Trump country, Trump’s people

Mike Safko is one of hundreds of people waiting in line to pick up Donald Trump yard signs for their homes to rally support for the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States.

Like most people here at the event, in a fire company's picnic pavilion in Johnstown, in western Pennsylvania, the 19-year-old has been drawn to Trump's campaign for one reason: jobs. The businessman's pledge to restore the area's economic fortunes, to bring blue-collar jobs back from overseas and to "make America great again" resonates strongly here.

“Look at Johnstown: it is a disaster of what it was 20 or 30 years ago,” says Safko, who is from Dilltown, nearby. “My dad was from Johnstown, and we go to Johnstown now, we say: ‘What’s happened?’ Nothing is working any more. We need to bring jobs back to this area.”

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Trump’s people: a supporter in an Irish T-shirt in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Simon Carswell

Safko’s father worked at a local steel mill and then at a coal mine before they both closed. His grandfather was forced to retire because he was being laid off by the mine where he worked.

“It’s just killing us . . . I am just doing what I’m good at, and that is driving a truck. There should be better things to do in this area,” says Safko, who hauls gravel rather than coal these days.

The coal industry was for decades the engine that drove the economy here in rural Pennsylvania, but it has fallen on hard times. Power plants have switched to cheap natural gas, leaving the mines struggling with crippling debts, greater overseas competition and increasingly stringent environmental rules to limit greenhouse gases and toxic emissions.

This is Trump country, and these are Trump’s people. The New Yorker enjoys some of his strongest support along the Appalachian Mountains, in eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania and western Virginia, where blue-collar workers have seen their economic fortunes slump.

Trump’s protectionist policies, with his promises to stop foreign countries “ripping off” the US and to renegotiate “bad” international free-trade agreements, have strong support here.

“I am thrilled that he is running for president,” says Safko. “Donald Trump really likes the coal industry, and we need coal to run our power plants. We need to bring the coal mines back.”

Pennsylvania is a key target for Trump. Given his narrow base of support – among white, blue-collar, nongraduate voters – the businessman is unlikely to win the White House if he cannot win the Keystone State.

His staunchly anti-immigrant platform and divisive rhetoric has alienated so many minorities that he is relying on winning the support of enough white voters on November 8th.

"He needs to win Pennsylvania. There are very few paths to victory without winning Pennsylvania," says Rob Gleason, chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, who is from Johnstown. He points to Trump's "rust belt" strategy as a way to win Michigan and Ohio too.

The local Republican believes that the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, whose unpopularity is almost as great as Trump’s, will not perform as strongly as Barack Obama did in 2012 in Philadelphia and its suburbs, where Democratic votes usually outstrip the state’s rural Republican votes.

“This is setting up for a Republican to finally win Pennsylvania for the first time since 1988,” Gleason says. “The last Democrat to get elected president without winning Pennsylvania was Harry Truman, in 1948, so there is no path to victory without winning Pennsylvania.”

Despite what Gleason calls Trump’s “extreme popularity” in these rural areas, the votes may just not be there. In Cambria County, where Johnstown sits, the population has been falling steadily since the 1950s, from 209,000 to an estimated 136,000 in 2015.

A Monmouth University poll this week gave Clinton an eight-point lead over Trump in Pennsylvania. The businessman is trailing by 10 points among college-educated white voters in and around the state’s cities, a group that Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, won by 15 points.

“In the rural part of the state there are more deer and bears than people,” says Thomas Baldino, a professor of political science at Wilkes University, in northeast Pennsylvania. “The Republicans can claim that they have vast stretches of land, but there aren’t that many people.”

Taking a break from handing out Trump-Pence yard signs, Jackie Kulback, chairwoman of the Cambria County Republican Party, acknowledges their electoral disadvantage. This is why she has organised the picnic and is encouraging people to vote for Trump and rally support.

"We have to offset what's going on in Philadelphia. If it weren't for Philadelphia this state would be red," says Kulback, who works as chief financial officer at Gaultier Steel, a steel-manufacturing company in Johnstown that is battling imports from China and Germany. She describes this year's election as a pivot point.

“We are fighting for our jobs. We are fighting for our livelihood. It is our families. That’s why people are here. We’re tired of getting the snot kicked out of us,” she says.

