From gold high-top sneakers to Women-for-Trump tank tops, iron-on “Fight, Fight, Fight” patches to a poster featuring a 19th century cowboy outlaw, Trump merchandise sales at the Trump store in Scranton, Pennsylvania , sales tripled in the days following the US president’s landslide victory in the US elections last week.
In a difficult week for Democrats, the goods flying off the shelves added insult to injury as Scranton has long been closely associated with Joe Biden, hailed as his hometown and a symbol of his affinity with the American working class.
Store manager Thomas Rankin said he never believed polls predicted a tight race. Trump voters, he believed, had simply kept quiet because they didn’t want a fight. “A very large portion of the Democratic party went boom as soon as they got into the booth! They could see through all the Democratic propaganda,” he said.
Related: ‘They say the Democrats look down on me’: Trump’s victory fueled by populist backlash
And then there were the rallies — Rankin, a former deadhead, said he went to a lot of concerts — and Trump had held hundreds of them with his signature weave of folktales, policies and political rhetoric.
“People traveled to them like they were traveling for the Grateful Dead,” he said, and that’s what I did. He drew people in, just like the dead. People were having fun, but they were also interested in what he was saying.”
Bitter truths abounded in Scranton last week, as voters in “Scranton Joe” Biden’s hometown largely rejected Democrats’ proposal for a continuation under Kamala Harris.
Lackawanna County, of which Scranton is a part, lies at the top of Pennsylvania’s densely populated Route 222 voter corridor. Once a Democratic stronghold, it swung five points toward Donald Trump last week compared to 2020.
Harris narrowly won the county by less than 1%, significantly less than Biden’s 8% in 2020 and Barack Obama’s 30% in 2012. Hopes that Latino voters would come through for Harris did not materialize. Democrats lost Pennsylvania and every other swing state if predictions for undeclared Arizona held.
Despite living in Scranton’s Green Ridge neighborhood for only the first decade of his life, Biden made the city a key aspect of his political story — the “Scranton values” — and not Delaware, the state backed by the financial services industry, where he actually spent his 50-year political career.
Biden wrapped up his limited campaign appearances in support of Harris at a carpenters union hall in the city on Sunday, acknowledging: “I’m leaving. I ask you to do something for yourself and your family.”
But that didn’t happen, or not in sufficient numbers, and now the intraparty accusations are in full swing within the Democratic party — and on the streets of Scranton, too. “The Democrats started switching candidates too late,” said Robert Tosti, a retired doctor, at Wegmans, an upscale supermarket on the city’s west side.
“I don’t blame Biden, I blame the party. He’s 80. Give him a break. They should have taken care of someone else. They should have seen this coming.”
Instead of accusing, Tosti, a Democrat, said Democrats should ask themselves a question: “What does it tell you about Democrats when most people voted for a man of his caliber — a convicted felon, whose vice president and cabinet does not even want to endorse him?”
The short answer is that Democrats sold a platform, a set of values and policies, that a majority of American voters do not believe and are not willing to buy.
Wegmans and the Trump store sit across from a Walmart that was hit by a landslide and is now a quarry. But at a new Walmart nearby, the division between left and right—the Democratic elites and the working class who now vote Republican—was clearly visible.
Larry Cornelius, a black voter who voted Democratic, predicted that Trump’s promise to reform the economy to benefit the American working class would end in disappointment. “This doesn’t reflect how they think,” he said.
Three women were loading groceries into their car. “I feel like she was a chameleon. So we went for Trump,” one of them said. Her daughter said she was not impressed that she would have the first female president. “No, I think it’s more important to buy a house and be able to live on my own,” she added.
The final days of the 2024 elections were hit by counterclaims over waste. Democrats hoped that a racist joke by a comedian at Trump’s New York City rally about Puerto Rico would turn Latino voters in this part of Pennsylvania against Trump. But Biden later appeared to call Trump voters trash, complicating the issue.
Suheily Echevarria, 29, owner of a Puerto Rican restaurant in Scranton, said it didn’t move her. “I don’t even care because I know I’m not trash,” she said. As a mother of two young children, she didn’t want her children to hear about gay and transgender identities at school. “I want that to come from the house, not some stranger teaching them,” she said.
Echevarria said the inference that Black and Latino men were resisting an undisclosed misogynistic impulse to vote for Harris was misinterpreted. “We want a better life and we want to support our families,” she said.
Latino voters were in trouble: A vote for Trump meant approval of the bullshit commentary, Echevarria said, “but if they don’t vote for Trump, it means they approve of the economic suffering under the Biden administration.” Won paying bills.
At Garibaldi’s Mexican Restaurant, owner Isabel Sanchez said the choice was easy. “Kamala is good, but Trump is better for the economy,” she said. “We are Mexican, we are in America to work.” Biden’s border policies had made life more difficult.
At every turn in Scranton, it was difficult to find a core Democratic party message that had not been rejected, in part because of the associated sense of sameness and elitism. Democratic margins in the US crumbled and the ‘blue wall’ of the Rust Belt states collapsed.
With even Pennsylvania’s Democratic Sen. Bob Casey removed from office, retired nurse Julie Zabrowski, 57, who had been working long hours and injuring her back during the pandemic, said Lackawanna’s country was “truly democratic.” , but that ‘people just needed change’. and Harris represented no change.
“For me it was economics – and I did better under Trump. I’m pro-choice, but that was one problem. It’s huge, but it’s not everything,” Zabrowski said. As a Democrat who voted for Trump, she said she was annoyed by Biden’s primary-free handoff to Harris.
“I had no choice and I thought that’s what it was about,” she said.
At the Local 524 pipefitters union, Rick Elliott said his daughter, who works in New York, was saddened by the election results. “I told her, whatever happens in this election, it won’t directly affect you in the near future.”
Elliott, a Democrat at least in spirit, ventured that Trump would provide relief from the two-party political game. ‘He’s a businessman. He’s going to get away from all these politicians. We can’t listen to them, and he’s not going to play their game.”
Another man, a member of the Most Wanted Riders motorcycle club, may have captured some of the prevailing sentiment in Lackawanna after an 18-month election that cost $15 billion in advertising alone. He didn’t vote because he couldn’t.
‘I’m a criminal. I can’t vote. A felon won, but a felon can’t vote. Find out,” he said.
