JOHNSTOWN,
The night of the election, in this dying little city stuck in the hills of mostly rural, depressed western Pennsylvania, Joey Del Signore dozed off in his recliner. The 60-year-old catering company owner and lifelong resident woke up around 3 a.m., opened his eyes and focused on the words stripped across his television screen: President Donald Trump. “My dream come true,” Del Signore said the other day.
In Portage, 20 miles outside of town, Pam Schilling, 59, a retired grocery store meat wrapper whose son died in April of a heroin overdose, sat in her living room, alone except for her tiny Yorkie named Rudy, glued to the news. She stayed up all night. “I was so excited,” she said.
And at his house half an hour north, Tim Byich, a 57-year-old technician and manager at a manufacturing plant, watched the coverage “like it was a football game,” he said, wired by the surprise reversal and a few too many Genesee Lights. “I got toasted,” he admitted.
They had earned the right to celebrate. There are, easy to say now, many reasons Trump won, but high on the list are people like Del Signore and Schilling and Byich. Trump’s road to the White House ran through Cambria County, where once steel and coal let people with high school educations buy houses and take vacations and lead relatively want-not middle-class lives—and where it doesn’t work that way anymore. In this Rust Belt notch, where peeling paint, vacant storefronts and the dark hulks of shuttered mills are reminders of all that’s been lost, Trump’s mantra of Make America Great Again sounded not like a ball-cap slogan but a last-ditch chance—to reverse an economic decline that has been choking this region for decades.
“Your government betrayed you, and I’m going to make it right,” Trump told a boisterous crowd at the Cambria County War Memorial Arena less than three weeks before Election Day. “Your jobs will come back under a Trump administration,” he said. “Your steel will come back,” he said. “We’re putting your miners back to work,” he said.
The people here who voted for Trump want all that. They want him to loosen environmental regulations. They want their taxes to go down and their incomes to go up. They want to see fewer drugs on their streets and more control of the Mexican border. They want him to “run the country like a business.” And they want this fast. So now comes the hard part for Trump—turning rhetoric into results. Four years ago, the largely Democratic voters in Cambria County flipped on President Obama, disgusted that he had not made good on his promise of change. What’s clear from a series of interviews with Trump supporters here is that they will turn on Trump, too, if he doesn’t deliver.
All the talk about the “white working class” creates an impression of a monolithic and homogenous base of support. But in one conversation after another, voters revealed meaningful distinctions about what issues they most want solved. Some might want a wall sturdy enough to stop the drug traffickers, but others are paying much closer attention to whether there’s a bump in the payroll at the last coal mine. And that variation—plus the urgency expressed by those who swung so passionately for Trump—suggests less a permanent bloc than an anxious and impatient coalition that could fracture as quickly as it formed. It’s only 10 days after this oft-overlooked, tucked-away part of Pennsylvania helped put Trump in the Oval Office—and the clock is ticking.
“I think you’ll start seeing improvements in six months,” Bill Polacek said in his corner office at JWF Industries, where he’s one of the owners of one of Johnstown’s last manufacturing plants.
Dave Kirsch stood in the parking lot of Himmel’s Coal Yard in Carrolltown, where he drives a truck, and expressed optimism and preached patience—not, though, that much patience. “My boss, he’s a pretty smart man,” Kirsch told me, “and he said it can’t change overnight, but he said give it six months to a year.”
Maggie Frear, a retired nurse, told me toward the end of our meeting one evening in her home that the changes Trump pledged would “take him at least a couple months.”
A couple months?
“Or probably even two years,” she said.
Four years tops, though, she assured me.
“If he doesn’t do what he said he was going to do, in four years I won’t vote for him,” Frear said, holding open her screen door, as I stepped out into the dark and the cold of the winter on the way. “If he doesn’t do what he said he was going to do, in four years he shouldn’t even run.”
The New York Times published a story out of Johnstown about massive steel plant and coal mine job losses due to increased global competition. It included comments from industry experts acknowledging that many of these jobs were gone forever and from residents fearful about the economy and the future. This was in 1982.
Terry Havener, 63, a retired union carpenter, met with me this week at an empty luncheonette called Missy’s Place and said he was laid off from Bethlehem Steel, long since closed, after a flood devastated this city in 1977.
“That,” he said, “was the nail in the coffin here”—39 years ago, well before the advent of the job-sucking trade deals that animated blue-collar workers across the Midwest.
So this year, as the divisive, repellent 2016 presidential campaign came to a head, Cambria County
In Portage, 20 miles outside of town, Pam Schilling, 59, a retired grocery store meat wrapper whose son died in April of a heroin overdose, sat in her living room, alone except for her tiny Yorkie named Rudy, glued to the news. She stayed up all night. “I was so excited,” she said.
They had earned the right to celebrate. There are, easy to say now, many reasons Trump won, but high on the list are people like Del Signore and Schilling and Byich. Trump’s road to the White House ran through Cambria County, where once steel and coal let people with high school educations buy houses and take vacations and lead relatively want-not middle-class lives—and where it doesn’t work that way anymore. In this Rust Belt notch, where peeling paint, vacant storefronts and the dark hulks of shuttered mills are reminders of all that’s been lost, Trump’s mantra of Make America Great Again sounded not like a ball-cap slogan but a last-ditch chance—to reverse an economic decline that has been choking this region for decades.
“Your government betrayed you, and I’m going to make it right,” Trump told a boisterous crowd at the Cambria County War Memorial Arena less than three weeks before Election Day. “Your jobs will come back under a Trump administration,” he said. “Your steel will come back,” he said. “We’re putting your miners back to work,” he said.
