Erie County is the sort of place that will decide the election – a swing community in a crucial swing state.Adrian Morrow/The Globe and Mail
Missy Burke didn’t vote before Donald Trump came along.
A 54-year-old warehouse worker in northwestern Pennsylvania, Ms. Burke says she was enticed to the polls for the first time in 2016 by the businessman’s brash image (“he didn’t care who he made mad”) and his promises to crack down on immigration (“they’re getting free money while people are living on the street”).
The fact that Mr. Trump was found guilty in late May of 34 crimes related to a hush-money scheme has done nothing to cool Ms. Burke’s ardour. She will be casting a ballot for him again in November.
“I’m going to vote for the felon. I’m going to have a convict for a president,” she says as she sits in a park in Corry, Pa., a town of 6,200 surrounded by forested, green hills, on a sweltering, sunny Friday afternoon. “If he is going to have to run the country from a jail cell, I guess that’s the way it has to be.”
Forty-five minutes and a world away, Abdiaziz Miney sounds rather less enthusiastic about his choice for president: Joe Biden. Tending a community garden in Erie, an industrial city of 93,000, Mr. Miney lists off disappointments with the President. His inability to fully implement student-loan forgiveness is at the top.
Abdiaziz Miney plans to vote for Joe Biden because 'he quieted the country down.' Here he is working in a community garden on the east side of Erie.Adrian Morrow/The Globe and Mail
Still, he’s determined to avoid a return to the conflicts of the Trump years.
“I have to vote for Biden – he quieted the country down,” says Mr. Miney, a 57-year-old landscaper, father of eight and refugee from Somalia, standing amid rows of freshly planted collard greens.
Erie County is the sort of place that will decide the election – a swing community in a crucial swing state. A 270,000-strong county about 160 kilometres from the Canadian border, it has, like most manufacturing centres, struggled with population loss in recent decades. Currently, it is best known for its plastics industry and Presque Isle (pronounced “Press Kyle” here), a state park that juts out into Lake Erie.
Stretching from the urban core of Erie to small towns such as Corry, the county voted twice for former president Barack Obama before turning to Mr. Trump in 2016, then flipping to Mr. Biden in 2020 by a single percentage point.
The contrast between Ms. Burke and Mr. Miney reveals a dynamic that could decide the result this time around: whether the Democratic incumbent can persuade his wide-ranging 2020 voting coalition to set aside its ambivalence about him personally to again overcome the polarizing Republican’s enduringly loyal following.
Gary Horton, the head of the local NAACP chapter, contends that the election will turn on which party can better motivate supporters to get to the polls – not in winning over people on the other side of the country’s yawning political divide.
Gary Horton, head of the Erie, Pa., chapter of the NAACP, at a community centre he runs.Adrian Morrow/The Globe and Mail
“If the Democrats chase people who aren’t likely to change their minds, it’s a waste of time. They have to look for new voters and irregular voters in their own party,” he says at a community centre on the city’s blue-collar east side, an area of clapboard bungalows and lush oak trees.
The data bear him out. Between 2016 and 2020, Mr. Trump increased his vote total, both in Erie County and across the country, but lost the latter election because the Democratic vote increased even more.
Standing outside her parents’ house nearby, Marie Smith is the sort of voter Mr. Horton is talking about. Asked about Mr. Biden, she expresses frustration with both inflation and spending on U.S. military aid to Ukraine and Israel. “Working-class people like us are struggling. It shouldn’t be that way. All our money is going to fight that war.”
Still, she says, Mr. Trump is far worse. She worries that his divisive rhetoric is pushing the country closer to political street violence and a possible repeat of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
“It is ignorance and untruth that he’s spewing. The racial tension that we’re having in America is in part because of his platform. It’s dangerous,” says Ms. Smith, 61, who is Black.
Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures during a campaign event in Philadelphia, Pa., on June 22.Tom Brenner/Reuters
At the headquarters of the county Democratic Party, in a Victorian commercial building on the city’s wide main drag, Sam Talarico says it’s been hard to get voters excited about the election at all. “People aren’t paying attention yet,” he says. “They haven’t shown a lot of interest so far and it’s frustrating.”
Mr. Biden’s campaign has invested in Erie, dispatching staff from headquarters to organize weekend door-knocking efforts, says Mr. Talarico, a 68-year-old retired science teacher who serves as the county party chair. He sees preserving democracy and fighting for abortion rights as the major winning issues for his party, particularly with some Republicans now trying to ban or restrict in-vitro fertilization and contraception.
“We are focusing on democracy versus autocracy, which is really what Trump is offering,” he says. “And just some of the absolute crazy things that are being talked about on the other side.”
U.S. President Joe Biden participates in a campaign event at the South Side restaurant in Philadelphia, Pa., on May 29.MANDEL NGAN/Getty Images
Over at county Republican headquarters, in a suburban strip plaza, party chair Tom Eddy, 74, is grappling with a voter motivation problem of his own: the small but pervasive faction of GOPers who have never liked Mr. Trump. He fears the former president’s conviction could be enough to drive them to not vote.
“It’s those people who are conservative that are on the borderline that I worry about, because they can change an election,” he says.
For Mr. Eddy personally, Mr. Trump’s felonies don’t matter. “If I’d had an affair with Stormy Daniels, you’d better be sure I’d be trying to cover the damn thing up. My wife would shoot me,” he says.
Back in Corry, Lewis Norman, Sr., is the sort of Republican who stresses out Mr. Eddy. A 78-year-old retired insurance underwriter, Mr. Norman views Mr. Biden as “too free with the spending” but also a “good, decent man.” He will be voting for the President as a protest against his own party’s nominee.
“I want to bury Trump. I just have no respect for him. His attitude towards women. His attitude towards the law. His attitude towards democracy,” Mr. Norman says. Such opinions can apparently cause friction in this town. As he lists off his complaints with the former president, Mr. Norman’s wife tries to hush him.
Sitting nearby, on the sidelines of a chainsaw-carving competition unfolding on this early summer day in the town’s central park, Jennifer Elchynski is the Republicans’ hoped-for antidote to people such as Mr. Norman.
She wasn’t bothered by Mr. Trump’s courtship of foreign autocrats (“he was trying to be friends with Russia”) and she liked his tariffs on steel and aluminum. “He wanted to stop buying so much product overseas,” she says.
Like Ms. Burke, her political engagement begins and ends with Mr. Trump. Before him, she didn’t vote, and she doesn’t cast a ballot in elections in which he isn’t running. It is this effect – “only Trump” voters drawn uniquely to this singular political figure – that gives his party confidence he can turn back the swath of Americans arrayed against him.
“What Trump was trying to do was good,” says Ms. Elchynski, 46. “I probably won’t vote in other elections after he’s gone.”