This is WESA Politics, a weekly newsletter by Chris Potter providing analysis about Pittsburgh and state politics. If you want it earlier — we'll deliver it to your inbox on Thursday afternoon — sign up here.
It was right about the time when the second Kamala Harris supporter collapsed outside Harris’ Monday-night rally that I began to wonder: Will there be enough energy to sustain this effort tomorrow?
There we were, thousands of us, shuffling with painful slowness toward the charter buses that were taking us — a few dozen at a time — from the historic Carrie Furnaces site in Swissvale to where we’d parked in West Mifflin. Some of us spent 10 or 12 hours either at the rally or getting to and from it. And for all that, when Harris arrived a little after 9 p.m., she spoke for just nine minutes.
Much of that time was taken up with offering up Harris’ assurances — seemingly geared toward moderate Republicans and others turned off by Trump’s divisiveness — that “[a]s President, I pledge to seek common ground and common-sense solutions.” By contrast, there were no words of support for, say, Pittsburgh’s trans community. Even though it had been subjected to as brutal a campaign of demonization and dehumanization as any I can ever recall, from Donald Trump’s TV ads about Harris’ alleged “they/them” agenda to Senate candidate Dave McCormick’s radio ads about “transgenders.”
Of course, few enough of the rest of us — including political reporters like me — paid attention, either. As one trans acquaintance lamented to me after the election, “The fact that nobody was really saying anything made it worse.” And as for those Republican fence-sitters? There’s little sign they were listening much more closely than they were back in 2016, when Hillary Clinton tried to execute a similar play.
Exit polling suggests that Democratic hopes that moderate women, including in rural areas, would rally to their cause over abortion didn’t pan out — even as Trump shored up his base and established beachheads among Black and Latino men.
To be fair, I didn’t hear much resentment about the brevity or the blandness of Harris’ speech. There were even some jokes that, unlike those who attended Trump’s Coachella rally, we at least could be sure the buses would take us back.
And from the outset of her candidacy, Harris faced a daunting task. Making her the party’s nominee just three-and-half months before the election was like appointing a female CEO to be the “fresh face” of a company on the verge of bankruptcy.
After all, she inherited an economy whose success at job creation was marred by inflation that, while lower than that of other nations, was painful on its own. And the war in Gaza couldn’t help but divide a party whose coalition includes Jews and Muslims. In the end, Democrats brought together hard-line supporters of Israel and hard-line supporters of Palestine in only one sense: Both factions wanted to punish Harris and Biden for not being more strongly on their side.
That would have been a toxic environment for any Democrat. And just about the only bright spot for Democrats in Pennsylvania was Chris Deluzio’s reelection win in the 17th Congressional District outside Pittsburgh.
When I asked Deluzio how he managed it, he said he would “let the pundits do their work.” But he added that he always foregrounded economic issues such as “bringing down costs, taking on monopolies, trying to grow jobs. … I think we have powerful economic messages, but too many folks, I think, don’t prioritize it. And that’s been a mistake.”
That approach had earned him some progressive plaudits even before Tuesday. Still, his win was an oddly muted affair. His election-night party ended before the race was called because the lights in the rented union hall were set to go off at midnight. Meanwhile, campaign buses were turning into pumpkins all across the state. Two of Deluzio’s eastern Pennsylvania colleagues, Susan Wild and Matt Cartwright, lost their reelection bids. All four Democrats running statewide lost their races, including U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, who appears to have been utterly outhustled by the GOP’s McCormick.
And as Deluzio acknowledged, “Senator Casey has been a strong voice” on the same economic issues Deluzio puts front and center. “I don’t lump him in there.” Biden and Harris, meanwhile, were as pro-union an administration as we’ve seen, walking picket lines and saving the pensions of union workers who often voted against them anyway.
For now, Democrats worried about the future can take some solace in the fact that, for all the fear of election day violence, voting proceeded almost serenely here in Allegheny County. (Other counties weren’t so fortunate, though the most notorious threats may have originated outside the country.) Similarly, people on the right may reflect that despite all of the fear-mongering by their leaders, out of 1,300 voting districts in the county there was only one — one — hiccup at a polling place that registered long enough for anyone to complain about.
There will be a lot of finger-pointing, some of which may crop up in a political magazine near you. You may hear about how local politicos sought to leverage the national ticket for their own advantage, and vice versa. And while Republicans complain, baselessly, that Philadelphia produces votes that aren’t there, Western Pennsylvania pols have the opposite gripe: that right up until Election Day, Philadelphia Democrats led them to believe there’d be votes they never actually had.
There will be debates, too, about whether the party’s most urgent problem lies with voters of color who are drifting away, or with white voters who long ago stopped mustering majorities for it in the first place.
It may be that it’s still the economy, stupid, and that voters haven’t changed … even when the leaders they swing behind become increasingly erratic and autocratic. If I knew what the answers were for Democrats, I’d be doing something more lucrative than writing this newsletter. But in the wake of a drubbing like this, maybe the first thing the party, and those who advise it, should do is admit they don’t have the answers, either.
