Convention stokes Democrats’ hopes for Biden in a battleground county

High above a bend in the Susquehanna River, a half-dozen Trump campaign signs sprouted from the tidy green lawns of West Nanticoke in 2016. A solitary Clinton sign offered the only evidence of the competitive election raging across Pennsylvania — and nationwide.

On Thursday, Michael Wolfkiel walked his local streets, chatted with neighbors about the latest from the Democratic National Convention and scoured front yards to tally the score.

"Sixteen for Biden, four for Trump," said the 62-year-old. "I thought this must be a pretty red neighborhood. Apparently not."

The whole region was actually reliably Democratic for decades, helping to make Pennsylvania an essential building block in the Blue Wall. But the former coal-mining hub shifted dramatically toward the Republicans in 2016, reflecting the power of Trump's pitch in rural areas and small towns.

In Wolfkiel's Luzerne County, voters who twice opted for Barack Obama delivered Donald Trump a stomping 19-point margin over Hillary Clinton, which was pivotal to his statewide victory margin of less than 1%. Pennsylvania was Trump's narrowest win anywhere, and it helped propel him to the White House.

He may need to repeat the trick to win reelection — a point underscored Thursday by the president’s visit to a town just upriver from Luzerne and only minutes from Biden’s boyhood home, in Scranton. Trump rallied supporters — and sought to upstage the Democratic nominee only hours before his marquee convention speech.

Yet local Democrats say they see evidence that Luzerne could be swinging back in their favor as Biden courts the White working-class voters who defected four years ago. And the convention that ended Thursday night with Biden paying tribute to his northeast Pennsylvania roots, they say, is likely to have helped their cause.

"We've been absolutely overwhelmed by requests for those yard signs," said Kathy Bozinski, the Democratic Party chair in Luzerne. "At this point in the 2016 campaign, there was not even a fraction of the enthusiasm that we're experiencing now."

The energy, she said, has built over the course of the week.

A convention stripped of its joyous crowds and relegated to the digital world, she said, has been an unexpected hit.

"People love this format. They really do," she said. "The roll call was more than just hoopla from folks on the floor, with a couple of balloons. You actually met the folks from Guam."

When Robert Casey Jr., the senior senator from Pennsylvania, popped up in front of Biden's boyhood home Tuesday night, Bozinski cheered from her living room and tapped out approving messages on social media. "That, for me, was a moment," she said.

Polls have given Biden a national lead of around eight points. Surveys show a narrower, though still substantial, advantage in Pennsylvania. But Bozinski, a television news veteran who lost her marketing job amid coronavirus-spawned cutbacks, said that has done little to allay the anxieties of Democratic activists.

"None of us believe in polls after 2016," she said.

That year, Clinton ended with a 2.1 percent lead in the RealClearPolitics polling average for Pennsylvania. That's not terribly far off from the 0.7 percent margin of Trump's victory, but enough of a difference to scar a generation of Democrats.

The coronavirus pandemic has made it especially difficult to gauge attitudes this year, with Biden's public campaign curtailed and Democrats forgoing door-knocking.

Republicans insist that polls are undercounting Trump's support, especially in places like Luzerne, where, they say, blue-collar backers may be reluctant to tell survey-takers what they really think.

Four years ago, said Lou Barletta, a Republican who represented the area in Congress for nearly a decade, Trump was on the verge of pulling out of Pennsylvania, giving it up as a lost cause.

"I begged him not to because the polls were wrong. I told him Northeast Pennsylvania would put him over the top," said Barletta, who lost a 2018 Senate race to Casey. "This year, I see a repeat of 2016, only with a wider margin of victory for President Trump."

As Barletta spoke Thursday, his voice was drowned out by the roar of a crowd cheering in advance of Trump's arrival. "You would never see this for Joe Biden," he said.

He didn't think the convention had helped the Democratic cause. "Rather than speak about a vision for America, it's a bashing of the president," he said. "It turns people off."

