As Donald Trump emerged to a thunderous roar of approval in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Rust belt, he was back in his comfort zone among the people who once put him in power.
But by the time he stepped off the stage nearly two hours later, even some of the former US president’s supporters were wondering whether his rallies are doing his re-election campaign more harm than good.
Trump was on his seventh visit to Luzerne county since he first ran for president in 2016. From the stage of an indoor arena in Wilkes-Barre earlier this month, the former president looked out on thousands of the kind of blue-collar voters who helped put him into the White House by flipping the north-eastern Pennsylvania county after it twice voted for Barack Obama.
Trump was back to fire them up once more as he again counts on Luzerne to help push him over the line in a swing state he almost certainly has to win if he is to be a two-term president. But much has changed in Luzerne since he first ran eight years ago.
The local Republican party has been torn apart by infighting amid accusations of racism and “sledgehammer politics” over how to get Trump re-elected. Meanwhile, support for Democratic candidates in local and state elections has been steadily rising even as its own supporters describe the local party as a “a complete mess” and “useless”.
As the election gets off the ground, political strategists on both sides say that the outcome in Luzerne county and much of the rest of north-eastern Pennsylvania is likely to be decided by turnout in a region where a lower proportion of people vote and so there is greater scope to boost support.
Local Republican leaders saw the rally as an opportunity for Trump to take the initiative after evidently being thrown by suddenly facing Kamala Harris after months of leading Joe Biden in opinion polls. Harris has not only erased Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania, but recent polls put her three or more points ahead.
Frank Scavo, a businessman and ardent Trump supporter who was part of a coup that took hold of the county Republican party earlier this year, was clear before the rally about what he wanted to hear from Trump.
“These rallies fire up the base to go out there and knock on doors. His base will walk on fire for him, but plenty of other Republicans don’t vote. Are they demoralised? Do they think their vote doesn’t count? Most of it is apathy. But if we don’t get people out there knocking on doors, Trump’s not going to win Luzerne county,” he said.
“But to do that, Trump’s got to focus on the message and not get distracted by personal attacks. Trump’s a good communicator. He’s got the issues, commonsense issues, most of them economic, not social. He should leave the attacks on Kamala to others, at least until the debate.”
That’s not how things worked out.
Trump repeatedly broke away from the prepared speech about economics to make rambling claims that Harris was both a fascist and a communist, to attack her laugh as that of “a crazy person” and a “lunatic”, and to claim he was more beautiful than the vice-president. He also spent time debating aloud with himself how to pronounce the name of the CNN anchor Dana Bash.
By the time he stopped speaking 100 minutes later, a large number of the arena’s 8,000 seats had emptied.
A hard core of local supporters, some wearing T-shirts proclaiming “I’m voting for a convicted felon”, remained alongside traveling groupies who follow Trump from rally to rally. But in rural cities such as Wilkes-Barre, there is also a contingent who go along to political rallies for the entertainment value, to see a former president on a Saturday afternoon when there is not much else going on, or to help weigh up how to vote. Some of them were not impressed.
“He reminded me why I’m not going to vote for him this time,” said Jenny, a local businesswoman who did not want to give her full name because she didn’t want to alienate customers.
“I voted for him in 2016 and had a Trump flag in the front yard. I voted for him again in 2020 but didn’t put the flag out that time. I’ve been thinking of voting for him again because Biden’s been so bad for the economy and Kamala won’t be any better. But after listening to that, I’m actually afraid of Trump being president again. I don’t know what he was talking about half the time. Perhaps he was always like that but he seems worse, more unstable.”
The county Republican party split earlier this year over how to win back voters like Jenny and get others to the polls. More than half the leadership quit after a “grassroots” Trump-aligned faction set up a breakaway organisation, Luzerne County Republicans.
The county chair, PJ Pribula, resigned in March along with other officials after losing the fight. In his resignation letter, Pribula accused the insurgent group of “sledgehammer politics and intolerance”.
“For two years, myself and my executive board have spent 90% of our time and resources fighting the 10% because their twisted beliefs run contrary to what our Republican Party stands for,” he wrote.
“They realize that if they are deceitful enough, loud enough, obnoxious enough and demanding enough, they will find a path to the inside. Over the past few weeks, I have seen this group and their candidates making in-roads I never would have believed possible and in seeing that, I realize that it is my time to go.”
Pribula told the Scranton Times-Tribune that the new leadership was pushing a hate-filled agenda.
“They’d put things on their sites being against gays, lesbians, African Americans, anybody who didn’t fit their cookie-cutter mold they are against and that’s not how I am and that’s not how the Republican party is,” he said.
Scavo served as the treasurer of the insurgent group shortly after his release from 60 days in prison for illegally entering the Capitol building during the 6 January 2021 riot. He said he organised a trip of about 200 people to the Trump rally in Washington that day because he objected to the conduct of the vote count in Pennsylvania.
In 2019, Scavo expressed regret for the wording of a series of anti-Muslim comments on social media, as well as falsely claiming Barack Obama is Muslim, when he unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the state legislature. Shortly afterwards, he was voted out as chair of a local school board.
