To Biden and buddies: We’re here
Last Monday, Joe Biden debuted his presidential campaign with a speech in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Making a bid for working class votes, the former vice president got it half right: He addressed an audience at the Teamsters Local 249 union hall on Butler Street. In addition to teamsters, the crowd was swelled by union teachers and fire fighters. The International Association of Fire Fighters endorsed Biden the day before.
Alas, the other half of the Biden-Pittsburgh equation — that Lawrenceville is blue collar through and through — was all wrong.
White House-inclined Dems continue to conflate the city with western Pennsylvania. They are not the same. Lawrenceville is Lawrenceville; it is not Greene or Washington or Westmoreland counties. And heavens to Harry Truman, it is not Fayette County.
These days Lawrenceville isn’t even Lawrenceville. Not the Lawrenceville of old: blue-collar, union-strong, steelworker-smoky. Today, in the estimation of one resident, it is “hip.” That would be Jeremy Shafton, 30, who moved, with his wife, to the neighborhood in 2014. Jeremy works for a Silicon Valley tech firm. He roams the East Coast selling stuff — new stuff, modern stuff.
I spoke to Jeremy some 24 hours before Biden’s arrival. He was walking the sidewalks of Butler Street, a thoroughfare, which, besides a handsome World War I memorial erected in the long ago by the Ninth Ward Soldiers and Sailors Welfare Association, boasts a number of hipster-sounding establishments, such as The Abbey — “pub, coffeehouse, bistro” — and a French bakery.
Butler Street is home to “a lot of good restaurants,” Jeremy imparted. It’s “trendy.”
John Tackovich, a 32-year old techie, told me the chief complaint of older Lawrenceville residents is the absence of parking spaces now that the place is being inundated by new, younger residents. John said neighborhood rent and home prices are zooming upward, so much so the city has adopted a measure to insure new construction includes a modicum of low-income and middle-income housing.
I need not belabor the point. Lawrenceville is not your grandfather’s Lawrenceville, just as Pittsburgh is not the Pittsburgh of Davey Lawrence and Ralph Kiner and steel mills. If and when Democrats wishing to live in the White House want to visit a blue collar, working class stronghold in western Pennsylvania they must necessarily depart Pittsburgh for places outside the city – communities that likely voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and helped to turn Pennsylvania from reliably blue to red.
Trump’s 44,000-vote majority in the state three years ago was forged in rural and small-town Pennsylvania. It kind of makes sense that for Democrats to recapture the state next year, they are most likely to do so by making a strong appeal to residents in counties that are only a short driving distance from the city but politically quite different.
Rich Fitzgerald, Allegheny County chief executive, know this. Fitzgerald, a Democrat, recently sent a letter to the score or more Democrats vying, in this early stage, for their party’s nomination.
“We saw in 2016 that winning big in Allegheny County isn’t enough.” The candidate in 2020 cannot win convincingly in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia while doing ” extremely poorly” elsewhere, Fitzgerald said. In that event, Trump wins.
Fitzgerald invited the candidates to “get to know us” and to “earn our votes.” But those votes will only be earned if Democrats show up not just in Pittsburgh but, as Fitzgerald said, in “Washington, Greene and Fayette counties, in Beaver, Lawrence, Butler, Armstrong and Westmoreland counties.” Fitzgerald noted that “In every one of these counties, you’ll find a lot of people willing to listen … regardless of who they’ve voted for in the past.”
The road to the White House runs through Pennsylvania, Fitzgerald said. And Pennsylvania, he reminded the candidates, consists of places Democrats running for president haven’t visited in decades.
While in Lawrenceville, I ran into Leonard Fabio, at 88 a former union steelworker.
Fabio was visiting with his adult son and six-year-old grandson. The three were sitting at a picnic table outside a Butler Avenue establishment catering to the young and young at heart. The restaurant-bar features assorted outdoor games. Couples in their twenties were tossing bean bags into round holes on slanted boards — these days, corn hole is played in backyards throughout western Pennsylvania.
Fabio failed to vote in 2016. He said the Democratic party turned its back on him years ago, and that’s why he is no belongs to the party of his youth, the party of Harry Truman.
To compete in Pennsylvania, to become a national party commanding a governing majority, Democrats need to win voters like Fabio in 2020: disaffected white, male voters, some of whom are growing old and many of whom voted for Trump. I venture to say Democrats can best connect with voters like this in neighborhoods not in the city.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached by email at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.