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“All politics is local,” the old saying goes. And as the Democratic National Convention wraps up, it may be time to add “... and the road to the White House leads through Pittsburgh’s West End.”
OK, maybe not. But in both parties’ conventions this summer, often-ignored Western Pennsylvania communities had their moment on the national stage and helped define the political landscape of the entire election.
The Republican National Convention, for one, featured a speech by Erin Koper, a community and political activist who lives in Pittsburgh’s Elliott neighborhood. In a speech tied to the evening’s focus on public safety, Koper said she had a front-porch view of “the chaos caused by Democrats and their soft-on-crime policies.
“I have been chased by drug dealers on my own street. I’ve seen filthy tent cities pop up on my block,” she told the audience of GOP delegates. “What the Democrats did to San Francisco, they’re doing to my city.”
Before you cancel the closing on that home you were about to buy in Elliott, be advised that when Koper and I spoke this week, she said things have been improving since 2022 and 2023.
“Last year, my neighborhood was a different place” due in part to an encampment and some squatters in an abandoned home, she said. “You would wake up at 5 a.m. and see someone on drugs below your bedroom window.”
But as those issues were addressed by community folks, city police, and City Councilor Theresa Kail-Smith’s office, “Things got a lot quieter,” she said.
Still, she said that without more police on the streets and other law-and-order moves, “My fear is that we only have a Band-Aid on” crime problems. “I had to install a $5,000 security system in my home, and every month when I pay for it, I get mad. … If we don't address the problem we can't fix it.”
That law-and-order message is at the heart of a lot of Republican themes. But oddly enough, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro used a neighborhood just down the street to make a key argument for Democrats this year.
When asked by MSNBC inside the convention center what his party could offer voters who “seem to be out of reach for Democrats,” Shapiro cited a lead-line replacement project in Esplen. He said the project was “an example of meeting people where they are and addressing real concerns,” thanks to infrastructure investments by President Joe Biden and his would-be replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Democrats have been pushing that message hard, though in a time of marked political polarization, it’s not clear such investments change votes. Politico, for example, recently reported on how one steel town’s voters may not be much impressed by a half-billion-dollar Biden/Harris investment in the mill that keeps many of them employed.
And Republican standard bearer Donald Trump sought to disrupt such appeals by invoking painful divisions.
Shapiro’s own DNC speech Wednesday night was a five-minute barn-burner that identified the Democrats as the party of “real freedom” and made a Barack Obama-esque connection between contemporary liberalism and the ideals of the nation’s founders. That prompted Trump to call him a “highly overrated Jewish governor” on social media and blast him for not acknowledging that “I have done more for Israel than any person.”
Shapiro’s speech didn’t even mention foreign policy, and he brushed off Trump’s attack, telling reporters that Trump “routinely peddled antisemitic tropes” and is “obsessed with me and obsessed with continuing to spew hate and division.” But it’s not hard to see why Trump brought it up.
After all, issues the GOP could use to divide Democrats, such as abortion or guns, don’t work as well these days, but differences over the War in Gaza? They can trip up not just presidents but local mayors or be used as a cudgel in state treasurer races.
And it’s conspicuous that Western Pennsylvania’s highest-profile politician and one of Israel’s biggest boosters in national politics, former Braddock Mayor and U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, was nowhere to be seen at the convention. He said he’d rather spend time with his family, but his own strong position on the war has put him at odds with others in the party, including his own spokesperson.
At least for this week, though, Democrats’ excitement about Harris seemed to transcend such divisions — and a Western Pennsylvanian leader who was at the convention demonstrated the point. When Shapiro committed Pennsylvania’s delegates to Harris during a Tuesday-night roll call, he wasn’t alone. Standing beside him was Aliquippa Mayor Dwan Walker, whose town’s high school football team, the Aliquippa Quips, received a visit from Harris and Walz during a Pittsburgh-bucket-list tour of the region just before the convention.
With cameras rolling and Shapiro’s arm around him, Walker celebrated the Quips’ three NFL Hall of Fame alumni — “My city’s the city of legends” — and recalled his decision to run for mayor after the murder of his sister Deidre in 2009. “Fifteen years she’s been gone. Twelve years this city has been under my watch.”
“I’m from Aliquippa, and when the lights are brightest that's when we show up,” Walker told me. “There was a lot going through me: I was crying because I was thinking of my family. But Josh Shaprio grabbed my hand and kept telling me, ‘You were made for this. You deserve to be in this room.’”
And much like Lieutenant Governor and McKeesport native Austin Davis — another Black official from a rust belt town who had his moment on the DNC stage — Walker said his presence in that room sent a message of its own.
“I’m a kid from Aliquppa, Sixth Avenue,” said Walker. “I’m in a place nobody thought I would be in. But if you do right and be right, you can get from there to here.”
In a razor-close race turning into the final lap, that could be the motto for either party.
