Two Days in Pittsburgh

At PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh on 4 November, teams of ushers were handing out signs that said: ‘Trump will fix it.’ They didn’t allow homemade signs because it was a safety risk, they said, though it also meant they could control what appeared in photos and videos. Seating was carefully orchestrated too: teams of workers wearing T-shirts with union logos and hard hats were positioned close to the stage, behind Trump, so the cameras would show him surrounded by cheering blue-collar supporters. Empty seats were kept out of frame, though there weren’t many of them.

For weeks leading up to the US election, Democratic Party superstars took aim at Trump’s ‘weird obsession with crowd sizes’, in Barack Obama’s words. But the election result suggests a harsh truth: Democrats needed to do a better job of courting Trump’s crowds rather than dismissing them.

I was in Pittsburgh as part of a long-term study interviewing US voters across the political spectrum. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Rust Belt region, in former steel towns, at racetracks and in rural bars drinking pickleback shots with people who are worn down by inflation but still insist, out of pride and politeness, on buying rounds.

It’s more than 130 years since the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers fought Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick’s union-busting Pinkertons at Homestead. Steel-related businesses still provide jobs in the region, but Pittsburgh’s heyday is long past: its population has halved to 300,000 since the 1950s.

The city is still a Democratic stronghold. Kamala Harris took nearly 60 per cent of the vote here. But the surrounding farmland is heavily Republican. Out in the country, among the handmade signs offering Rottweiler puppies for sale and churches publicising free lunches for those who need it, I saw far more Trump-Vance signs than in Pittsburgh. Even in the city, though, Trump’s supporters made themselves seen and heard. Before the rally on 4 November, a passing fire truck blared its horn to whoops from the crowd queuing to get into the stadium.

I spent four hours in the rally queue, talking to people. Artie, aged 69, told me it was the first time he’d felt comfortable enough to wear his MAGA hat in public. He’s a white man from Connecticut, and none of his friends are Trump supporters – he feels like an outlier in his community. He hadn’t come to Pittsburgh for the rally, but had driven the nine hours from Connecticut to cat-sit for his daughter. Recently retired from a job in IT at a financial services firm, he was more expensively dressed than others in the crowd, wearing a navy blazer, jeans and a button-down shirt.

Cameron, 28, also white, also wearing a MAGA hat, was dressed more casually than Artie, in a black body-warmer over a Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt. He’d come alone, too. He’d been a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016 and voted for Biden in 2020. But now he’s swung to Trump, and he describes his shift in an almost religious way, speaking in awed tones about his certainty that Trump would end wars soon in Ukraine and the Middle East.

In months of interviewing, I have found two broad types of Trump supporter. First, there are those who like his anti-woke stance. They claim that they fiercely value free speech, feel censored for speaking their minds, and think that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are undermining the notion of equal opportunity the country is supposed to be built on.

Second, there are the people suffering financially in America’s winner-take-all economy. They attribute low pay and job losses to a loose border, and desperately hope Trump’s win will mean a drop in inflation and lower prices.

There’s overlap between the groups, but keeping both in mind helps to explain why Trump has attracted so many former Sanders supporters to his side – especially young men like Cameron, who feels that the political right, more than the left, is a space of non-conformity and free thought.

During our conversation, Artie and Cameron bonded over their shared admiration for Frank Zappa. Cameron is a musician and grad school student in Pittsburgh. He moved there to study and compose music after coming out as gay to his Mormon parents in Utah. ‘I saw the pipeline that a lot of Mormons have, where it’s like, “OK, you’re going to go on a mission,”’ Cameron said. He didn’t want that but instead went directly to university, convinced before arriving that ‘this was somewhere I could go where everyone’s accepted.’

But he’s been disappointed by his university lectures, angered by what he sees as the lack of openness to different viewpoints. A recent visiting lecturer from the University of Pennsylvania, for example, was critical of people who subscribe to ‘great replacement’ theory but refused, he claims, to take more than a couple of pre-selected questions after her talk. Even Biden is on record admitting that the US is unlikely to be majority white by 2040, Cameron said, so why are people on the right seen as conspiratorial for pointing out that major demographic shifts are a fact of life?

Many of Cameron’s comments were troubling, like his wish to visit England one day and his hope it still ‘looks like England’ – implying that the England he dreams of is white.

But not everyone who is confused and anxious about demographic shifts is a conspiracy theorist, and they might be less susceptible to conspiratorial thinking if there were more open discussion about demographic change, acknowledging that it’s happening and – why not? – arguing for it as a positive development.

