From Obama to Trump to Biden, why Erie County's next choice will likely be our new president

ERIE, Pa. — There's a blue Trump flag at one end of Bill and Joyce Mallet's front porch and a pink "Women for Trump" flag at the other. They flutter in the wind as cars pass along the busy roadway.

Several Trump signs dot the yard. Even the small "Let's go Brandon" sign, a derogatory reference to President Joe Biden, who exited the race in mid July, remains a fixture here.

"Sometimes we get people honking and going like this," says Bill Mallett, raising his arm and making a fist to show solidarity.

"Then we get others who are like this," Mallett continues, only this time flashing a middle finger. "She gives it right back to them."

We talked to voters in key swing states that could decide the election

Reporters around the Paste BN Network talk to voters in seven key swing states that could decide the 2024 presidential election.

Everyone in the Mallett family backs Trump's re-election, said Joyce Mallett, an 81-year-old who's sporting a gift from a family member —a T-shirt that says, "I'd rather vote for a felon than a jackass." In fact, until Trump's arrival on the political scene in 2016, Bill Mallett, an 83-year-old retired construction worker, had never cast a vote for president.

In June, following a disastrous debate performance by President Joe Biden against Trump, the odds of Trump returning to the White House were high. Not any more.

Erie politicos know it could be voters in the northwest corner of the state who decide the outcome if the election comes down to Pennsylvania.

Marie Troyer sits at her desk inside Erie County Democratic Party headquarters, fielding call after call. Supporters of the newly minted Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris want yard signs, and a shipment has just arrived.

It's Aug. 29 and the race is hitting full tilt.

It's been one week since Harris accepted the nomination, following Biden's hasty mid-July exit. A few residents in the grape-farming community of North East have cut off the top halves of their yard signs to remove Biden's name, leaving only Harris'.

"People have been over-the-moon ecstatic," says Troyer, a retired teacher of 34 years. "She has changed the way people feel about our country. It's so positive right now. And they are so tired of the division that Donald Trump has put into this country."

Biden wasn't eliciting this energy from voters a few months ago. At the time, about 50 people had agreed to volunteer, Troyer said. Now, it's about 300. Even people from neighboring states, such as New York, where a Harris victory is nearly guaranteed, are offering to volunteer.

"We would've all tried to stick with him (Biden) if he would've been the (nominee)," Troyer said. "But we all knew. Everybody was talking. People would come in and say how much they love him, but he needs to understand that we need somebody for the younger generation. Thank goodness he made a decision for the country."

Erie voters know that.

Erie County is 'the ultimate bellwether'

For seven consecutive elections, Erie County was a Democratic stronghold in presidential politics, from Michael Dukakis to Barack Obama.

Donald Trump changed everything in 2016, becoming the first Republican to win the county since Ronald Reagan in 1984 and the first to win the state since 1988.

That a Democratic stronghold would back Trump, however narrowly, thrust Erie County into the political spotlight. Only 206 counties nationwide backed Obama twice and then turned to Trump.

When voters delivered a slim victory for President Joe Biden four years later, Erie County found itself in even more exclusive company as one of 25 counties out of 3,143 nationwide to "boomerang" from Obama to Trump to Biden.

"Erie is the quintessential Pennsylvania electorate all in one area," U.S. Sen. John Fetterman said as he walked in Erie's annual Labor Day parade. "You have urban, you have more rural and suburban all together."

During his 2022 Senate race, the former lieutenant governor relaunched his campaign in Erie after suffering a stroke months earlier. And Erie delivered.

"If you can't sell your plan or your platform in Erie, then you really can't sell it across Pennsylvania," Fetterman said. "This is really the ultimate bellwether county."

The direction voters here go in November is as clear as the skies during an Erie lake-effect snowstorm.

Mixed messages and new optimism

Inside Lavery Brewing Co's old brick warehouse, strings of patio lights illuminate a crowd of nearly 300 people who've assembled to watch Vice President Kamala Harris debate former President Donald Trump.

