We win Pittsburgh, we win this election

Don and Sally Rea own a large piece of property on the side of a hill in Beaver County, a red area within the Pittsburgh-metro area. It’s clearly visible when you drive across the Ohio River into Bridgewater, PA, but until recently, the vacant lot was unremarkable. That is until Don decided to put up the first political sign of his life: he mowed a 90 by 36 feet HARRIS into his lawn and covered the letters in white paint to make sure it stood out. 

It was a move Don says was partly inspired by politics and partly by spite: A neighbor on their private road put up a Trump sign “100% aimed at me” so he decided, “go big or go home.”

“There's nobody in Beaver County that hasn't seen it,” he said of his sign.

I returned last week from a four-day trip to Pittsburgh to get a sense of the feeling on the ground there, away from the polling and clips of Trump raising his fist after being shot at a rally in the area. In my mind and based on what I’d read and heard from locals before visiting, the vibes for Harris/Walz were generally good. But when a friend in a purple suburb of downtown Pittsburgh told me her neighbor unexpectedly put out a Trump/Vance yard sign, it got me thinking: Was there a Trumpy undercurrent that could only be felt up close? So I got on a plane.

Living in New York, you’d hardly know there was a presidential election happening. But as soon as I reached the rental car desk in PA, I could feel the difference. “Kamala Harris thinks you’re stupid for not noticing rising housing and gas prices,” an ominous voice coming through the radio speaker said. It was followed by a clip of Harris saying, “Bidenomics is working” with her signature hearty laugh, which was meant to sound sinister—as womens’ laughter so often is. 

On every corner, the election hung conspicuously in the air. After a spirited chat at an outdoor cafe with an undecided voter in Sewickley, a suburb of Pittsburgh, a man passed by and asked if I was a canvasser. No, I replied, I’m a reporter. He told me that he was actually a canvasser for Harris/Walz, so we exchanged phone numbers. When I called him the next day, he told me he was first motivated to volunteer in 2020. Why then? “The Trump presidency and the threat he represents to the world my children will inherit,” he said.

At the same Donuts with Democrats event where I met Don and Sally Rea, Congressman Chris Deluzio, a one-term Democrat running for reelection in the area, spoke to the crowd. He quickly mentioned that he may be pulled off stage at any moment as his wife was in the hospital and about to give birth to their fourth child. Luckily he said, throughout the pregnancy, “Republicans were not in the exam room.” It was a stark reminder that abortion and reproductive freedom are on the ballot.

Senator John Fetterman was also in the house, and I was able to get a minute of his time after remarks to the room. I asked him if the presidential polls, which show an incredibly tight race, could be trusted.  

“Polls have been for shit for a while,” Fetterman told me. “Certainly in my race as well. But you can't really control that. What you can control is energizing and showing up and fighting hand to hand for votes all across Pennsylvania.”

To get a better sense of the city, I reached out to the Mayor of Pittsburgh—at least that’s how he’s saved in my phone. John Rhoades is the owner and CEO of NEXTpittsburgh, a digital publication focused on remarkable people and places in the Steel City. He was also college roommates with a dear friend. 

Rhoades, a seventh generation Pittsburgher, drove me around downtown and then out to Squirrel Hill, a historically Jewish neighborhood that is now familiar to many as the location of the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooting massacre. 

“There were, even as I was a little kid, factories all along the Monongahela [River],” Rhoades recalled as we ate breakfast at a neighborhood diner. “and you could see the stacks with flames coming out of them.” By that time the number of steel mills had already dwindled, but he remembered his grandfather who worked downtown at US Steel saying, “just walking downtown he would have to bring two shirts sometimes, because the soot was bad enough, it would turn gray.”

The metropolitan area has changed immensely since then, and not just in soot content: According to Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia analysis, the population has shrunk by 400,000 people since 1969 because of the steel collapse. But despite the loss, it remains one of the most important cities to capture in the fight for electoral dominance, and in 2024, it seems like it might actually be number one.

This past Tuesday, Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Governor Tim Walz held a rally at Acrisure Stadium, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers. (Locals still call it by its former name, Heinz Field.) VP Harris has visited multiple times, and on a drive a friend pointed out the Sheetz convenience store where she recently stopped for a photo op and a bag of Doritos. While I was in town, Donald Trump was back in Butler County—where he was shot in the ear back in July—this time with Elon Musk hopping along at his side. A few days later, former President Barack Obama delivered a rousing speech. And Republican Vice Presidential candidate Senator JD Vance came through a couple of weeks ago, causing a kerfuffle at famed sandwich spot Primanti’s. 

It’s not an understatement to say that as goes Pittsburgh, so goes the country. And Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff said as much at an outdoor rally that I had the opportunity to attend while I was in town. “The path for victory literally comes right through your state, right through this very town,” he said. “We win here, we win this election.”

Emhoff spoke to a crowd in Schenley Park, a beautiful green space adjacent to the University of Pittsburgh campus, nestled in the shadow of the school’s iconic Cathedral of Learning. Hundreds gathered to see Emhoff and other Pennsylvania Democrats speak before singers Jason Isbell and Michael Stipe of REM took the stage together.

“I'm ready to make history,” Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, the city’s first Black mayor, told the crowd of getting Harris elected. “Are you ready to make history?”

In contrast to the parking lot outside the Trump rally on Long Island, the diversity was in the crowd itself and not the type of merch being hawked by vendors. 

I chatted with a couple originally from India who are professors at the university and said they were attending a political campaign event for the first time; the husband said in the suburb where he sometimes works, in the past Republican to Democratic signs were at about a 1:1 ratio. But this year, he said, they’re 1:2.

I also chatted with Alison and Patti, a married couple who live in the city and had been to a rally for John Fetterman in 2022 where Obama spoke. Alison wore a “Yinzers for Harris” tshirt, local parlance that has been explained to me multiple times but that I still don’t quite grasp. 

As the crowd filed out, I spotted Marsha Wheeler, a Black woman wearing a tshirt that had an image of a giant postage stamp with Harris’s face on it. She told me she’d seen Harris speak when she was in town the previous week. “It's emotional,” Wheeler told me “It's electrifying to listen to her and to know what she's going to do for this country.” 

I asked Wheeler if she’d ever volunteered or attended a political rally before. “I have not, this is the first one,” she said. “I signed up for phone banking, so I'm excited about that this time.” When I asked what made this time different, Wheeler said “Because she's a woman and she's Black and Indian. The fact that we're gonna have a first woman president, it's just so exciting.”

And women voters—specifically young women—will no doubt have a massive impact on the outcome in the state. According to Tom Bonier of Target Smart, a political data firm based in DC, the Taylor Swift endorsement of Harris appears to have had a seismic effect in Pennsylvania specifically. In the period from 9/11-9/13 this year compared with the same time in 2020, voters under 30 were 61% of all new registrations, compared to 45% in 2020; Hispanic women under 30 increased by 188%; and Black women under 30 increased by 137%. And perhaps most encouraging of all, Democratic registrations increased by 88%.

I left Pittsburgh feeling cautiously confident about the vibes on the ground. Even if Harris wins Pennsylvania, down ballot races could still go the other way in such a deep purple state. But when I asked the Pitt professor at Emhoff’s rally for her prediction, she replied: “My gut says Harris wins by a landslide.”