Dem party chairs cautiously optimistic over Tuesday’s election results
Shelley Glessner is encouraged “a little bit.” The same can be said of Jim Davis. Both see some running room for western Pennsylvania Democrats, though both are realists: until further notice, our small but significant corner of the world remains Trump territory.
Glessner and Davis are local Democratic Party chairs; Glessner in Somerset County: Davis in Fayette County.
They were reacting to this past week’s Democratic victories in Virginia and New Jersey, where Republicans were shocked to discover an eruption in suburbia against the man, Donald Trump, who singlehandedly and in the short space of 10 months has brought the United States to its knees — a victim of near nervous exhaustion, if nothing else.
Neither Fayette nor Somerset are suburban counties, not like Washington and Westmoreland; thus, their optimism is necessarily conditional and guarded.
Glessner takes encouragement from the fact that Tuesday’s vote in Somerset County brought to office a handful of women candidates, including several who surprised themselves by even getting in the ring.
One especially. The mother of a mentally challenged child alarmed by proposals to chip away at the nation’s social safety net. It was the Trump effect.
Glessner told me she had been pleased with the revival of the Democratic Women’s Club, a long tradition in Somerset County that was gasping for air before Trump came along freaking people out. Presidential disrespect toward women has gone a long way to pump up the women now crowding into club meetings.
This is not your grandmother’s Democratic Women’s Club, said Glessner. These women, says the party chair, are opinionated, combative, fearless. They are composed of the young and the young-at-heart, women in their 20s to 70s.
They talk up and they talk back.
So these women are new to politics; perhaps they sat out the 2016 election?
No, said Glessner, they were “all in for Hillary.” The Clinton loss spurred them to new organizational heights.
Oh.
Glessner is not into fooling herself: the complexion of red-to-the-bone Republican Somerset County is not changing anytime soon, she said. And it doesn’t help that the state’s top two Democrats, Sen. Bob Casey and Gov. Tom Wolf, don’t come around often enough to meet real, honest-to-goodness Somerset Countians.
She hears from the governor’s people that he makes it to the formal ceremonies at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville.
Well, la de da, she says. Most of the people in attendance aren’t from Somerset County.
Well, while he’s here, she’s told, the governor spends time with the county commissioners.
That’s immaterial, she replies, noting that two of the three commissioners are Republicans.
The Casey case may be harder to figure. “Somerset County doesn’t need me,” Glessner says he has told her, an answer so bizarre I asked her to repeat it, twice.
“I’ve been trying to get Sen. Casey here for six years,” Glessner said.
Jim Davis is less worried about Casey in 2018 than he is about Wolf. Like Glessner, he thinks the governor should come around more. Davis thinks the Wolf political operation is fixated on television to the exclusive of old fashion, look-’em-in-the-eye politics.
“Obviously it’s encouraging to see what occurred in Virginia and New Jersey,” Davis said. “I’m encouraged about Pennsylvania, too.” The results in some eastern localities raised his spirits.
He surmises that voters have been shocked to find that Donald Trump as president is just as bad, maybe worse, than his political foes said he would be.
The president carried Fayette County in 2016 by a percentage margin of 64 to 33. (The Somerset results were 77-21.)
To flip Pennsylvania from red to blue in 2020 requires not an overhaul, Davis said, but some new tires and maybe a lube job.
The Trump core voters aren’t going anywhere, Davis believes. They’ll remain with The Donald through thin and thin.
Instead, Democrats should be working hard to win back voters who had stars in their eyes for Trump, but are now disillusioned, believing Donald Trump’s America is not exactly what they signed up for.
This may be the big takeaway from last Tuesday’s voting. Neither competent nor coherent, the president figures to further “disappoint … the people who were on the edge” of the Trump coalition in 2016, Davis said.
This vital “10 percent” of voters “are disappointed in (Trump’s) performance,” Davis insisted. What was evident last week in Virginia and New Jersey, looks to be the case in Fayette County as well, he said.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.