Fracking in Pa. takes center stage in presidential contest. What about the rest of the economy?

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A lot has already been said about Tuesday’s presidential debate, so I’m going to beg off on weighing in on who won, who lost, and whether it will matter.

But I will say this much. At this point, Pennsylvanians can be forgiven for feeling about fracking the way people in other states probably feel about Pennsylvania: Can’t we talk about something else in this election? The rest of us have problems too. 

The natural gas industry was the only economic sector in the United States that got any real discussion on Tuesday night, and it’s no mystery why. It’s a big business in Pennsylvania, perhaps the most critical state in the election. Plus! It presents the tantalizing prospect of a flip-flop — always irresistible to political reporters.

Back in 2019, Harris made a pledge to ban fracking on federal land and seek broader limits in Congress. And while, as this space has noted before, such a ban would have little effect in Pennsylvania, President Biden’s move to put a moratorium on natural gas exports shows presidents can have a big impact on the business.

Then again, natural gas production in Pennsylvania has hit record highs during his term. And Harris, who has renounced the ban since then, drew on that record during the debate. “I will not ban fracking,” she said. “I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States.”

Trump was unimpressed. “She has a plan to not allow fracking in Pennsylvania or anywhere else,” he said. “That's what her plan is until just recently.”

That’s been a refrain for Trump since Harris jumped into the campaign. At a rally in Johnstown at the end of last month, for example, he told supporters that Harris was “anti-fracking, she’s anti-everything. … If you don’t have fracking, you don’t have a commonwealth.”

That may be a slight overstatement. But it does reflect the way in which Trump, and much of this election, has made a single industry the stand-in for the highly diversified economy of a state of 13 million people.

Which seems like a shame. There used to be a whole bunch of imperiled industries Trump talked about!

When he ran in 2016, he used to be greeted with supporters bearing signs that said “Trump digs coal.” And he pledged to turn around that industry and others as well.

During a 2016 Johnstown visit, for example, he promised rally goers, “We’re putting your miners back to work” thanks to “beautiful clean coal.”

Steel would be back, he reassured them: “Your steel will come back,” he said. “It will be a whole different ball game. We will no longer be the dumb people, we will be the genius people … You’ll be competing like you have never competed before.”

As someone who was at that rally, I can tell you the people at that rally weren’t stupid. They didn’t think Trump was going to reopen the mines or bring back Bethlehem Steel. If you asked whether they thought electing Trump could restore Johnstown’s glory days, they would say it would at least be a good start.

And statewide employment in coal mining did gain a couple hundred jobs during Trump tenure, as did steel and other metals manufacturing in the Pittsburgh area. That halted drops in the later years of Obama’s administration, which sharpened a long-running downward trend.

But the differences were small: Total manufacturing employment statewide has been flatlined since May 2009, fluctuating by about a percentage point or two over three presidential administrations. Gains in mining and steel were lost, and then some, during the COVID downturn.

As for Biden’s record, the numbers suggest a slow but steady recovery since the COVID downturn, though the numbers here in Pennsylvania are still a few hundred jobs behind those posted at Trump’s peak. Then again raw employment in all sectors here in Pennsylvania is above Trump’s pace. Nationwide, the Biden/Harris era has already surpassed Trump in manufacturing jobs.

Meanwhile — perhaps because his own term of office never lived up to the billing — Trump himself shows less interest in talking about coal and steel these days. When he spoke in Johnstown this year, his hour-and-a-half long speech made no mention of the domestic coal industry beyond a couple vague references to “the fossil fuel thing.” He didn’t bring up steel at all — not even a reference to his professed opposition to the proposed sale of U.S. Steel.

It wasn’t until more than an hour into his speech — 10 minutes from the end — that he promised to “turn the United States into a manufacturing superpower very quickly.”

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The irony here is that by every account, coal faltered in large part because of the gains of natural gas. And while gas production has been surging in Pennsylvania, employment has lagged — a seeming paradox experts attribute to gains in technology and the inevitable end to an initial boom. Employment has dropped from an Obama-era gold rush, enjoyed a bump under Trump, and then dropped again.

University of Pittsburgh regional economist Chris Briem says it's no surprise that the industry still exerts a powerful hold on voters. After all, “The core of where that investment came was concentrated in regions that haven't seen a lot of growth or investment.” It created jobs and royalty payments for property owners with gas underfoot, perhaps most notably in rural and post-industrial communities in Western Pennsylvania.

And Trump wasn’t wrong to say these areas had been forgotten. When steel and related industries collapsed in the 1980s, Briem said, then-President Ronald Reagan did little to stem the tide. In general, the United States does less than some other countries to invest in places once an industry uses them up. (“The Germans don’t let Braddock happen,” Briem said.)

Many of the people who could leave those places did. But, “People have learned the hard way that places matter.” Briem said. “There are repercussions of having places that are left behind.”

That’s true both politically and socially, and Biden has tried to apply that lesson. His efforts created hubs for workforce and other development, prioritizing proposals in old coal communities and other ignored places. But Briem says such an approach is “a very long-term game, so it's not rational to ask how it's doing now.”

Which means we’re likely to be talking about fracking for a while to come.