Both Artie and Cameron described themselves as strongly socially liberal. ‘My daughter, who I’m cat-sitting for, she’s trans. She was born a boy,’ Artie said. His daughter, like Cameron, is a Bernie Sanders supporter. But Sanders wasn’t on the 2024 ballot, so what option was there for leftists disappointed by the Democratic Party’s rightward stance on issues such as the Mexico-US border and Israel-Palestine? Artie said his daughter voted for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.

There have been rare moments in American politics, Artie observed, when the major political parties have altered position in a dramatic manner: he mentioned the Democratic Party renouncing its pro-slavery stance and KKK affiliations and leading on Civil Rights reforms in the 1960s. He said he thought it was happening again today, as the Republican Party – to his mind – is more accepting of freedom of expression and non-conformity than the Dems.

He gestured at the crowd around us: ‘I think that most of the people here will say that the government doesn’t belong in people’s bedrooms. And anything they want to do among themselves as adults is fine.’ Unless, of course, what they want to do is cross the Mexico-US border safely, or have an abortion in Texas or Idaho.

It isn’t surprising that Trump’s conservative positions on reproductive rights should have won him the support of many Christians who have long been anti-abortion. But Artie’s assumption – his willingness to support Trump despite growing hate crimes against gay individuals and the repression of reproductive choice – is less easy to understand.

‘I just honestly could not figure out what redeeming quality you feel like he has that would make you vote for him,’ Sherry, 52, had said to me over breakfast at a café in the Hill District on Sunday, 3 November. ‘I think people should do what they feel comfortable doing, but I’m not going to lie: I do side-eye people who [support Trump] because I feel like they’re missing some of the bigger issues.’

Sherry is a Black woman from Philadelphia who went to university in Pittsburgh and stayed, marrying a man from the Hill District, a predominantly African American area that has suffered decades of economic decline. When the Civic Arena was built in the late 1950s – it was the home of the Pittsburgh Penguins for more than forty years before they moved to the PPG Paints Arena in 2010 – it cast a long shadow on the economic welfare of Hill District families. The project forcibly displayed thousands of Black families and cut off the Hill from downtown, stemming the flow of customers to the dozens of jazz bars and restaurants that had once made the Hill a cultural hub: a bastion of mid-century American optimism for a better, more racially integrated future – hopeful that at last Black families might receive a proportionate share of the wealth that had long advantaging white families.

It never happened. Pittsburgh, like other Rust Belt cities, is still heavily segregated. In the Hill District there are very few bars and restaurants. I passed one boarded-up shop after another. A former NAACP office was abandoned, but there’s still evidence of community support. A leaflet taped to a store window publicised a Memorial and Pollinating Garden to be built by a community coalition. The garden will commemorate people who died from drug overdoses.

‘When we voted for the Democrats four years ago, we were going to get places to eat,’ John, in his fifties, told me. ‘And as you can see, nothing happened. Matter of fact, they’re tearing more buildings down.’ John told me he would be voting for Kamala Harris as ‘the lesser evil’, and taking his 18-year-old son with him, to make sure he at least got to the polling station, whoever he ended up voting for.

I met other Black men in the Hill District who weren’t sure about their support for Harris – or about voting at all. ‘It’s going to be a little harsh,’ the co-owner of one of the few restaurants still open in the Hill said to me, ‘but a person who may be a full-blown drug addict, having the same view as someone who is in the elite thinking class, I really don’t agree with it. He has a right to vote because he’s an American citizen, but should he count?’

The restaurant owner said that his criticism of democracy was shaped by his religion. His conversion to Islam when he was younger, he said, had saved him spiritually and physically. His allegiance was to God, not to any political figure. I asked him about notions of redemption and grace. Why shouldn’t a drug addict ‘count’? Doesn’t he count before God?

He switched topic, threw down a gauntlet, telling me I should ask people whether they were voting on race or voting on policy. He pointed to a woman sitting with us: ‘It might be, like, me and her are the same colour, but maybe our two values don’t match. The race card is played too much.’ His language was blunter than many people’s, but it was a sentiment I heard a lot – especially from Black men. They resented being told they had to vote for Harris because of their race. (More Black men voted for Harris than for Trump, though not as many as voted for Biden in 2020.)

Trump’s win was a protest vote against the incumbent party in a grossly unequal economy where grocery bills have gone up 30 per cent since 2019. But it was also about the perception of freedom of choice – even as migrant safety and reproductive freedoms are severely endangered. And it was a backlash against identity reductionism: the diktat that people should vote a certain way because a candidate is Black or a woman.

Maybe if the Democrats are to win power again there will need to be less lecturing, more listening. Even when a sentiment – such as people not ‘counting’ – is hard to hear. Because democracy’s durability is threatened in many ways, with the biggest danger of all Trump’s capacity to ‘fix it’.

Names have been changed.