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This is a newsletter about politics, so let’s start with a bit of shameless self-promotion.
If you haven’t checked out our 2024 voter’s guide, you should! We’ve got a breakdown of just about every statewide and local race of interest to a Western Pennsylvania voter. It’s all there: Biographical information! Candidates’ positions on issues such as education funding, economic policies, abortion and marijuana legalization! Professionally done photographs that make even state legislators look shiny and new!
We focused exclusively on races with some competition on the ballot, and not every race qualifies. But even if your district isn’t here or you’ve already picked your candidates, it may be worth looking at the races next door. You’ll note, for example, how much more … shall we say … nuanced the discussion of abortion has become on the Republican ticket, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court withdrew constitutional protections for the right to an abortion. (Also notable: Even candidates who voice misgivings about marijuana legalization — such as its potentially deleterious effect on drivers — are loath to oppose it outright.)
Because as they say, all politics is local. Even in a presidential race. Even when you have to go across the state to hear what a candidate says about you.
So it was when Donald Trump went to Scranton on Wednesday, where he discussed the fate of Homer City, Indiana County.
“Last year Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant shut down in Homer City,” Trump said. “Just devastating. They got nothing. A small little community of 1,800 people. Does anyone know where Homer is?”
“They’re taking plants that are perfectly good … and they’re closing them up and they’re forcing you to use energy that’s 10 times and 20 times more expensive,” he added. “I hope whoever owns that plant can just keep it around for a few months, just keep going because we’re going to let that plant go for a long time. You got to tell them, ‘Homer, Homer, you don’t have long to go.’”
It’s unclear why Trump would deliver this message in Scranton as opposed to Indiana County itself, where he gave a speech almost in the shadow of Homer City’s smokestacks less than three weeks ago.
But while the plant’s operator complained of “increasingly stringent environmental regulations” as one reason for the closure, it said there were “several factors” at work, placing “the low price of natural gas” at the top of the list. The threat wasn’t energy that was “20 times more expensive”: It was energy that was cheaper — provided by the natural gas industry that Trump champions repeatedly in Pennsylvania speeches.
That trend has been evident for more than a decade now, and Trump hasn’t been able to reverse it, either. This time four years ago, The New York Times was reporting that roughly 15% of the country’s coal-fired electrical capacity had been idled — “the fastest decline in coal-fuel capacity in any single presidential term [and] far greater than the rate during either of President Barack Obama’s terms.”
Would Homer City’s fate be any different in a second Trump term? While there is talk about a redevelopment that will include some form of electricity production — the site is close to power transmission lines, after all — it is hard to imagine anyone reigniting a coal-fired furnace given overall trends.
Still, it may not matter if Trump’s promises are empty, so long as people feel their only other option is promises that have been broken.
Believe it or not, there has been good news for Indiana County during the Biden era: the Homer City plant’s closing notwithstanding, the county as a whole saw job growth in 2023. And while its unemployment rate has ticked up recently, it’s currently in the same ballpark it was in the Trump era. Given the wrenching impact of the coronavirus on every aspect of the economy, some call the Biden-era turnaround for such communities “remarkable.”
Even so, inflation has been a problem everywhere. Indiana’s economic performance lags that of the state as a whole, and it is among roughly 1,000 “left-behind” counties in the United States that saw population and income growth of less than half the national average for the first decade-and-a-half of the 21st century. And there have been complaints about a flat-footed federal response to the plant’s closure in the year since it shut down.
Indiana County Commissioner Michael Keith seemed wary about the Homer City plant’s future. He said the property owners were “keeping to themselves” about their vision for the site: “I don’t know what their intent is.” (Indeed, the COO of the firm in charge of redeveloping the site did not respond to my call Thursday morning.)
He said he’d seen little sign of government investment, and as for discussions of the future, “Believe me — rumors take off. [But] at the end of the day, there isn’t a damn thing that has happened.”
Of course, many Pittsburghers remember that the Homestead Works and the old J&L sheds on the South Side weren’t redeveloped overnight. Efforts to help communities like Homer City, let alone to reverse decades-long economic trends, take time.
And Keith, a Republican, seemed just as cautious when I told him about Trump’s remarks in Scranton.
“A lot of people can say a lot of things,” he said. “Show me the real thing. Talk is talk.”
But with polls of Pennsylvania now seemingly frozen within the margin of error, it’s not clear Trump needs to talk much about how he’d improve things. When he was in Indiana, he brought up a spike in the number of immigrants who’ve recently moved to the Washington County river town of Charleroi. But he said not a word about the closure of the Anchor Hocking glass factory there — a sign of how immigration fears often seem to overshadow other topics.
Then again, you can never tell: He might decide to talk about Western Pennsylvania’s glassworks the next time he’s in Reading.