In any other election cycle, the watch party might draw a few dozen volunteers and a couple down-ballot candidates.

Not tonight.

"Philadelphia may be the birthplace of democracy," Jim Wertz, a former party chairman and a candidate for state Senate, tells the audience, "but Erie is its last line of defense."

The excitement, several national polls have shown, is especially strong among young Black women like Nylejhia Jones, 20, of Erie.

"I have too many concerns," said Jones, a freshman at Gannon University, when asked what issues are important to her. "There's housing, inflation, reproductive rights, the homeless population, drugs."

Jones said she's inspired by the potential of electing the first female president and the second person of color to the White House.

"It says to me that anything is possible," Jones said. "Plus, we've had a lot of old white dudes as president."

A recent poll of Erie County by Paste BN/Suffolk University found Harris with a 48% to 44% advantage over Trump, within the margin of error in the survey of 300 likely voters conducted after the candidates' Sept. 10 debate.

There's reason for optimism among Erie County Republicans, too.

The party has cut into Democrats' voter registration advantage. There are now 79,987 registered Democrats, 4,118 fewer than in 2022; and 69,650 registered Republicans and 26,607 independents or third-party voters, increases of 1,768 and 1,718 voters, respectively, over the same two-year period.

Since 1994, Democratic registration has dropped 10 percentage points, from 55% to 45%, while the number of independent voters has grown from 5% to 15%.

"How they (independents) go is how Erie County will go," Erie County Republican Party Chairman Tom Eddy said, "and why they may go toward Trump is, as they say, 'it's the economy, stupid.'"

'Help the little guys'

The unemployment rate was relatively low at 4% in July, but the median household income ($59,396) has long lagged the rest of the state ($72,210) and nation ($74,580). High inflation has only worsened the issue.

And Erie County, like the state, hadn't fully recovered the jobs lost during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were 3,400 fewer jobs in 2023 than in 2019, a 2.8% decline, according to recent analysis of labor data by The New York Times.

Gene Josey, 59, of Erie, works as a welder to support his children, ages 11, 15 and 19. Josey wants lawmakers to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour in hopes that wages will rise across the board.

"It's getting tougher to live, pay bills, buy food," he said. "So why aren't our wages going up? I'm just hopeful that somebody will step up and help the little guys out."

That "somebody" won't be Trump, says Josey, who declined to say if Harris has his vote.

Jaiden Zeigler, a 23-year-old electrician, is working side jobs and shopping at warehouse clubs to afford groceries for himself, his girlfriend and her two children.

"I do all right," said Zeigler, who makes $50,000 annually. "But things are a little more expensive. I still get two grocery carts full, but after the price of that it's like 'dang.'"

Zeigler voted for Trump in 2020, but in early September was undecided.

Labor's shifting political sentiments could sway outcome

Trump's populist appeal resonates with Erie's working-class voters, said Scott Slawson, the president of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers Local 506, which represents workers at Wabtec Corp.'s locomotive plant outside the city.

In the decade Slawson has served as president, he has watched the union's membership drop from 3,200 to 1,400.

For decades the locomotive plant, the brainchild of Thomas Edison that opened in 1907, was the county's largest employer. That changed in late 2017, when it was surpassed by Fortune 500 Erie Insurance.

A lot has happened at the plant in 15 years.

Longtime owner GE Transportation, a subsidiary of General Electric, moved its headquarters from Erie to Chicago. It opened a non-union plant in Fort Worth, Texas, and shifted hundreds of jobs there.

Then, in 2019, General Electric sold its transportation division to Wabtec for $11 billion. Wabtec preserved locomotive production operations in Erie. In 2023, UE 506 and 608, a smaller bargaining unit, went on a 10-week strike after failing to reach a new contract with the company.

The rank-and-file union made the rare decision in 2016 to back Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. But when Sanders was "shunned," as Slawson put it, at the Democratic National Convention in favor of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a lot of members defected to Trump.

