Protesters stood in the rain, waiting to greet the daughter of a drapery salesman and the son of an iron welder as they rolled into western Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Coal Country, a region where Donald Trump expects to win over blue-collar workers and cultural conservatives, isn’t friendly territory for Democrats. That was precisely why Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine had come.
“Lock her up!” a few dozen protesters jeered as they stepped off the bus into a rainy haze on their fourth stop of their post-convention tour, at Johnstown Wire Technologies factory in Cambria county, which is 93% white and has a median household income of $42,000. Some waved Trump 2016 signs and American flags. Others held homemade posters with phrases like: “Send her a$$ to jail!” Across the road a smaller group huddled. Their signs read: “Steelworkers for Clinton.”
With 100 days to go to the presidential election, Clinton and Kaine have made clear they are going to fight for working-class voters. On their first campaign trip together, the two Ivy League-educated political insiders drew on their modest midwestern upbringings in an effort to connect with voters now frustrated with their lot.There, Clinton recalled in detail how she would spend hours in her father’s dimly lit printing plant, dragging a squeegee across the silk screen laid on top of the drapery fabric. In the factory, Kaine said he recognized some of the machinery from the days spent in his father’s iron-working shop.
“We are visiting places that prove what Americans can do,” Clinton told 200 or so mostly unionized workers during her remarks at the factory. “We have the most productive, competitive workers in the world, we just need to give our people the chance to succeed. So from Philadelphia to Hatfield to Harrisburg and now here in Johnstown, that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
For decades, Democrats have lost out to Republicans among blue-collar workers and white Americans with a low education. Trump has capitalized on this trend and is counting on making a battleground state out of Pennsylvania, which has not voted for a Republican for president since 1988. The state is central to Trump’s Rust Belt strategy, along with success in the Great Lakes states such as Ohio, Michigan and WisconsinPolls show a tight race there. In a head-to-head race, Clinton leads Trump in Pennsylvania by 46% to 42%, according to the realclearpolitics.com average. In Ohio, she leads by less than 1%, 42.6% to 41.8%.
Under gauzy marquee lighting at a market in Harrisburg, Clinton appealed for help convincing ambivalent voters that the stakes are now too high to sit out.
“If somebody is not interested in voting,” she said, “if somebody has given up on politics, if somebody says it won’t make any difference, ask them to give us a chance.”
Through the weekend, the Clinton-Kaine motorcade wound through faded factory towns in hilly green landscapes.
“If you’re looking for a kind of pessimistic, downbeat vision of America, we’re not your folks,” Clinton said at toy manufacturing factory in Hatfield, Pennsylvania, on Friday. “We do not buy into that dark, divisive image that was presented at the Republican convention last week.”
In her first 100 days in office, Clinton said, she would push through a gridlocked Congress the biggest jobs agenda since the second world war, a plan to create more jobs by investing in new infrastructure and clean energy.
“We’re going to create jobs in Pennsylvania and across America,” she said in Johnstown. “Especially in places that have been left out and left behind.
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