Swing City, Swing State

Scott Slawson says he could see Trump’s victory coming in 2016 when the MAGA lawn signs began dotting the front yards of Western Pennsylvania. “It was probably about two or three weeks before the election,” he remembers. “My business agent and I were traveling up from Grove City and I just said, ‘You know, I got a bad feeling.”

Slawson is president of Local 506 of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, a union that represents the kind of Rust Belt workers who have been battered by decades of deindustrialization. His local is in Erie County, a Democratic stronghold since the 1980s. Today Erie County, whose voters chose Donald Trump by a two-point margin in 2016, is an electoral bellwether. (The city of Erie went overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton.)

Since Trump’s upset victory, the national media have trained their cameras on the facades of Erie’s empty factories—and told the story of laid-off, mostly white, middle-aged manufacturing workers who voted for Trump. But there is more to this lakeside town than empty factories—what happens in 2020 is also about other people in Erie: African Americans, young people, union members who lean left, its new immigrants and also voters who rejected the major parties during the 2016 election.

On paper, it seems that Erie County, which has a population of 270,000, may have moved back into the Democratic column. A recent survey shows Trump trailing Democratic leading candidates among registered voters. The county voted for the Democratic incumbent governor by an 18-point margin in 2019.

Read more: https://prospect.org/politics/erie-swing-city-swing-state/
(American Prospect)