Scavo denies that the new Republican party leadership in Luzerne county is pushing a racist agenda. He said the ousted chair and his staff were going to cost Trump the election because they were elitist and unwilling to listen to voters.
“The previous leadership didn’t want to have any resistance or turbulence so they didn’t engage with the grassroots,” he said.
“There’s a lot of people that don’t vote, so our job is to find them and then say it’s time to vote. Simple. They didn’t seem to understand that.”
Republican twitchiness about the election in Luzerne county is in part driven by the success of Democratic activists in pulling back support that collapsed after Obama left office. However, Ed Mitchell, a veteran Democratic strategist in Wilkes-Barre who previously worked for one of Pennsylvania’s members of Congress, said little of that is down to the Democratic party itself.
“I have a personal philosophy as a consultant that the parties don’t really matter anymore. At the national level, they can raise enormous amounts of money, but our state party isn’t very effective here in Pennsylvania and our local Democratic party in the county is a complete mess. They’re useless,” he said.
Instead, Trump’s opponents in Luzerne county drew lessons from his defeat of Hillary Clinton and decided the Democratic party was a part of the problem.
Alisha Hoffman-Mirilovich volunteered for Clinton in Pennsylvania but became frustrated with how Democratic campaign staff disdained local advice on the issues that mattered in Luzerne county.
“It was mostly outside organisers telling locals what to do and not necessarily listening. I myself stopped volunteering because of the way that I was treated and some things that were happening at the time,” she said.
“They all packed up and left within the week after the election. But this is my home and I decided we needed to do something.”
Hoffman-Mirilovich launched Action Together NEPA, a non-partisan social welfare organisation permitted to campaign on issues but not directly in support of individual political candidates, to work on increasing voter turnout.
The group did what the local Democratic party failed to do and banged on thousands of doors to talk policy not personalities.
“Because of Trump, we now have something where if you just even mention Republican or Democrat it’s just very divisive in communities, which is much different when you are from a non-partisan organisation that’s issues-led. I have talked to candidates who go to knock on doors and get thrown off of porches even though they’re from the community. They are told to go,” she said.
“But people are at least willing to talk to us and we find out what’s important to them, not what the party thinks is important. The largest issue in Luzerne county is corruption. It comes up over and over again.”
Hoffman-Mirilovich traces that back to the “kids for cash” scandal in which two Luzerne county judges, elected to the positions as Democrats, sentenced hundreds of children to prison terms for petty offences in return for millions of dollars in bribes from the private company incarcerating them. Some of the children were as young as eight years old and sentenced for offences such as jaywalking and smoking on school premises.
Other corruption scandals since then have kept the issue alive. Hoffman-Mirilovich said that has fed into a distrust of the system that extends from suspicion about corporate greed driving inflation to the loading of the US supreme court with conservatives to strip away democratic protections and the constitutional right to an abortion.
The Democratic share of the vote in Luzerne county has risen with each election since Trump’s 2016 victory, including the race for Pennsylvania’s governor two years later and a seat in the US Senate. Biden narrowed the gap with Trump in 2020 and then the Democratic candidate, Josh Shapiro, won the county in his election for governor in 2022.
Democrats have also made inroads into the county government in which Republicans previously held all but one of the 11 commissioner seats. At the last election, the Democrats picked up four seats.
Mitchell credits Action Together, which said it knocked on 36,000 doors in Luzerne county to get Shapiro elected, and other activists, more than the local Democratic party.
Some Republicans say, more in hope than expectation, that Biden quitting the presidential race will cost the Democrats voters who were loyal to the president because he makes much of having spent part of his childhood in Scranton, a city in the neighbouring county.
But Hoffman-Mirilovich sees the opposite effect, saying Harris has opened up new possibilities. She said voter turnout in Wilkes-Barre is lower than in the rest of the county in part because it has a younger demographic that is less likely to vote.
“We are finding talking to some of these voters that they are now energised with Kamala as the top of the ticket. They are excited about voting for the first time,” she said.
“Some people, if not most of them, didn’t want to see the same matchup from 2020.”
Scavo is not unaware of the success of the get-out-the-vote effort on behalf of Democrats and has been working to match it. The Republicans have driven up party registrations over the past couple of years to nearly match those of the Democrats.
But Scavo said Trump then has to get those voters to turn out on election day. He agrees with Hoffman-Mirilovich that it will come down to turnout and thinks Trump needs to do more to make sure his supporters vote.
“My father keeps saying: ‘If I vote for Trump, what’s Trump going to do?’ And I’m thinking, if you’re asking me that, then Trump isn’t getting the job done because you should know what he’s going to do on day one,” he said.
“So how does Trump win? He stops with the personal narratives of ‘I was prosecuted, persecuted, tried’, and all the personal stuff against Kamala. He needs to start talking to the person that’s disengaged by saying: ‘We’re going to lower your cereal, egg and meat prices. We’re going to lower your energy cost, your gas. We’re going to re-establish the border and have mass deportations.’ That’s the message he’s got to focus on, and then people will come out and vote.”