Standing nearby, Gleason’s cousin Robert Davis Gleason, known to locals as Gunner, is amazed by the numbers showing up, including many whom he does not recognise as Republicans.

“I have been on the Republican state committee for 44 straight years, and I have never seen anything like this,” he says. “They are coming here and driving from all over the county to get a yard sign. Everyone who drives to get a yard sign will drive to vote.”

David Mayes, a 53-year-old navy veteran, is here to pick up a new Trump sign after one of his was stolen. That sign came from the “Trump House”, he says.

Fifty kilometres west of Johnstown, Leslie Rossi has turned one of her fixer-upper houses in Youngstown into a shrine to Trump. The house is painted in the stars and stripes of the United States flag, and a giant cutout of the businessman stands in the front garden.

“Our government is out to get us, we feel; their policies are hurting us, and Mr Trump, as a businessman, completely gets it,” says the 45-year-old mother of eight, explaining his appeal in the region.

Back in Johnstown, it is not just Trump’s economic policies that people like. Robert Sorg, a 42-year-old steelworker at Gaultier Steel, supports Trump’s plan to close the borders for national-security reasons. Johnstown is a 30-minute drive from Shanksville, where Flight 93, one of the four hijacked 9/11 planes, came down.

“That really hit home,” says Sorg, picking up a Trump yard sign with his wife, Kristi, and six of their nine children. “A lot of people I know left work to go get their kids out of school, because they were fearful what might happen next.”

The anger over the politics-as-usual in Washington is palpable too. Trump supporters lament their loss of young people to the economic decline here.

Tony Sherron, an 85-year-old from the community of Vinco, has seen his son move to New Jersey and his daughter to Maryland for high-skilled jobs.

“Most of the people in Cambria County are steelworkers or coal miners. They ain’t not here no more; they are either dead or left,” he says. “My kids got the hell out of here. There is nothing here, nothing.”

John Smith, a former Democrat from Ebensburg, the county seat, says he once had an $800,000 house in Virginia, on which he paid $4,200 a year in taxes. Now the 69-year-old pays $4,500 on “a little $200,000 rambler” – and says, “I don’t get a damn thing for it.” He also complains about having to drive his restored Corvette on battered roads.

“If I had rented here instead of bought I would have been out of here in six weeks. This place sucks.”

Smith, as a Democratic convert to the Republican cause, is not unusual in these parts. Registered Democrats far outnumber Republicans in western Pennsylvania, but people here are religious and socially conservative – against abortion and for traditional family values – and turned away from the Democratic Party as it moved leftwards to vote for Republicans they like. They were "union Democrats" and became known as Reagan Democrats in the 1980s. These are the voters whom Trump is hoping to win over again this year.

“I was a Democrat most of my life, a union man, but Hillary Clinton is lying . . . Trump is honest,” says John Barley, a 67-year-old former steel-mill worker, standing next to his wife, Joanne, both proudly holding their Trump signs.

“Trump is going to bring back Christian values. We can say ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘God bless you,’ ” says Joanne.

This year large numbers of people in Cambria County have filled out change-of-party-registration cards. As of Monday 2,425 people have switched to the Republican Party this year, almost six times as many as those who have moved to the Democratic Party.

Karl Rummel, a 48-year-old cook, is another new passenger on the Trump Train, as local Republicans call it. Sitting in the picnic pavilion, he fills out a Republican registration card with Poppy, his chihuahua, on his lap, sitting next to his brother, a one-time liberal Democrat. Rummel, an independent, is becoming a Republican for Trump, not for the party, because he saw first hand how Trump “cares about the small man on the totem pole”.

Rummel recalls working at one of Trump’s casinos in Atlantic City in 1989 and Trump praising him after Trump spotted him cleaning a dirty slot machine when it wasn’t his job to do so. “Back then he was a multimillionaire. He didn’t need to give me, a person with a midlevel casino position, that kind of face time,” he says. “I just can’t say how nice an employer he was and how we’re going to do as a nation . . . We’re in for a great ride. We’re going to be great again. When he says, ‘make America great again,’ I think that’s more than a campaign cliche.”