“The Democrats used to be about the working man. Now, they sound like communists,” former Dem mayor of Kingston said. https://t.co/2ZGxtVhGrB
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) September 15, 2019
And these are the real people who Democrats are again dismissing.
It is not an unusual sentiment in this blue-collar corner of Pennsylvania: “I voted Trump last time, and I’ll vote Trump next time because there’s a lot of loonies out there.”
What is unusual is that Gary Reese, 75, served as the Democratic mayor of Kingston, a town in Luzerne County at the heart of what used to be the state’s coal belt, in the 1990s. “The Democrats used to be about the working man,” he continued. “Now, they sound like communists.”
Luzerne County emerged as one of the bellwethers of Mr Trump’s unlikely 2016 victory, a place where a predominantly white, blue-collar electorate plumped for the Republican nominee. Here, successive victories for Barack Obama were transformed into a Trump win of 26,000 votes — more than half his winning margin in a state that flipped from blue to red.
Voters were motivated by his promise to bring back jobs, keep out illegal immigrants, and to speak for a population who believed they had been forgotten.
This time around, members of the informal political chat group that gathers each morning for the $3.99 breakfast special (two eggs, bacon, toast and home fries) at the Pierce Street Deli see little to win them back.