The Battle for What May Be the Most Important County in the Country

There are signs everywhere in Erie County, and the only thing you have to know is how to read them. “It appears that whoever wins Pennsylvania is going to win the whole thing,” says Sam Talarico, the bald and affable chair of the Erie County Democratic Party. And whoever wins Erie County is probably going to win Pennsylvania. As goes Erie, so goes America. 

“Yard signs are big in Erie County,” says Talarico, who looks like former Pittsburgh Steelers coach Bill Cowher, but without hair. “They always have been.” Now you just have to count all of the yard signs in this largest of Pennsylvania’s counties, and account for any and all political loyalties not expressed on a 24-by-18-inch rectangle of corrugated plastic, and you’ll have next week’s presidential election all figured out.

Sign: The blue Harris-Walz campaign poster tucked at the base of a flagpole adorned with Old Glory on the prim lawn of a vinyl-sided house on West Sixth Street. May seem like a small deal, but Kim Clear, a Democratic official from Millcreek Township—a suburb of Erie that is the fulcrum on which this whole county turns—says that in 2016, Hillary Clinton’s sign game was virtually nonexistent. They were too sophisticated for signs. They had targeted voter models. 

Democrats are smarter this time around. “I would say that we are neck and neck,” Clear told me when we met for coffee at a Tim Hortons. “We have as many Kamala signs as we do Trump signs.”

Trump defeated Clinton in 2016 by 1.6 percent in Erie County, which had once been the preserve of lunch-pail Democrats (grandparents who venerated FDR, parents who voted for JFK, sons and daughters who got caught up in the Reagan revolution) but has since become something more complex: a combination of Midwestern perseverance and Rust Belt pathologies that are plainly visible when you drive past the shuttered factories of 12th Street. Biden won here by 1 percent in 2020, and now 12th Street is being “reimagined,” thanks in part to federal funds. The bipartisan infrastructure law has turned Bayfront Parkway, which hugs the majestic Lake Erie coastline, into a massive construction site. This is not a city mourning its decline. 

“There’s a big movement to try revitalize many of the things that we have here, to make the area a beautiful, amazing place,” Rabbi Dovid Kivman, executive director of the Chabad of Erie County, told me as we ate his wife’s chocolate chip cookies on a cold autumn afternoon. “A big part of it is not really dying.”

This city of about 93,000 residents is not any one thing, the thing you want it to be so that you can believe whatever is comforting to believe. Erie is resurgent and embattled, self-confident and insecure, hopeful and brooding. A surprising number of people willingly choose to stay, even if they could live elsewhere. Many also leave and then come back—because they want to.

One of them is Ryan Sanders, an energetic sheet-metal worker and local labor leader. Before that, he worked for the Cheesecake Factory for many years, spending some of that time out in Vegas. “We’re just this collective,” he says. “We just get along. I don’t hate Kamala Harris, I don’t hate Donald Trump.” Sanders says he voted for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and, most recently, Trump. Now he is voting for Harris. 

I ask him to explain.

“Welcome to Erie, Pennsylvania,” Sanders says. 

Not only has Erie picked every president since 2008 correctly, it has been hugely consequential in making those picks. It is a needle that registers every shift in the country’s mood, even if those shifts are happening thousands of miles away. Or, as a minister will put it at a Black church later that evening, “Erie County holds this election upon its shoulders.”

For what it’s worth, Sanders thinks Harris will pull it out. So does the amiable bartender who pours me a glass of local cabernet (yes, there is a wine region here, and, no, it isn’t just cough syrup in glass bottles). But they and others are mostly waiting for this deeply silly season to end, for the rest of the country to leave them alone, stop lavishing them with transactional attention.

“Let’s just get this over with,” Sanders says.

