A drive through the Rust Belt: Will it be Kamala Harris or Donald Trump who swings Pennsylvania?

Jim Dlauter is taking in the Friday afternoon sun, distinctive in his psychedelic Pink Floyd T-shirt and shades in his usual spot in downtown Gettysburg. He likes to watch the world go by.
Gettysburg is a Pennsylvanian beacon, drawing up to two million visitors each year to stand at the spot where Lincoln delivered his address. The town centre is like a film set but the preserved battlefield, in the intense silent heat, has an otherworldly atmosphere. The tourist rush is over for the year so the locals get their town back, not that Dlauter minds the influx. He talks about the strangeness of living somewhere that is part small-town, part lodestone to the mythology of America.
“I’m comfortable either way,” Dlauter says, speaking with that true southern accent you seldom hear anymore. “It’s just something you deal with living here. I meet a lot of people. The other night I was sitting here talking with a couple from Denmark. And that was just so cool.
[ US election campaign irrevocably poisoned by fallout from another apparent assassination attempt on Donald TrumpOpens in new window ]
“We don’t have the winters here like we used to. We don’t have the snow or any of that, what it was like when I grew up. I originally grew up in Hanover. And when I was younger we took car trips up here and we would have picnics on the battlefield. But today the best way to understand this, up here, is to go on one of the tours. There is too much to talk about. A lot of veterans died out there. It’s like sacred ground. Because the guys who died out there… North, South whatever… they were brothers. And Abraham Lincoln said right after that all men that died in this war are to be considered veterans. I guess it is my upbringing to be involved in it.”
We chat for a while about the currents of the presidential election and the frequent mentions of some new form of civil war or civil breakdown occurring. I tell him that I’m on the way up to the city of Wilkes-Barre, where Kamala Harris will give a rally that evening.
“Harris?” Dlauter says. “She’s a joke. The debate?That was a joke. What I did see of it… she never came out with a definite thing about anything. It was all flip and flop. One time we frack. Next time, we don’t frack. We need to become independent again – our country, as a whole. I don’t agree with where everything is. But there’s a hell of a lot of shit I don’t agree with. At this point in time, we are like the kid on the block and everyone is beating on us. The country. We need somebody in there to kick ass and take names. That’s what it comes down to.”
He grins when asked if he thinks that Donald Trump is the presidential candidate he sees as best-equipped to kick said ass.
“Yeah, I do! Cos he ain’t gonna take any bullshit. He’s comin’ right at you.”
Dlauter is speaking for a considerable cohort of Pennsylvanians. As the election date grows closer, the commentariat places a magnifying glass over the Keystone State – sometimes derisively called “Penn-tucky” because of its sharply pronounced urban/rural divide – and the focus on it grows more intense. In this century, it has swung from George W Bush to Barack Obama to Donald Trump to Joe Biden. It enters autumn on the brink: Harris’s decision not to elect the state’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, to give her an edge was the first surprise of her candidacy.
The problems specific to Pennsylvania – ancient lead pipes have caused a chronic water-quality issue in the cities and bigger towns; population decline and the wasting towns of the Rust Belt – are superseded by the prevailing national election issues: the economy, women’s reproductive rights and the US border with Mexico.
The ethnic make-up here in Adams County has remained largely unchanged over the past decade, mainly comprised of the descendants of Germans and the Irish, as well as English and Italian settlers, who account for 89 per cent of the ethnicity of residents according to the United States Census Bureau. The median household income – $76,000 (€68,000) – exceeds the state average and 60 per cent of the housing stock is valued at between $200,000 and $500,000: just 1.4 per cent of houses in the county are valued at $1 million or more.
Standing on the street, quiet apart from a group of motorbike enthusiasts in their golden years returning from the battlefield site, historic Gettysburg feels an awful long way from the southern border. But Dlauter believes the area has been impacted by problems associated with immigration.
“Yeah, I see some of it here. Not a whole lot. But this is a protected area. You aren’t going to screw around up here. They’ll light you up. But I look at it this way. What has happened in the last four years, we will be fortunate if we can dig our way out in the next 20. They are giving these guys more than I ever had growing up. Okay, I am retired now. I got social security; I got some banking. I’m good. But there are kids here that can’t eat. What do you mean, a kid can’t have a lunch? In Japan, every kid eats the same lunch and gets the same thing. And you know what, no kid goes hungry. Nothin’ wrong with that.”
