Pennsylvania: Democrat voters caught between despair and determination

Twenty-four hours back in America, my native country, for the most consequential election of my life and two thoughts keep going through my brain:

PTSD – Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

“Don’t mourn, organise.”

PTSD is defined as “A disorder in which a person has difficulty recovering after experiencing or witnessing a terrifying event.”

Talking to people, some family, some friends, and some contacts I have developed over the last five years reporting on Donald Trump, I know his election was a trauma for many. Post-trauma they seem incapable of seeing anything but imminent catastrophe.

Tell them Mr Biden is leading in the polls and they will tell you the polls were wrong in 2016. Remind them the Democrats seized back control of the House of Representatives in 2018 and they say winning more votes isn’t enough.

Mr Trump will use tactics to invalidate enough of the vote to force the Supreme Court to decide who won. He has appointed three justices after all, and the traumatised assume they will hand him victory.

“Don’t mourn, organise” were the last words of early union organiser Joe Hill. The events of 2016 galvanised some people into action, particularly women.

They didn’t mourn, (well, not for too long, anyway) they organised. All over the country women who had no previous experience of political activism started groups to make sure that Mr Trump would be a one-term president, a historical anomaly. I met some of them in Georgia and Texas in 2018. It was their energy that led to the Democratic takeover of the House.

In Pennsylvania dozens of local groups formed and as 2020 approached they established a larger organisation, Pennsylvania Stands Up.

Hannah Laurison, Pennsylvania Stands Up executive director, explains, “Trump brought to the fore what’s been happening in our communities for a long time. Pennsylvanians are divided by race class and geography. We are trying to overcome those divisions.”

The focus on Pennsylvania in this election is very personal for me. I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and spent a year shortly after university working for the state government organising a series of conferences on health care. I got to know the place intimately, from the big cities and suburbs, to the industrial towns already showing rust at the edges, and the state’s central, beautiful, empty quarter where ridges of the Appalachian Mountains are separated by lush agricultural valleys.

That was four decades ago. As America has become more polarised so has Pennsylvania. It has also become arguably the most critical swing state in Presidential elections.

In the last two weeks Vice President Mike Pence and President Donald Trump visited Reading, a city of 88,000 about 60 miles west of Philadelphia. Actually, visited is the wrong word. They held brief rallies at the local airport. Why would they invest the time and energy in this city of 88,000 about 60 miles west of Philadelphia?

Pennsylvania is the must-win state for the Republicans. It is virtually impossible for Mr Trump to keep the presidency if he doesn’t win and collect its 20 electoral votes. In 2016, he won them by less than one per cent of the ballots cast.

Reading is the largest city in Berks county, a microcosm of the state as a whole. The city, comparatively liberal and ethnically mixed, is surrounded by semi-rural and rural communities that are mostly white. Natural Trump country.

The President has to maintain turnout among his supporters if he is to have any chance of keeping hold of the state.

His Democratic challenger Joe Biden has been focused on the state as well. He was in Philadelphia on Sunday and will be in the western part of the state on Monday, racing between Pittsburgh and Erie and back.

Ms Laurison, of Pennsylvania Stands Up, is typical of the progressive women who are doing the bulk of the grass roots organising for the Democratic Party. We spoke on the phone as Mr Biden was en route to Philadelphia. I asked if she was going to one of his events. She knew nothing about it. Her organisation is independent of the party.

She prefers it that way. It allows Pennsylvania Stands Up to develop its own campaign strategies, a necessity since Covid largely killed off knocking on doors and trying to persuade voters face-to-face.

“When the pandemic hit we were very worried about how you can campaign if you can only phone,” Ms Laurison recalls, “but it turned out the pandemic was a gift.”

Her group worked on what she calls “deep canvass” – long telephone conversations that were less about Joe Biden and voting Democrat than encouraging people to “share their experiences of the crisis.

“They were political conversations in the broadest sense,” she says. “We talk to people and try to help when they say I need groceries, who can I talk to to avoid being evicted.”

So far her group has made 5 million calls this season statewide.

When I asked Ms Laurison, and a few others in her organisation, how they were feeling about the outcome of Tuesday’s election they didn’t want to speculate. They are more focused on what will happen once the counting begins.

They have already organised training in de-escalation and de-conflicting the situations they expect to arise at places where the votes are being counted.

One volunteer said that, occasionally, armed men have turned up at their meetings. The group expects that kind of intimidation to continue at the count.

This makes me think of another phrase to go alongside PTSD and “Don’t mourn, organise” – the old Boy Scout motto “Be prepared.”