We talk at the Shoreline Bar and Grille, and though the curtains have been pulled down over the large glass windows, you can see a splendid sunset over Lake Erie, the colors made more brilliant, Sanders says with grim humor, because of the pollution wafting over from Detroit. Behind him curves the peninsula of Presque Isle State Park, a splendid assemblage of running trails, pristine beaches, and historic sites. Clear, the Millcreek official, informs me that Presque Isle gets more visitors than both Yellowstone and Yosemite, two of the most famous national parks in the United States. I nod along but think that can’t possibly be true; it’s just one of those things locals say to make themselves feel better. But she’s right.

Yet the decline is real, and some parts of Erie are so far gone that the process of actively dying ended long ago—now there is just decay. The three enormous smokestacks of the former Hammermill Paper plant loom on the horizon, a constant reminder of loss. The factory closed in 2002, and nearly 1,000 people lost their jobs. There is now a biodiesel company, Hero Bx, next to the derelict Hammermill site. Its steel drums are new and gleaming, but they don’t tower over the city the way the Hammermill smokestacks still do.

The story of decline is decidedly not the only story about Erie. It’s not even the dominant story, not any longer. A recycling plant for which the feds will offer a $128 million loan is coming to town. Downtown, they have an honest-to-goodness food hall, and if the gourmet pizza was a little on the greasy side, the local IPA more than made up for it. The story of regeneration is real. It’s just much harder to tell. 

“Democrats have not really, over the years, defined where Erie is going,” said Joseph Morris, a political scientist at Mercyhurst University, a small Catholic school with a charming hilltop campus. Politics is stories, Morris said, and the stories Trump tells simply make more sense to the average person. “‘We have an immigration problem. We are going to deport the immigrants.’ That’s an easy story to understand. Democrats’ story has been much more complex,” Morris says. They tell stories that make sense to Nobel Prize economists but not to Pennsylvania machinists, and there are a whole lot more of the latter in this world than the former.

The Democratic Party offices are on State Street, Erie’s main thoroughfare, formerly grandiose but currently uncharming, with strong downtown Newark vibes. Rick, a middle-aged volunteer who did not give his last name, fits lawn signs with a metal H-stake. Rick, who is wearing exercise clothes, says he has put together about “17 million” Harris-Walz signs. I tell him I will have to fact-check that. He laughs without looking up.

There’s a catch, something Clear and I have both noticed. “Now, I will say, when someone does have a Trump sign, it’s very large,” Clear says. She hates the incivility of Trumpism. She’s a lifelong Midwesterner, a suburban mom who thinks we could be heading down the road to fascism. And though she hates the rhetoric of Trumpism, which is all around her, she can’t help but take a very Trumpian dig at the people with the very large Trump signs: “I think that the size of the sign is compensating for something else,” Clear says.

Another sign, to Clear’s initial point about signage size: A Trump campaign poster hung from the roof of the Presque Isle Gun Shop. There is also a large Trump flag, flapping in the cooling breeze. Inside, you can purchase a shotgun whose stock proclaims “TRUMP 2024” and “TAKE AMERICA BACK.” A white woman, late middle age, buys a handgun. A young Black man, a military veteran, buys a Mossberg rifle. He also wants steel-cased bullets that are no longer available because they come from Russia, and there is no buying anything from Russia until the war in Ukraine ends. On a television above the entrance, Newsmax plays. John Kirby, the spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council, is on the screen, announcing that North Korean troops are now fighting on the Kremlin’s behalf. There is also a report in The Wall Street Journal that Tesla founder Elon Musk has been talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin, which seems not entirely kosher, to put it mildly. “I’m not in a position to corroborate the veracity of those reports,” says Kirby, a master at saying nothing while giving you the sense that he is doing everything he can to give you the straight dope.  

Trump says he will talk to Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskiy and end the war within hours of assuming the Oval Office again. He will bring peace to the Middle East too, which he had already done with his Abraham Accords, or so his supporters claim, only to have Joe Biden muck everything up by sending money to Iran and emboldening Hamas (naturally, the Biden people dispute this version of events, but some of them have less credibility than they realize).

Since the previous evening, MSNBC and CNN had been doing segments about Trump’s abiding affinity for Hitler, as reported by The Atlantic and The New York Times, but in the Presque Isle Gun Shop, owner Timothy Parker had heard nothing about that flap. 