We move the conversation on to the universal subject of the youth of today, who are not a source of comfort to Dlauter.
“I don’t know where their head is,” he marvels. “Their heads are right here,” he says, pointing at the phone I’m holding.
“They don’t know how to talk like me and you are now. Give ‘em a clock with hands on it and they can’t even tell time. This is crazy!”
As I leave, Dlauter is adamant that I try the “candy store” on the corner. He’s waving at someone he knows.
[ Conservative Catholics could swing US election in favour of Trump and VanceOpens in new window ]
I take a quick drive out to the Gettysburg battle site, whose flashpoints over the three days are marked with ornate statues and pillars. The entire site is now navigable by a subtle one-way road system meaning civil war history buffs and the merely curious can tour the field without sacrificing the air conditioning or Spotify on the car stereo. But if you wish, you can roam through the war fields on foot.
It’s a strange place: a site of absolute human carnage that now radiates an intense peacefulness. When I arrive at the field at Seminary Ridge, I find it entirely empty of visitors. This is where the infamous Pickett’s Charge occurred, an event that inspired the famous description by William Faulkner which has been subject to heavy revisionist interpretation.
“For every southern boy 14 years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long-oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet.”
The beseeching tone reflects the “myth of the Lost Cause” and the perspective of the then white ruling class rather than the enslaved masses in the south. It’s a reminder that the issue of race and racism is still the abiding undercurrent of much of the national conversation, including the November election.
Wilkes-Barre is a slow two-hour slog through the snarl of the interstate whose time-beaten surface is getting a facelift courtesy of the Biden infrastructure Bill – the adverts are frequent. It’s a city of 50,000 in the steadfastly Republican Luzerne County. The Victorian-era mansions and boulevards close to Wilkes university reflect a late-19th century prosperity, part of the Wyoming valley coal-mining rush.
The arrival of a vice-president brings Friday afternoon chaos: entire streets are cordoned off and the university arena where Harris will speak has been full for hours. Unlike her opponent, Harris keeps her stump speeches brief and upbeat: they are high-voltage events. Many Americans never get to see a presidential candidate in the flesh. So even though the speech is familiar, the live experience is unique.
“You know, one of the things I love about everyone who is here and what we are doing is, you know, in the midst of this moment there are people trying to divide us as a nation, trying to make us feel small and alone,” Harris says. “These are moments that remind all of us that we are all in this together.”
Her voice is drowned out by wild cheering for a few seconds and then she eases into her standard rally speech. It’s all done and dusted in half an hour.
“Oh, we are so happy to have her here,” says Molly Baron, who watched the rally on a big screen on one of the university lawns. “This is a Biden area so we have been so invested in President Biden and love him dearly, but that love translates over to Kamala Harris. Once we knew he was good with it, it felt safe for us to be good with it.”
Baron lives in the neutral ground between Luzerne and Lackawanna County, where the city of Scranton – home to Biden’s fabled and oft-remembered childhood days – is located.
“It is an unusual thing,” Baron explains. “I live in that area between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. It is interesting. People from Scranton don’t shop in Wilkes-Barre and vice versa. It is like they are two different worlds. And living in between, I have gone to both my whole life. But just because people have support in Scranton doesn’t mean they have it in Wilkes-Barre. Folks from there won’t necessarily come down here for dinner.”
Wilkes-Barre had a population of 86,000 in the 1930s, so it is one of those industrial towns waiting for the people to come back. This evening’s event is a brief return to the period when the downtown was boisterous and crowded. The secret service operation is polished: while the crowd is still exiting, Harris’s motorcade ghosts down one of the residential boulevards and then she is gone.
“It was very sweet to see. And the room so full and empowered and ready for a change,” says Natalia Rivera, who drove with her mother from Mount Pocono, about an hour away, to see Harris speaking.
“It felt so good.”
Rivera has recently given birth so her mother, Monica, had the next generation on her mind after listening to Harris.
“We need to be a unified country,” Monica says imploringly.
