Dems need to show up and show off
President Biden, campaigning in Pittsburgh last Wednesday, promised cheering steelworkers to keep U.S. Steel in American hands, despite a $14.9 billion deal on the table to sell the iconic and one-time industrial behemoth to a Japanese firm.
The president’s stop came on the heels of the visit on Monday to Uniontown by Julie Su, the acting Secretary of Labor. Appearing at the District 4 offices of the United Mine Workers on Wayland Smith Drive, Su unveiled a new federal rule limiting silica dust exposure in coal and iron mines.
The goal of the rule is to reduce the number of miners contracting black lung, the debilitating and frequently fatal respiratory disease that has been the bane of miners generation after generation.
Also on Monday it was revealed that Uniontown Hospital would reopen its birthing center early in 2025, thanks to a $750,000 federal grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission. The hospital’s obstetrics unit has been closed since 2019.
In addition to the substance, there is an unmistakable political dimension to these developments. With Pennsylvania one of a handful of states in play for the 2024 presidential election, the Biden administration is undoubtedly hoping to score points with voters in the contest against former president Donald Trump.
One suspects the least political of these is the money going to WVU Medicine for the local hospital – after all, state Rep. Charity Grimm-Krupa, Republican of Smithfield, supported the grant request. Nevertheless, taken together, the measures suggest the extent to which the administration and the president himself are attempting to reclaim the Democratic party’s lost tribe (lost to Republicans) of blue-collar, small town and rural voters.
There was at a time when Democrats were competitive in broad swaths of the country, including in counties other than Allegheny in western Pennsylvania. That hasn’t been true for some time now. Indeed, both parties are similarly handicapped, only in different ways.
Republican electoral strength is pretty much confined to the white, working-class, evangelical middle of the country, while Democrats do best in cities and their adjacent suburbs.
As a consequence, neither Democrats nor Republicans are capable of winning anywhere and everywhere at any time.
The result of this warped political landscape are elections which produce government deadlock, and national division and personal distrust bordering on the dangerously absurd. It would be best for the country if Americans broke out of their respective political cages.
Can they, will they? Everything political changes eventually. But the pace of change is critical. Democrats under Biden appear to be forcing the issue. The president (not for the first time) boasted in Pittsburgh that he is proud to be the most pro-union president in history. In addition, billions of federal dollars are washing disproportionately across rural and semi-rural America – money for bridge and road repairs and infrastructure projects such as computer broadband – thanks to the Biden administration.
Will these be enough in time for the November election? Only time, and Democratic persistence and possible Republican pushback, will tell.
Yet it’s not clear that Washington dollars or fresh policy initiatives alone will do the trick. Money may be the least of it. Empathy and understanding and presence are crucial. As rural sociologist Nichols F. Jacobs recently noted in Politico magazine, place, custom, and tone matter to working-class rural voters.
It’s been years since Democratic presidents and nominees competed for votes in places like Fayette County. The effect has been cumulative. Democrats up and down the ballot here and elsewhere find it hard to be relevant on Election Day.
Once part of the beating heart of the Democrats’ national coalition, voters in places running from Greene to Mercer counties in western Pennsylvania need some Democratic wining and dining. They need to be wooed and won over not just with dollars, though dollars are important, but with the right words uttered by party higher-ups.
Democrats “need new messaging,” Nicholas Jacobs argues, “to address the rising tide of resentment in rural communities.”
And they need messengers. Both John Kennedy and Bill Clinton campaigned in western Pennsylvania communities other than Pittsburgh during their presidencies. It’s time Joe Biden did the same. In the president’s absence, another cabinet secretary or two will do, or perhaps Sen. Bernie Sanders. There’s Chuck Schumer. Even Barack Obama. Bill Clinton? Sure.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.