US election 2020: America’s forgotten people weigh in

In 2016 Scranton’s voters flocked to Donald Trump, but will they again?

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden stops in front of his childhood home on July 9 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Picture: AFP

Tom Moran can see Joe Biden’s childhood home from the front porch of his house on North Washington Avenue in the hard-scrabble town of Scranton, Pennsylvania. It is not the best place to live for someone such as Moran, a staunch Donald Trump supporter who flies a Trump flag alongside an American flag from his porch.

“We’ve taken a lot of grief for being on this street,” the 60-year-old father of three tells me as he stands outside his home. “I’ve had three Trump signs stolen, we routinely have obscenities yelled at us in front of our three-year-old because my view is not the view of others here.

“But to me Donald Trump has been a unique politician in my lifetime. He told us what he would do and mostly he has done them, he has kept his promises. I will be voting for him again.”

The bitter political divide in this single street, where Biden fans frequently pay homage to the faded blue weatherboard house where he spent the first 10 years of his life, is repeated across Scranton, which sits in a key swing state.

The story of gritty Scranton is in many ways the story of Trump’s America, and his chances of re-election will depend on how voters in towns and regions such as this perceive the President four years after his election in 2016.

Scranton was a staunch Democrat union town, a former manufacturing powerhouse where Democrat blood ran deep. Democratic nominee Biden was born there. So was Hillary Clinton’s father, Hugh E. Rodham, who is buried in the local cemetery. Clinton’s grandfather Hugh S. Rodham once toiled in the town’s lace mills in the glory days when Scranton was a key manufacturing centre.

Yet Scranton went the way of many cities in America’s rust belt, losing 64 per cent of its manufacturing jobs between 1989 and 2015, and with a poverty rate rising to almost 25 per cent by 2015. When Trump came along in 2016, he found his so-called forgotten people in Scranton and across Pennsylvania as lifelong Democrats voted for him.

In Scranton’s Lackawanna County, a 24 per cent swing to Trump saw Clinton receive the lowest vote for any Democrat presidential contender since 1992 while Trump became the first president to win Pennsylvania since George HW Bush in 1988.

But with the coronavirus pandemic and the collapse of the economy, Scranton is again a grim place, littered with abandoned buildings, boarded-up shopfronts and in-your-face poverty.

Scranton council worker Patrick McNichols is a voter who has gone on the rollercoaster journey with Trump and is wondering what to do next.

When I first knocked on McNichols’s door the day after Trump’s 2016 election win, he told me that, although a lifelong Democrat, he voted for Trump because “this is a scrappy blue-collar town and he seems like a pretty scrappy guy who says he’s going to shake things up”.

When I visited Scranton again a year after Trump took office, McNichols was disillusioned with the President.

“When he ran I thought he was the lesser of two evils and I thought it would shake things up, but he is dividing the country too much. He doesn’t seem to have a plan, he flies by the seat of his pants all the time,” he said at that time.

Patrick McNichols outside his Scranton home. Picture: Cameron Stewart

But three years on, McNichols is considering casting his vote for Trump again, mostly because he is disappointed with Biden.

“I am not happy that the Democrats have chosen Biden,” the 66-year-old says from the porch of his modest wooden home. “I feel like Biden is being controlled by the left of his party. I don’t like open borders, I don’t like sanctuary cities, I don’t like a lot of that stuff, I am anti-abortion, and that seems to be the way that the Democratic Party has been going year after year after year.

‘I’m not crazy about Trump on the other hand — the tweets and all that other garbage — plus if he gets back in (office) the handcuffs will be off and he could do anything.”

But McNichols likes a lot of Trump’s agenda and believes the President gets a raw deal from the liberal media.

“I like the stance on immigration, I like the stance he took with China, I think that is long overdue because I think our country has been pushed around a lot by deals,” McNichols says. “I like what he did with the economy before this pandemic hit; I mean, we were booming. I was bringing home a lot more money these four years than I did previously.

“But to be honest I really don’t know who I will vote for. I am leaning Republican but I just don’t know. I’m on the fence.”

Although Scranton was Biden’s home town before his parents moved to Delaware, many locals say it has little bearing on their vote and that he returns mostly during election times.

Anne Kearns recalls Biden suddenly arriving outside her home in July — along with a large contingent of media — to visit the house he grew up in. “He yelled out: ‘I love you, Anne’, and I replied: ‘I love you more, Joe,’ ” Kearns says.

Kearns, 85, still lives in the modest home she and her husband bought off the Biden family in 1961. Her late husband asked her never to sell the house, telling her: “Joe Biden is going to be something one day.” Kearns has a photo in her hallway of herself with Biden and says he has visited the home regularly through the years and even invited her to the White House when he was vice-president.

In Biden’s old upstairs bedroom, he has scratched into the wall: “I am home — Joe Biden 9.1.08.”

Biden makes a stop to see Anne Kearns who lives in his childhood home in Scranton. Picture: AP

“He is so nice and everything they say about him is true,” Kearns tells me. “It was such a wonderful reward for him to finally be nominated. He is so well prepared to be president, but is he prepared for Trump? That’s what worries me.”