“I just think about my son, my daughter, my four beautiful grandchildren. And the violence in this county has to stop. We are sending the wrong message to our enemies. My mother always taught me – and I taught them – when you get on that school bus, you take care of each other. If you don’t, you invite others to disrespect your siblings. It is the same thing. We are fighting among one another and not getting along. What right do we have to tell another country to be civil when we are not getting along?”
She has struck at the heart of the anxiety beneath the surface coverage of electoral college votes and potential ”pathways” to the election for both Harris and Trump. Pennsylvania is embedded in the plans of both parties. (”If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing,” Trump would say on Monday night.) If Harris retains the state as Democratic-leaning, her immediate task will be to try and pacify a fraught electorate, a potential challenge to the result and the simmering threat of violence.
“Absolutely,” Monica Rivera says when asked if she thinks Harris can do this.
“Because just the fact that she is coherent. And I don’t doubt the intelligence of the American people whether you are Republican, Democrat or liberal it does not matter. We are smart people and should act like that.”
On a street bench nearby, Kevin and Alicia are sitting waiting for the traffic to settle before they go home. Both are from Wilkes-Barre. Because they work in public service roles, they prefer not to give their surnames. They’ve watched – and worked with – people whose lives have turned somersaults in the years since the pandemic, with the escalating fentanyl crisis contributing to a local homeless crisis.
“We’ve seen the community suffer dramatically from a homeless crisis that has sprung up over the past year,” Kevin says, “through fentanyl and heroin addiction.” And, in tandem, Wilkes-Barre has become sucked into the national vortex of soaring house prices and spiralling rents.
“Now, what you pay for… if you want to feel safe, you are going to have to pay a lot of money,” Alicia says. “Now it is old housing stock – fire hazards and unsafe conditions in unsafe neighbourhoods. It’s bad,” she nods. “Housing is really bad out there.”
Both are hopeful that a Harris presidency will act as a salve for the country. They are weary of Donald Trump even though both have friends and family who are absolute loyalists. They chat about Ireland, about Europe. “People here don’t understand the cost of gas globally,” Alicia says. “If they knew the prices in Europe, they’d be horrified.”
By eight o’clock, the streets of Wilkes-Barre are completely deserted. The street barriers for the Harris rally have been stacked on the roadside for Saturday collection. But downtown is ghostly.
And it’s a theme. On Saturday, I drive across to Clairton, in western Pennsylvania, avoiding the interstate because you might as well be on the autobahn or the N4. There is nothing to see. Pennsylvania has a population of 13 million people and, on a four-hour drive across the state, I count five of them outside, three of whom are mowing their lawn. It’s peculiar. The day is sublime: 28 degrees and clear skies, yet as I go through towns with names like Shamokin and Berrysburg and Gratz, there is nobody outside. Clearly, the era of sitting on the stoop has passed: there is more to do indoors – and football season is up and running.
The countryside is defined by narrow, hilly roads and lush, fabulously coloured fields and the gardens immaculate: it’s as if the entire middle of Pennsylvania has been handed over to Claude Monet and the ground staff of Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Club. It’s a dreamscape – and then it changes.
Clairton is just 11 miles (18km) south of Pittsburgh but belongs to a different era. The town acquired an odd sort of fame as the setting for The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino’s 1978 operatic war film that still splits opinion – “a small-minded film with greatness in it” was the verdict of the influential film critic Pauline Kael when it was released that Christmas. The making of that film has been discussed as much as the film itself and, in his exhaustive location-scouting process, Cimino discovered he couldn’t use Clairton. And so the town had the indignity of other, lesser Monongahela Valley towns used as stand-in locations.
Clairton grew around the biggest coke production plant in the United States. But by the late 1970s, when Robert DeNiro, Meryl Streep and company were passing through, it was in rapid decline. In 2024, nothing has been done to arrest that. The coke plant is still smoking but employs a fraction of the workforce. Clairton itself is beyond derelict: street after street of closed businesses, of boarded-up houses, of nothingness.
YouTube has a lavish menu of Clairton videos posted by ghost-town enthusiasts. Of all the closed buildings, the Grisnik Bakery, with its pink-tiled facade, catches the eye. “Established 1910,″ it reads, as if proof of a once-thriving community. An obituary from 2007 in a local newspaper pays tribute to the late owner, George Grisnik, whose grandfather had established the bakery after emigrating from Croatia.
