There is no South African political scientist, election strategist, pollster or billionaire who truly knows who will win the US election. The best guess is the 320,000 residents of the small county of Northampton, Pennsylvania.
Since 1912, the election results in the region, located north of Philadelphia, have coincided with the overall final score. Only three times (1968, 2000 and 2004) did the choices differ. In 2020, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by a difference of just over 1,200 votes.
The largest city in the county, Bethlehem, was home to one of the great American steel mills. Founded in the 19th century, the company closed its doors in 2003. Today, the main sectors in the region are health, industry, and transport and warehouses. Amazon, with its distribution centers, is the third largest employer.
Those who felt the blow were mainly low-income families, the so-called working class in the USA. There, as in the rest of the country, it became more difficult for this group to rise socially.
This is what a study by Opportunity Insights, linked to Harvard, shows by comparing the trajectories of 57 million people born in 1978 and 1992 across the USA. During this period, the distance between white families with the lowest and highest income grew by 28%. At the same time, the racial gap among the poorest shrank by 27%.
At age 27, someone born in 1992 into a low-income family in Northampton received 10% less than someone born in 1978 at the same age. If she is white, the value drops by 11%. If you are black, it went up 20%.
In Luzerne County, northwest of Northampton, the story is similar. The main difference is that, there, Trump won in 2020 by a difference of 14 percentage points. Geography explains: leaving the Democratic enclaves of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, the deeper you go into the state, the more Republican – or Alabama, as famous strategist James Carville said – it becomes.
It is in this border area between one another, in the suburbs of big cities, that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are fighting the battle that could decide the future of the White House. With 19 electoral college votes, the most among all swing states, a victory in Pennsylvania is seen as crucial by both campaigns.
The suburbs
The Republican’s strategy is to increase his advantage in rural areas, where he easily dominates, and try to win more votes on the margins of urban centers than in 2020. This population’s dissatisfaction with the economic situation over the last four years plays in Trump’s favor and the worsening prospects for social mobility in recent decades.
Although job creation broke records during the Biden administration, largely in response to stimulus from billion-dollar infrastructure and green energy packages, the 20% spike in inflation in the last four years has eroded practically all the increase in income. For the population, the feeling is of stagnation.
Not surprisingly, the businessman’s main proposals for the economy are tax cuts – in recent weeks, he included overtime in the list of promised exemptions – and the imposition of tariffs on imports, mainly from China, with the aim of stimulating industry American.
Reducing the tax burden is a classic Republican agenda, explains economist Tara Watson, director of the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at Brookings and assistant secretary for microeconomic analysis at the US Treasury in the Obama administration.
“The populist part of Trump’s platform is that he is less interested in combining this with spending cuts. The traditional Republican Party would have pushed for big reductions in Social Security and Medicare to maintain a more reasonable debt level,” he says.
“The tariff proposal, or trade protectionism, is not something traditional that the party used to support, but I think it attracts some audiences”, he adds.
Own house
Inflation in recent years has affected a central area of the American dream: home ownership. With the central bank raising interest rates, the supply of cheaper properties fell, and prices rose.
“My parents were 26 and 28 when they bought their first house in 1986 for $50,000. Now, if you find a house for less than $230,000, you’re lucky,” says Katie Kennedy, 29, born and raised in Pittsburgh. His mother was a high school art teacher and his father was a history teacher before becoming a legal assistant.
The young woman earns US$38,000 a year working at the university where she is studying for a master’s degree. Additionally, she has $18,000 in student debt, which is currently suspended.
She has no doubt that she will vote for Kamala. When asked about the candidate’s economic proposals, Katie lists subsidies for property purchases and student debt forgiveness as the most important.
Being a middle-class president and promoting what she calls the opportunity economy are the two central ideas of the current vice president’s vague economic agenda. “Details have been pretty sparse on both campaigns,” says Watson.
Like Trump, Kamala also promises tax cuts – but focused on lower-income families. Furthermore, it intends to build 3 million homes to reduce the housing deficit and expand subsidies already adopted by the current government.
“I think her biggest difference from Biden is the care economy. She made a recent announcement for elderly care, I imagine this will also expand to children and family leave,” says the Brookings economist.
It is through college-educated white people like Katie that Democrats try to counterbalance the strength of Trumpism among those without a college education. The weight of educational background is one of the main cleavages of the electorate this year.
Today, the Republican is supported by just over a third of this group in Pennsylvania, eight percentage points less than in 2020, according to a Wall Street Journal survey.
Another survey in the state, carried out at the request of the Center for Working Class Politics, shows Kamala with 36% of voting intentions among manual workers, 48% among service and administrative workers, and 47% among specialized professionals. Trump has 56%, 42% and 45%, respectively.
Giles Grinko was policy director for the western section of the century-old International Painters Union, an organization with more than 140,000 members between the US and Canada. Close to 70 years old, the Democrat, who has already campaigned for Obama and Hillary, cannot understand the support for Trumpism among workers.
“It’s going to be very difficult. I hope Kamala wins by a big margin, but I don’t see that happening. I don’t know why people are thinking (about voting for Trump),” he says, dismayed.
“I did my duty, I fought the battle. If you’re not going to fight the battle I fought to get to where I am today, I don’t see how you’re going to make it. I was so happy with Obama’s victory, the young adults really went all out , had unbelievable energy. I don’t see that now.”
