The Battle for What May Be the Most Important County in the Country

There are signs everywhere in Erie County, and the only thing you have to know is how to read them. “It appears that whoever wins Pennsylvania is going to win the whole thing,” says Sam Talarico, the bald and affable chair of the Erie County Democratic Party. And whoever wins Erie County is probably going to win Pennsylvania. As goes Erie, so goes America.

“Yard signs are big in Erie County,” says Talarico, who looks like former Pittsburgh Steelers coach Bill Cowher, but without hair. “They always have been.” Now you just have to count all of the yard signs in this largest of Pennsylvania’s counties, and account for any and all political loyalties not expressed on a 24-by-18-inch rectangle of corrugated plastic, and you’ll have next week’s presidential election all figured out.

Sign: The blue Harris-Walz campaign poster tucked at the base of a flagpole adorned with Old Glory on the prim lawn of a vinyl-sided house on West Sixth Street. May seem like a small deal, but Kim Clear, a Democratic official from Millcreek Township—a suburb of Erie that is the fulcrum on which this whole county turns—says that in 2016, Hillary Clinton’s sign game was virtually nonexistent. They were too sophisticated for signs. They had targeted voter models.

Democrats are smarter this time around. “I would say that we are neck and neck,” Clear told me when we met for coffee at a Tim Hortons. “We have as many Kamala signs as we do Trump signs.”

Trump defeated Clinton in 2016 by 1.6 percent in Erie County, which had once been the preserve of lunch-pail Democrats (grandparents who venerated FDR, parents who voted for JFK, sons and daughters who got caught up in the Reagan revolution) but has since become something more complex: a combination of Midwestern perseverance and Rust Belt pathologies that are plainly visible when you drive past the shuttered factories of 12th Street. Biden won here by 1 percent in 2020, and now 12th Street is being “reimagined,” thanks in part to federal funds. The bipartisan infrastructure law has turned Bayfront Parkway, which hugs the majestic Lake Erie coastline, into a massive construction site. This is not a city mourning its decline.




https://newrepublic.com/article/187597/pennsylvania-election-most-important-county-2024