“George really enjoyed baking the Christmas-holiday specials such as the traditional Paska bread, along with the nut and poppyseed rolls,” his wife, Dorothy Grisnik, says in the piece. “Before George and I were married in 1954, we both belonged to the Jelica Singing Society, which is a Croatian singing group”, and she describes how this group wore the traditional folk costumes and performed at Croatian centres throughout western Pennsylvania.
“Of course, as the children came, George put in longer hours at the bakery, and I was kept busy at home. We had to curtail our singing commitments. But that didn’t stop George from singing as he was baking or waiting on customers.”
[ Pope criticises Harris and Trump, telling US Catholics to ‘choose the lesser evil’ in election voteOpens in new window ]
There is no singing in the bakery now. The short reason for the demise of Clairton is that the development of electric-arc mini-mills diminished overnight, the need for the coke developed by the town’s main plant for the production of steel. What it made became devalued. The legacy is a town with one of the worst air-pollution – and cancer – rates in the country. It is listed as having a population of 6,181, the median household income is $41,000 and the town’s employment rate is 46 per cent.
Clearly, Clairton is a community that has been horribly and repeatedly failed by both Republican and Democratic governments for years, and it is hard to see how it might be reimagined. Neither Trump nor Harris has visited.
About an hour west of Clairton is Johnstown, another western Pennsylvania river town still responding to the demise of its mill industries. Johnstown, too, has caught the imagination of the storytellers: it is name-checked in Bruce Springsteen’s aching ballad The River and was the location for All the Right Moves, starring a young Tom Cruise as an angst-ridden young football star with dreams of getting out – “You can’t even get a job in that damn mill now,” his character complains at one stage in the film.
The arrival into Johnstown, which is set on the Conemaugh river, isn’t so much a drive as a spectacular descent on a winding road on which you catch glimpses of church domes and the roofs of sturdy, unpretentious buildings. It’s breathtaking, in its own way. In the square, on Sunday lunchtime, there’s a community festival with a live jazz band and stands selling local art and foods.
[ Graveyard full of Irish names is all that remains of a US town slowly consumed by a 50-year fireOpens in new window ]
Johnstown has been subject to visits from both Trump and Harris within the past month. It’s the bright lights for Cambria County, which narrowly edged for Barack Obama in 2008 but has since moved further and further into a Republican vote.
Brian Lingenfelter was born and raised in Johnstown and he pinpoints his school years, in the 1980s, as the years when things began visibly to go south.
“Well actually when I was growing up we still had the steel mills going over there,” he tells me. “Right now, we only have one. The others have shut down. You figure you got a piece of steel that was made here for a buck or get it shipped in for 60 cents. What are you going to buy? So, work around here is a different situation. It’s tough. This is one of the repressed areas.”
He laughs at the mention of All the Right Moves: friends of his were extras in the film but he missed out because he went to “Hornerstown high school over there”, he says, waving towards the Lutheran church.
Lingenfelter had no idea the park party was taking place; his plan for Sunday was to cycle over to his friends’ house to watch the Steelers play their first game of the season. “Gotta get my exercise in,” he laughs, patting the bike saddle. But first he talks me through the difficulties facing Johnstown.
“People are tired of what this government is doing. Just the cost of everything going up. And I am going to sit here and tell you: I don’t care about communism. I don’t care about socialism. The people at the bottom don’t gain nothing − with either system. And they are forcing it on the people. I actually want to see Trump get back in just to stop all the madness. We had businesses all downtown there. Now you go up main street and you see empty store fronts.”
You do, but there is also a series of really nice cafes and artisan shops. It is trying its level best. Johnstown almost died twice: the first occasion was the flood of 1889, which killed 2,200 people after a dam burst, now the subject of a local museum. The football stadium at the top of the town was redeveloped at a cost of $8 million. You don’t have to spend long here to understand that there’s a fierce resilience about Johnstown.
Lingenfelter sits back on the park seat, enjoying the Sunday sunshine and trying to plot a way forward for Johnstown.
“When Reagan was in office, it was a good time. Even when President Bush was in office. Back then things were booming. It is going to take a long time to bring an old town back.”
He falls silent for a moment before adding: “It will come back. But a lot of that is down to the leaders.”
Then he heads off to watch the Steelers.