The people here who voted for Trump want all that. They want him to loosen environmental regulations. They want their taxes to go down and their incomes to go up. They want to see fewer drugs on their streets and more control of the Mexican border. They want him to “run the country like a business.” And they want this fast. So now comes the hard part for Trump—turning rhetoric into results. Four years ago, the largely Democratic voters in Cambria County flipped on President Obama, disgusted that he had not made good on his promise of change. What’s clear from a series of interviews with Trump supporters here is that they will turn on Trump, too, if he doesn’t deliver.
All the talk about the “white working class” creates an impression of a monolithic and homogenous base of support. But in one conversation after another, voters revealed meaningful distinctions about what issues they most want solved. Some might want a wall sturdy enough to stop the drug traffickers, but others are paying much closer attention to whether there’s a bump in the payroll at the last coal mine. And that variation—plus the urgency expressed by those who swung so passionately for Trump—suggests less a permanent bloc than an anxious and impatient coalition that could fracture as quickly as it formed. It’s only 10 days after this oft-overlooked, tucked-away part of Pennsylvania helped put Trump in the Oval Office—and the clock is ticking.
“I think you’ll start seeing improvements in six months,” Bill Polacek said in his corner office at JWF Industries, where he’s one of the owners of one of Johnstown’s last manufacturing plants.
Dave Kirsch stood in the parking lot of Himmel’s Coal Yard in Carrolltown, where he drives a truck, and expressed optimism and preached patience—not, though, that much patience. “My boss, he’s a pretty smart man,” Kirsch told me, “and he said it can’t change overnight, but he said give it six months to a year.”
Maggie Frear, a retired nurse, told me toward the end of our meeting one evening in her home that the changes Trump pledged would “take him at least a couple months.”
A couple months?
“Or probably even two years,” she said.
Four years tops, though, she assured me.
The New York Times published a story out of Johnstown about massive steel plant and coal mine job losses due to increased global competition. It included comments from industry experts acknowledging that many of these jobs were gone forever and from residents fearful about the economy and the future. This was in 1982.
Terry Havener, 63, a retired union carpenter, met with me this week at an empty luncheonette called Missy’s Place and said he was laid off from Bethlehem Steel, long since closed, after a flood devastated this city in 1977.
“That,” he said, “was the nail in the coffin here”—39 years ago, well before the advent of the job-sucking trade deals that animated blue-collar workers across the Midwest.
So this year, as the divisive, repellent 2016 presidential campaign came to a head, Cambria County
whiter, poorer and less educated than the nation as a whole—was ripe for Trump’s blunt, populist message. The most important word in his catchphrase, for people around here, was not make or America or even great. It was again. They changed their party affiliation in droves.
Politico Magazine visited Cambria County this past summer, and listened to people in a longtime Democratic stronghold who were already putting Trump signs in their yards. It was just after Hillary Clinton had secured the Democratic nomination—finally outlasting an opponent whose message of economic inequality had proven extremely attractive in parts of the country a lot like this. The story, written by Keith O’Brien, was an early alarm bell for the Clinton campaign, or should’ve been. For Trump’s campaign, though, it was an affirmation—an invitation.
In Trump’s appearance at the War Memorial Arena on October 21, a rally that drew an estimated 4,000 people in a place with a population of less than 20,000—he delivered a laser beam of an appeal to those desperate for some semblance of a return to better times.
“The iron and steel forged in your mills formed the backbone of our nation … This was the town that people flocked to from around the world to make their American Dreams come true,” he told them.
“If we win,” he said, “the change you’ve been waiting for will finally arrive. You must get out to vote. We will win. We will shock the world.”
Watch it now, and what happened on November 8 feels far less surprising.
A few days after Trump’s election, when I called some of the people who were quoted in O’Brien’s story from the summer, I heard a fair share of justifiable told you so.
“We knew something was in the brew,” said Dave Pancoke, a 54-year-old unemployed steelworker trying to make do on odd jobs.
“Hillary said the ‘deplorables’ didn’t count,” Kirsch said, referring to Clinton’s comments at a tony fundraiser in September in which she described “half of Trump’s supporters” as “the basket of deplorables.”
“Well,” Kirsch said.
He laughed into the phone.
Politico Magazine visited Cambria County this past summer, and listened to people in a longtime Democratic stronghold who were already putting Trump signs in their yards. It was just after Hillary Clinton had secured the Democratic nomination—finally outlasting an opponent whose message of economic inequality had proven extremely attractive in parts of the country a lot like this. The story, written by Keith O’Brien, was an early alarm bell for the Clinton campaign, or should’ve been. For Trump’s campaign, though, it was an affirmation—an invitation.
In Trump’s appearance at the War Memorial Arena on October 21, a rally that drew an estimated 4,000 people in a place with a population of less than 20,000—he delivered a laser beam of an appeal to those desperate for some semblance of a return to better times.
“The iron and steel forged in your mills formed the backbone of our nation … This was the town that people flocked to from around the world to make their American Dreams come true,” he told them.
“If we win,” he said, “the change you’ve been waiting for will finally arrive. You must get out to vote. We will win. We will shock the world.”
Watch it now, and what happened on November 8 feels far less surprising.
A few days after Trump’s election, when I called some of the people who were quoted in O’Brien’s story from the summer, I heard a fair share of justifiable told you so.
“We knew something was in the brew,” said Dave Pancoke, a 54-year-old unemployed steelworker trying to make do on odd jobs.
“Hillary said the ‘deplorables’ didn’t count,” Kirsch said, referring to Clinton’s comments at a tony fundraiser in September in which she described “half of Trump’s supporters” as “the basket of deplorables.”
“Well,” Kirsch said.
He laughed into the phone.
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