See ‘Now They’re Voting Red’: A Pennsylvania Fracking Boom Weighs on Biden’s Re-Election Chances: Economic churn is pushing voters toward Trump in the Pittsburgh area, potentially overwhelming Democrats’ base of college-educated workers by Aaron Zitner and Kris Maher of The WSJ. Excerpts:
"Pittsburgh is at the center of a class inversion between the two parties that is redefining American politics. Democrats have traded their former blue-collar base for professional-class, metropolitan workers, while Republicans have become overwhelmingly dependent on working-class voters concentrated in far-flung suburbs, small towns and rural areas.
In Pennsylvania, the largest 2024 battleground state, President Biden’s victory four years ago depended in large part on big gains among voters such as [Josh] Thieler, a software company manager and former Republican who is now part of the city’s heavily Democratic professional class. But those gains have been overtaken by opposition from voters like [John] Sabo, who works in the natural-gas industry, a sector that has given a boost to blue-collar workers in rural counties.
These energy-economy voters see Biden as hostile to fracking, which taps natural gas trapped in sedimentary rock deep underground. The sector has drawn billions of dollars in new investment in Pennsylvania, much of it in the state’s southwest corner.
Biden has been particularly hurt by his decision to cancel the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which local companies say cut into demand for their services; and his order this year to pause new permits to export liquefied natural gas, which could deprive drillers of new markets. Many of these voters also believe the president’s push for Americans to adopt electric vehicles will undercut jobs tied to fossil fuels.
The area’s reliance on energy jobs helps explain why Democrats look to be losing more voters than they have gained here despite a Biden agenda that’s pumping billions of dollars into infrastructure and manufacturing."
"There is little sign that Biden can regain substantial support in seven largely working-class and rural counties that surround the city, every one of which produced a larger vote margin for Trump in 2020 than in 2016. The resistance to Biden’s energy policies is making it harder for the incumbent to stop his party’s decline among noncollege voters there, forcing the party to wring more votes out of a Democratic base elsewhere that, so far, seems dispirited."
[there is] "a breed of progressive Democrat new to Pittsburgh, among them Rep. Summer Lee and Sara Innamorato, the top official in Pittsburgh’s county, who oppose fracking. They say the risks to residents’ health and the environment, as well as the effect on climate change, are too great, and that the region should prepare for energy jobs to shift toward renewables."
"In the 2000 presidential election, Democrats carried this part of the state—Pittsburgh’s county and seven neighboring, more working-class counties—by nearly 86,000 votes. By 2020, Biden lost by a net 38,000 votes in those same counties. Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, produced a far bigger margin for Democrats than it had two decades earlier, a 56% gain. But that was more than erased by landslide losses in the lower-income counties nearby."
"Once, Pittsburgh and its surrounding counties were largely unified in a single economic and political ecosystem of industry, unions and Democratic leadership. Steel and manufacturing plants were dotted along the two rivers that converge in the city to form the Ohio River, a transportation gateway to the West and South. Then, steel collapsed, with big job losses coming in the 1980s. The region started shedding population.
At its likely peak in 1952, manufacturing employed about 379,000 people and accounted for 40% of all jobs in the region, according to regional economist Chris Briem of the University of Pittsburgh. Thousands more jobs were indirectly related. Today, only 85,000 work in manufacturing, he said.
The fracking industry hasn’t filled the vacuum, but it has created high-paying, if cyclical, jobs in communities that had little to offer the blue-collar workforce. In Zelienople, a starting laborer can earn $85,000 a year right out of high school at Deep Well Services—“far more than their fathers ever did,” said Sabo, a company vice president.
"Those workers can then climb in responsibility to jobs that top out at $200,000 and even $250,000 in annual wages, a level now hit by about 60 employees, Sabo said. The work is hard, involving 28 days on the job and then 14 days off as part of teams that prepare wells to extract natural gas."
"Many workers in this part of the state say their jobs cement them to Trump and the Republican Party. While they criticize Biden’s stances on immigration, social issues and military funding for Ukraine, they often point to decisions that they believe directly affect their livelihoods in explaining their votes."
"An inflow of new workers, many of them foreign-born, has transformed city neighborhoods. In Lower Lawrenceville, once home to one of the nation’s oldest populations, the number of residents with a bachelor’s degree has more than doubled from a decade earlier, census data show, and the number with a more advanced degree more than tripled. Incomes rose as well, with median household income topping $90,000, more than twice the level of a decade earlier, adjusted for inflation."
"Thieler, the progressive Democrat who lives just north of the neighborhood, recalls a childhood in Uniontown, where his great-grandfather once owned a small coal mine that failed. He grew up listening to conservative talk radio and never questioned the Republican politics of his family. But he said that changed after he moved to Pittsburgh and took his first job at a startup in the city that made software to help hospitals track patients.
He credits his political shift to his exposure to more diverse people and issues in the city, including racial injustice and homelessness."
"The Pittsburgh neighborhood of East Liberty, home to Duolingo [Language app-maker Duolingo], has seen its own transformation as a tech hub. An old Nabisco factory site nearby now houses several artificial-intelligence companies and the Ascender Pittsburgh incubator, which is fostering startups in education, payroll services and other areas. Google’s offices are across the street."
"While many Democrats say they don’t recognize the Republican Party that has been reshaped by Trump, others here say it’s the Democratic Party that has changed most.
“It used to be a conservative, middle-of-the-road Democratic Party,” said Alan Benyak, a Washington County lawyer and member of the Democratic State Committee until 2022. Now, he’s a registered Republican.
“I’d go to a state committee meeting and feel like a dinosaur,” he said. “With this war on the fossil fuel industry, which is still big in Washington County, it was like I was swimming upstream.”
Benyak marvels at how deep the political divide has become between Allegheny County and those that border it.
“You’d think we’d all think the same way, somewhat,” he said. “We’re all from the same area, generally, within 20 miles of each other.”"
Related posts:
Are some blue jeans really Democratic and others Republican? (2019)
People say the president can control gas prices if the president belongs to the other party (2017)
Adam Smith Meets Jonathan Haidt (on political polarization and the animosity of hostile factions) (2023)
See also Americans start caring more about deficits and the national debt when the party they oppose runs them up by John V. Kane of New York University and Ian G. Anson of The University of Maryland. Excerpt:
"In the past two decades, US budget deficits have skyrocketed, and the national debt is now over $22 trillion. But do Americans care about the size of deficits and the national debt? In new research, John V. Kane and Ian G. Anson find that people tend to care more about the deficits and debts when they are increased by presidents from the party that they oppose. Both Republicans and Democrats, they write, become less concerned about governments running deficits when their President is in charge."
No comments:
Post a Comment