Her pro-Trump neighbour up the street, Moran, says he believes Trump will defy the polls to win because Biden is a weak candidate. He says Scranton’s decline is an example of the failure of Democrat-run towns with their union domination and clannish political systems, and he says that Biden would not have the strength or desire to challenge this status quo.

“Biden changes his words depending on what audience he is in front of,” says Moran, who works in financial services.

“The things that are important to Pennsylvania, like manufacturing jobs and fracking, these were beaten down by the Obama administration which Biden was a part of. And now we have things like the Green New Deal, which will cost jobs.

“Biden has never created a job in the private sector, he doesn’t know what that means, so if you are going to create jobs I want someone who has actually done it and Trump has done it.”

In dozens of interviews in Scranton this week, many people told me they were undecided about who they would vote for despite there being only a little more than six weeks until election day on November 3.

Some who were disillusioned with Trump over his handling of the coronavirus and his divisive style of leadership also were unenthused by or disappointed with Biden.

Fifty-one-year-old Lisa Moran (no relation to Tom Moran) wheels her ninth child, Matthew, 6, past the Biden home and says she and her husband are traditional Democrats but they voted for Trump in 2016 because “we just wanted a change from the same old regime which wasn’t doing much for us”. “But I have mixed opinions about Trump,” she says. “I like what he has done on the economy but I don’t like the way he behaves and what he says on social media.

“I think Biden is more presidential and so we are leaning towards him this time but we could still be swayed. The only thing that worries me about Biden is that he says he is a moderate but he has a lot of very liberal stances.”

While voters such as Lisa Moran worry that Biden is being pushed too far to the left by the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democrats, other voters, such as Tiffany Bonning, worry that Biden is not liberal enough.

Bonning, 37, an African American mother of two, says she would never vote for Trump because of “who he is morally, as a person; I don’t think that is what our country stands for”. But she is thinking of not voting for either candidate because she thinks Biden is too moderate.

Tiffany Bonning. Picture: Cameron Stewart

Mother of nine Lisa Moran. Picture: Cameron Stewart

“Universal healthcare and free colleges are important to me but Biden is not standing for that,” says Bonning, who preferred Sanders for the Democratic ticket. “I think people are scared of these sorts of policies. I’m not a fan of either Biden or Trump so it will probably be the first presidential election I sit out.”

Alyson Reilly, a mother of four, is a swinging voter who voted for Clinton but previously has voted for Republicans such as George W. Bush. She says she is undecided about her vote and is split 50-50 between Trump and Biden. She believes Trump would be better for the economy, including for the pharmaceutical industry she works in that puts “bread on the table” in their household.

But she worries about how divided America has become under the Trump presidency.

“I think Trump’s tone and manner have created a divide in this country like I’ve never seen before,” she says as she walks her dog with her daughter Lilly.

“This isn’t the America I was raised in and it’s a real shame for us and also for my kids. We can’t even go to dinner parties without people arguing over Trump or Biden. Political views should not dictate who you share a martini with.

“I think Biden is a better human being but some of his policies, like on immigration, are scary.”

Barbara Zaretski, 58, a healthcare worker and mother of two, says she is one of those who believed Trump when he said he would be president for America’s forgotten people. Zaretski considered herself a forgotten person.

“I voted for Trump because I thought he would bring something different to the table,” she says. “I believed him when he said he would help the middle class. But the middle class is disappearing into poverty right now.

“Just take a look at this town,” Zaretski adds, pointing down a street in west Scranton full of dilapidated weatherboard homes with rubbish strewn across front yards. “There is a lot of poverty in this town. What has he done for us?”

Zaretski says she has regretted voting for Trump “from day one” and says she is dreaming of a Biden victory. “I love Biden because he is down to earth and he is more in tune with what we need around here, he is for the lower classes, not just the rich and famous,” she says.

But retired schoolteacher Dave Hopkins, 73, and former health worker Chris Kirias, 72, who went to school together in Scranton, say Biden is the last thing America needs right now.

Barbara Zaretski. Picture: Cameron Stewart

“Trump is the best thing that has happened to politics in the last 40 years,” Hopkins says, as he stands with Kirias just down the road from the old Biden home. “Trump is tough, he takes care of the people and he is pro-life, which is important to be. By contrast, Biden can’t even speak properly, he is clearly not up to it.”

Kirias, who once met Trump during Trump’s New York real estate days, says he is a former Democrat who voted for Trump because of what was happening in towns such as Scranton.

“Factories were moving out of this country left and right, and we need someone to stop the bleeding and Trump has done that,” he says.

“Trump has stopped open borders, he is building the wall and he has done a phenomenal job with the pandemic. It’s a total sham that people criticise him over the pandemic. No one knew how bad it was early on but 10 days after the first case Trump shut the border with China while (Democrat) Nancy Pelosi was telling everyone to go to Chinatown. So who is right and who is wrong?”

Down the road another car pulls up outside Biden’s former home. “Is this where Joe Biden used to live?” the driver asks. He leans out of the car window to take a photo of the house. “I really hope Joe wins,” he says as he drives away. “But I’m worried it’s going to be close.”