Not everyone, of course. Democrats and Biden-backing independents say the convention has accomplished exactly what they hoped: unify the party behind their nominee, energize the rank and file and make a powerful pitch to voters who may be wavering.

"It was a great show of the big-tent aspect of the party. We have an incredibly wide and diverse coalition uniting together," said Tony Thomas, a 30-year-old financial aid counselor who is active with the local party's young wing.

The glue that binds it, he said, is disdain for Trump and a conviction that the country can do much better.

"The president has sort of done our job for us of bringing voters back to the Democratic side," Thomas said.

Luzerne is the kind of place where Trump has been able to cut deeply into a traditional Democratic advantage. The county's biggest city, Wilkes-Barre, has a population of only about 40,000. Mining and manufacturing jobs have been replaced with warehousing and the service sector. About 90 percent of the population is White.

Wolfkiel’s house in West Nanticoke — a wooded neighborhood of single-family homes just up the hill from a diner, a barbecue joint and a gun shop — is among the 16 with Biden yard signs. It’s his first and, he said, reflects just how strongly he feels that Trump needs to be defeated.

"I didn't put one up in 2016 because I thought, erroneously, that we couldn't be that awful that we'd elect this clown," he said.

A native of northeastern Pennsylvania, Wolfkiel has lived there his entire life, except when he went away for college. He worked for the same company for 35 years, leading training programs for a health-care company.

But with the economy wrecked by the coronavirus, he was laid off in June. His youngest child just graduated from college but hasn't been able to find a job. His wife recently had to go back to work, putting on hold a retirement that had begun only in February.

It's not the way he imagined this phase of life going, and he can't help blaming Trump's stumbling response to the pandemic.

"There's no way you could have prevented all the negatives," he said. "But Trump has actively and passively thrown gas on the fire."

As he searches for a new job, Wolfkiel has found an outlet: volunteering for the Biden campaign. The work includes helping his neighbors get their hands on Biden yard signs. There is no shortage of demand.

One neighbor, Ed Nowak, said he proudly votes "for the person, not the party," when making his presidential picks. Through the decades, Nowak's preferred person has included Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Obama.

Early on, he was intrigued by Trump.

"I thought Trump was an astute businessman," he said. "I was one of those who would have been hopeful that he could do half of what he said he was going to do."

No more. This year, the retired civil servant has planted a Biden sign in front of his brick ranch house, and even contributed to the campaign — something he had never done for any politician. His disdain for Trump’s style overrides all.

"Issues are one thing," he said. "But the meanness is another. It may be his ploy to get votes and tap into the anger. But it's not right."

Nowak has settled into an easy chair in his cellar each evening and watched nearly all of this week's convention. He has come away impressed and, at times, moved.

A segment featuring Ady Barkan, a progressive activist who is suffering from advanced ALS, a neurodegenerative disease, and is pushing to transform America's "fundamentally broken" health-care system, struck a chord. "That really touched me," he said.

Nowak is measured when talking about Biden himself. The 77-year-old former vice president is not perfect. But he knows it.

"He's a good man at heart," Nowak said. "I realize that he may have gaffes. He may misstate some things. But he'll tell you he was wrong. I appreciate that."

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, Candice Muench has come to a similar conclusion about Biden — though from a different spot on the ideological spectrum.

The high school history and political science teacher is a devout Bernie Sanders fan. She was "crushed" when he came up short in 2016, and again this year.

Like Sanders, she doesn't think Biden's proposals to change American health care and the economy go far enough. And the nominee's propensity for verbal miscues makes her nervous. Nonetheless, she'll be actively working to elect him this fall, something she never did for Hillary Clinton.

“We may not be 100 percent in line with Biden’s ideology. But the consequences of Trump winning again could set us back decades,” Muench said. “Bernie feels like a lot of us progressives do. We’ve got to get Trump out.”