn’t believe in conspiracies, considers QAnons insane, admits Trump sometimes exaggerates, but justifies it: without forcing it is difficult to really change. Reasoning similar to what I’ve heard from other county Republicans.
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Further south, in Hazleton, a former industrial city that has become a center of low-paid services and where Hispanics have gone from 5 to 52% of the population in the last twenty years, Marty Beccone (distant Sardinian origins) welcomes me with a Margarita in his 4th Street Pub. He too is a former Democrat who voted for Trump and will vote for him again, appreciates his direct language, the policy against illegal immigrants and his rejection of the rigor on the pandemic: «For me it was hard. I got away with delivering food to home, but the bulk of the business, the people who come from 8pm to 2am to drink and socialize, have almost stopped. I do not deny the danger of the virus: I have the stories of a niece who is a nurse in the hospital and of friends who work in retirement homes where there have been several deaths. More dangerous than the flu, sure, but I don’t even know anyone infected. It seems to me a phenomenon that is also emphasized for business reasons: a hospital that reports a Covid case immediately receives 5,000 dollars more a day ». And the job? “The county has also become impoverished because wages are crushed by illegal immigrants who accept very low wages. But don’t say we are hostile to immigrants. Half of my clients and many friends are Latinos. And many of them vote for Trump. The problem is the illegal immigrants ».
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Lou Barletta, a congressman in Washington for four terms who now, defeated in the race for the Senate, aims to become governor of Pennsylvania also insists on this: «This is a country built by immigrants: my family came from Calabria. But while the legal ones are an asset, the illegal immigrants are a problem. When I was mayor of Hazleton I found myself in a few years with a population doubled without any increase in tax revenues: how do you manage a situation like this? You have to cut public services and people get mad ». Even Barletta, an iron Trumpian, thinks that the county will make Trump triumph again and help him win Pennsylvania: he doesn’t believe the polls either, while admitting that the “blue collar” of the Biden state like it more than Hillary Clinton: measure of the Democrats’ failure is given by the fact that these simple people identify much more with a billionaire who should be far from their world than with their old party ”. But for Kathy Bozinski, the leader of the county Democrats, the Republicans are very wrong: «They don’t understand that this is no longer 2016: the atmosphere has changed. They say only Trump excites. But there is a large influx of volunteers in my Wilkes-Barre office. They are almost all women who are fed up with Trump and how he treated the coronavirus “. Kathy is convinced that there will be a reversal from 2016 also because two years ago the county voted for the current governor: a Democrat. Other progressives hope, more realistically, to severely reduce Trump’s lead in the county, so as to contribute to the success of Biden, which, in Pennsylvania, will certainly prevail in the large urban areas of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
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This is the scenario that also Thomas Baldino, political scientist at Wilkes University designs: “The county will remain republican: people feel that the Democratic party has moved away from its sensibilities. But Trump will not repeat the 2016 result when he took 58% here against Clinton’s 38%. His lead will be eroded, perhaps more than halved, by Biden who was born and raised nearby in Scranton, and who celebrates his roots in the working class far more than Hillary. “
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October 20, 2020 (change October 20, 2020 | 21:27)
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