Trump fever has broken in small town America, judging by appearances. I have just arrived in north-eastern Pennsylvania for the dog days of summer in a former mining community nestled among beautiful hills by the mighty Susquehanna river. In 2020 it was a riot of Donald Trump flags and yard signs, portraying him as Rambo brandishing a bazooka and in other heroic poses. Today, there are almost none. It is a shocking turnaround. Are Trump supporters lying low or have they disappeared?
This is Luzerne county, part of the Democratic “blue-wall” that crumbled in 2016 and propelled Trump to victory against Hillary Clinton. In 2020 Trump beat Joe Biden here by 57 per cent to 42 per cent. People used to boast they were “proud deplorables” in response to Clinton’s famous insult. Where have they all gone? I can’t say for sure, but the neighbourhood feels moderately more prosperous, younger, more diverse and less angry. Near-full employment and the absence of the pandemic may have something to do with the atmosphere.
Julia Robins, 44, has a rare Biden-Harris 2024 sign on her front lawn, which she is waiting to update. Her next-door neighbours were big Trump supporters four years ago; today she is not sure. I asked her what was different about this year’s campaign. Robins believes Trump voters are no longer feeling loud and proud. “They don’t want people to know they support him. After what happened on January 6, I wouldn’t want people to know I was a Trump supporter.” The same goes for Roe v Wade, she added, citing the supreme court’s reversal of abortion rights.
Robins has three daughters and four grand-daughters. “My mother is a registered independent. My sister’s a registered independent. All voting Democratic,” she emphasised.
The Trump-Vance ticket is short of female-friendly faces. Wife Melania and daughter Ivanka have refused to campaign
Her fiancé is a registered Republican, who thought Biden was too old to run, but will probably vote for Harris. “He’s got to live with me for the rest of his life,” Robins quipped. She was not sure about her 24-year-old son, who likes guns, but hoped he could be persuaded.
Trump remains popular in the manosphere. “It’s pretty obviously a problem,” Democratic strategist Brad Bannon told The Hill political website. “Trump has always done well with white men in 2020 and he’s going to do well with white men this time.” But women are for Kamala Harris. A recent poll showed suburban women favouring the vice-president over Trump by 52 per cent to 40 per cent, up eight points over Biden’s performance with the same voting group.
The Trump-Vance ticket is short of female-friendly faces. Wife Melania and daughter Ivanka have refused to campaign, though they showed up for a family parade at the Republican convention in Milwaukee. Lara Trump, who runs the Republican National Committee and is married to son Eric, compared Harris to a Balenciaga garbage bag this week. “It reminds me there was this bag that a very famous designer designed,” she said on Fox News. “It was literally a trash bag, but they sold this thing for like $2,000 thinking that people would actually buy it. It’s a similar situation with Kamala Harris.”
Trump doubled down on the insults by calling Harris a “bum” and a “low-IQ person”. Republican hopes of winning over black voters have vanished. Harris is part of a blended America, like the Team USA women’s gymnastics Olympic gold medallists. Robins, who has a black niece and nephew, said she was disgusted by the racist and sexist attacks on Harris as a diversity hire. “I can’t get down with that. It’s a dog-whistle,” she said. Some of the vilest social media memes, which show Harris on her knees and sleeping her way to the top, are totally blatant. And she hasn’t had five children by three spouses or paid hush money to a porn star.
A more subtle putdown, popular with some male commentators, is that Barack Obama is pulling her strings, as if a female politician couldn’t possibly lead her party without a puppeteer. The best response to all the slurs came from Harris herself in front of a 10,000-strong crowd in Atlanta, Georgia. Taunting Trump for pulling out of a scheduled presidential debate in September, she said: “If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.” Trump claimed on Monday he would probably end up debating with Harris but made no promises. Given that he wimped out of giving evidence in court after saying he wanted to, my guess is that he will decline the invitation. His campaign is caught in an “insult trap”, according to the Axios news website, and hasn’t figured out yet how to land successful attacks. This is not quite true. Republican attack ads on morning television and during screenings of the Olympics have been blasting out criticism of Harris as “weak, failed and dangerously liberal” on crime and immigration.
In Pennsylvania, these ads have been airing non-stop. Polling evidence suggests they are cutting through the noise. A Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll released yesterday showed Harris cruising ahead of Trump in several key states, including Michigan and Arizona, but trailing Trump by four per cent in Pennsylvania. His fans may have gone quiet, but they could roar back.
After a weak response to Harris’s emergence, Team Trump is getting its act together
Robins is hoping Harris chooses Josh Shapiro as her running mate. The moderate governor of Pennsylvania has a 61 per cent approval rate. “I know he would do well,” Robins said. “Imagine having a woman of colour president and a Jewish VP on the ticket. You would be hitting every demographic.” Others fear that he would alienate pro-Gazan voters in other states, but Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral college votes offer Harris the surest path to victory.
After a weak response to Harris’s emergence, Team Trump is getting its act together. He is set to hold a rally in Harrisburg, the Pennsylvania capital, and has promised to return to Butler, the scene of the attempt on his life. He clearly thinks there is all to play for in the state. With surgical precision, his campaign moved yesterday to counter a barrage of Democratic attacks by disowning Project 2025 and its plans for Trump’s second term in office after senior adviser Chris LaCivita called it a “pain in the ass”. The project’s director at the Heritage Foundation resigned yesterday.
It has been fun for Harris to label her opponents a bunch of “weird” women-haters but she needs to get on air fast with ads touting the strength of her policies on the economy, the border and protecting health and welfare. Her campaign is surging but she remains the underdog. A silent army of Trump supporters may be lying in wait.