"A lot of people saw (in Clinton) the regular Democratic establishment," he said. "Nothing was being shaken up. Nothing was changing. It was going to continue to be the same old rhetoric. So they said let's try something different, you know? And let's face it, Donald Trump was different."

Eddy, the GOP chair, said he's seen the shift among retirees.

"When an older gentleman walks in and he'll say, 'I want an application to change my (voter) registration,' usually the first thing I say is, 'did you work at GE?'"

The next thing they say, according to Eddy, is that the Democratic Party no longer resembles the party they supported for decades.

Slawson, however, thinks the tide might be turning again.

"I heard a lot of people, when Biden was still running, say that if it's Biden or Trump, 'I'm probably going to vote for Trump,'" he said. "I'm not hearing it as much anymore. I think there's a lot more support for Kamala than people realize."

Abortion vs. the economy

In rural Waterford, 48-year-old Ellen Ruhl keeps a firm grip on the collar of a half-ton cow outside a barn at the community fair.

Ruhl and her husband raise beef cattle and have felt the pressure of rising costs. They stand firmly behind Trump.

"You can't have just one family income anymore, it takes two, three," said Ruhl, a manufacturing planner for Greenleaf Corp. "I've seen families moving in together, so yeah, it's time for a change. We need something to happen soon. The false promises need to go away."

Her biggest concern, though, is reproductive rights. It's one area where she disagrees with Trump, who appointed three justices to the U.S. Supreme Court who ultimately reversed Roe v. Wade in 2022.

"I don't think the government should be able to tell anybody what they can and can't do with their bodies," Ruhl said. "That's the issue I have with him, but the other stuff that he does, you know, he's for the American people, the middle class."

Ruhl said she trusts that Trump won't ban abortion nationally and noted that the procedure remains legal in the state.

Denny Hunter, another fairgoer, is also a Republican who says abortion is his biggest issue. Hunter, who is Catholic, opposes abortion, including in cases of rape or incest. Trump, he says, is the only candidate who aligns with those values.

"I know Pennsylvania allows it to happen here, but I get outvoted," Hunter said. "The fact of the matter is abortion is killing another human being. And I can't vote for anything like that."

Hunter has his reservations about Trump.

"He's at the head of the ticket, let's put it that way," Hunter said. "I'm not a Trump fan. I have a lot to argue with about what he says and does, but they're secondary to what abortion is for me."

Republican wrestles with Trump's 'serious character flaw'

Gilbert Jacobs, a 78-year-old veteran, small business owner and retired college professor, isn't a fan of Trump either. A Republican all his adult life, Jacobs has voted for Democrats and other non-GOP candidates before, but the last time he supported one for president, John F. Kennedy was on the ballot.

He backed Trump twice before, but the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump's unwillingness to accept the election results, left Jacobs jaded.

He donated to South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley's presidential campaign and was among the one in five Erie County Republicans who voted in the primary to cast a ballot for Haley, even though she had dropped out a month earlier.

Jacobs judges candidates by "four Cs": competence, commitment, character and caring. Trump, he thought in 2016, had all four.

"He was pretty decent until the end," he said.

Trump displayed "an inability to accept reality" and a "serious character flaw" when his weeks of denying the election results culminated with the insurrection.

Jacobs will go to the polls Nov. 5, but for the first time he might not cast a vote for president.

"I'm struggling with the idea that I'm not supporting Trump when other (Republicans) I respect are," he said. "I'm not totally ruling him out, but I do see it as a real challenge for him to be able to demonstrate the character that I think is needed in a president."

Of course, there are others who support Trump regardless.

The Malletts are like many Republican voters, especially in the suburban and rural parts of this county. They don't just support Trump, they're loyal to him and excited to have another chance to put him back in the White House.

Asked if anything — including being impeached twice and embroiled in multiple civil and criminal court cases, including a 34-county felony conviction — could shake their support for Trump, Joyce Mallett paused and then said, "No, I don't think so."

"Nope," replied her husband.

Matthew Rink can be reached at mrink@timesnews.com or on X at @ETNRink.