“Our media is very biased,” Parker says, leaving it there as a fact. He is just as certain in his reality as are the people who think Trump is a fascist; just as convinced of imminent decline unless his side wins next week. He dismissed much of the criticism of Trump as the sniping of elites who showed themselves to be incompetent during his first presidential term. Embittered, they are now trying to keep him from a second.

“The swamp was so big, he had no idea,” Parker says. “He had no idea there were so many Loch Ness monsters out there. That’s why everybody under the sun is trying to indict him for all this B.S. stuff.”

A customer named Jim wears a Trump 2024 hat. He can’t stand this DEI business. That’s what gets him worked up. One of his granddaughters is Black, so this isn’t a race thing. The migrant thing too. A real mess they made on that front. Erie’s liberal legislators have made this a “sanctuary city,” a vague designation that means local authorities will not cooperate with federal law enforcement when it comes to deporting undocumented immigrants.

“This sanctuary city business is killing Erie,” Jim says. He says that a retired police officer who lives near the airport reports of flights full of migrants landing in the middle of the night. He even has tapes! I ask to see the tapes. Jim isn’t sure about that. He repeats that the cop lives near the airport, seeming to suggest that that alone should be sufficient information for a halfway-decent journalist to find the retired officer with the migrant tapes.

Clear, the Democrat from Millcreek, has also heard the rumor about the secret migrant flights, but when I ask her if she thinks it’s true, she dramatically rolls her eyes. To her, and many other Democrats, Erie does have real problems, but those problems have nothing to do with covert migrant flights and rigged elections. Trumpism is a kind of malevolent distraction, the danger of which is that the longer the distraction goes on, the harder it will be to return to whatever it is we are being distracted from. 

“I don’t understand what they’re afraid of,” she says. Maybe the fractured media landscape has something to do with it. Clear listens to NPR, while Parker watches Newsmax, each burrowing deeper into their own reality. “We don’t have a physical paper anymore,” Clear says. Actually, that’s not entirely true, but the Erie-Times News, now owned by Gannett, ceased to be a voice of the community long ago. Some people believe that “news deserts” lead people to vote for Trump. 

There are seven bookstores in Erie, including one affiliated with each of the city’s three colleges: Gannon, Mercyhurst, and Penn State’s Behrend branch, which is a leader in offering degrees in plastics engineering (plastics are big in Erie). The bookstores outnumber gun stores, of which I counted five. And there are more breweries and distilleries than there are bookstores or gun stores, by far.

“You can have all these wonderful pieces. Things are happening,” says Mercyhurst professor Morris. “We’re moving in a direction. But it’s ambiguous.”

The Pressed bookstore is next to gourmet popcorn shop, which is next to a distillery. In the bookstore’s window is a display of books on racism. There is a stuffed Barack Obama doll. At the coffee counter, there is a heavily tattooed, very fit guy with a toddler on his wide shoulders, dressed in a T-shirt from “Lions Not Sheep,” a brand aligned with the MAGA movement,

I pick up What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, the book Elizabeth Catte wrote in response to Hillbilly Elegy, the 2017 tome that made JD Vance famous. She makes no effort to hide her contempt for Vance and his treatment of the white working class. “I don’t want anything that Vance could ever give the region,” she writes, because, she concludes, “he’s far more interested in taking.”

After many days of uninterrupted, summer-like sunlight, there are clouds, the promise of rain. In the afternoon, the Trump campaign bus rolls into town. The boss, as many of his subordinates call him, is not there, but the bus is packed with various acolytes: notorious national security adviser Kash Patel, who is a much more rousing speaker than I imagined; Matt Whitaker, who briefly served as the acting U.S. attorney general and is best known for having once hawked a “masculine toilet”; Monica Crowley, a plagiarist who served in the Treasury Department; South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who once killed a dog. 

Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski flaps his hands in an unsubtly homophobic imitation of Tim Walz. Lewandowski is in a very, very good mood. He proceeds to call Walz “Tampon Tim”—something, invariably exaggerated, about policies regarding transgender students during Walz’s ongoing tenure as governor of Minnesota. He then charges Walz with reveling in the smoke of a burning Minneapolis during the protesting and rioting that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020. “Can you imagine what that lunatic would do,” Lewandowski wonders, “if he was the vice president of the United States?”

The crowd gathered in the parking lot of Waldameer Park and Water World (and the crowd, only a few dozen people or so, is not huge, it must be said; the boss would not be pleased) can indeed imagine it. They jeer at the thought. Then Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa comes out to lighten the mood once again. She pulls out her phone and says she is going to send a video to Trump of his supporters dancing. He really wants to see the video, the boss does. “Y.M.C.A.,” the Village People song, begins to play from loudspeakers. And the MAGA faithful begin to dance, as Ernst swivels her phone back and forth across the Waldameer parking lot.

I approach John Fredericks, the conservative radio host who calls himself “the Godzilla of Truth,” a presumed reference to his not-inconsiderable girth. I ask Fredericks how he thinks the race will turn out on November 5. “Blowout,” he says, without any hesitation.

Democrats are just as confident. “The enthusiasm we’re seeing is just something we’ve never seen before,” says Talarico, the local Dem poobah. He has seen nothing of the Harris campaign’s supposed disorganization. What worries him is the polling: “They’re all pretty close. So, you know, that’s concerning.” 

The polling worries everyone, right and left. While I am in town, the FiveThirtyEight simulation points for the first time in months toward a Trump win. There is a subtle shift in momentum, and you feel it everywhere, like the first chill of autumn. The early voting numbers for Republicans seem to be especially high, though no one can tell if those are new voters or people who have voted for Trump anyway. The consensus seems to be that Harris is running a better campaign than Clinton did in 2016, but Trump is also running a better campaign than he did in 2020. Make of that what you will. 

The Reverend Jesse Jackson also comes into town. Jackson, who is not in good health and must be wheeled around in a wheelchair, holds a couple of closed-door events and then, in the evening, a rally at the Second Baptist Church. Various religious and civic leaders praise both God and Jackson. There is a rousing spiritual, beautifully sung, vastly preferable to “Y.M.C.A.” in the Waldameer parking lot.

The main speaker is Jesse Jackson Jr., the former congressman, who was found to have misappropriated campaign funds in 2013. The night before the event at Second Baptist, I had seen him at the hotel bar, having an apparent nightcap. A lot more reporting used to happen at hotel bars, and a lot more intrigue. Now fewer and fewer outlets send reporters out on the campaign trail. And there is simply less contact between reporters and politicians, at least of the unmanaged variety.

At the church, the younger Jackson turns out to be an exceptionally powerful speaker, which I guess should not be surprising given his lineage. He is apparently in search of a “second act” in politics. Like other liberals, he may actually have an easier time if Trump is president and the Resistance mounts anew, looking for new heroes. But of course, that cannot be said out loud, not in public. Besides, he seems genuinely pumped about electing Harris. All politics is acting, and the question is only whether the act is convincing, which in this case it very much is. “The election is going to be won in Pennsylvania,” he says.

One afternoon I become exasperated with politics and decide to drive out to wine country, north and east of Erie, toward the border with New York State. I’ll have a glass of Riesling, read a book, get away from the importance of it all: this most important election in our lifetimes, on which the future of democracy hinges. The human mind is not equipped to handle quite this much importance on a daily basis. We need less consequential things.

This turns out to be a mistake. The country roads leading out of Erie are absolutely clogged with election signs, as if they were some kind of invasive species, a strain of kudzu invented by CNN. The lush country, with its rolling hills, is spoiled at every turn by proclamations of political fealty. Trump signs grow ginormous, though the Harris signs persist well into God and guns territory.

Finally, there is a sign whose message I can fully get behind it. “Vote for Bob,” it says. Which I would gladly do, except that Bob is a cat.