'We'll stop the bleeding': Democrats spot erosion of Trump's rural dominance
MONACA, Pa. -- Terri Mitko is sure there are former supporters of President Donald Trump who aren’t going to be voting for him again, because she lives with one: Her husband.
“There was a whole ‘I don’t want to vote for Hillary’ contingent. And Hillary’s not running this time,” says Mitko, an attorney and chairwoman of the Beaver County Democratic Party. “Trump was a breath of fresh air and had this schtick going about draining the swamp. ... Well, now we’re onto him.”
Beaver County, a hardscrabble western Pennsylvania manufacturing town in the midst of constructing a giant new plastics plant along the Ohio River, is one of the far-flung — “forgotten,” the president would say — areas that delivered a larger-than-anticipated margin for Trump in 2016. He carried it by 19 points over Hillary Clinton, netting 15,000 votes, about a third of the 44,000 total votes he won the commonwealth by four years ago.
As some polls show the race in Pennsylvania tightening into the final five weeks of the presidential campaign, Democrats believe Joe Biden’s ability to shave Trump’s margins in rural areas such as Beaver will be determinative throughout the Midwest — from western Michigan to northern Wisconsin. They are small towns alongside rivers and railroads, tucked into valleys and farmland adorned with Trump regalia. The president will easily win these areas. But preventing him from running up the score — to 60 or even 70 percent of the vote — could be the difference between a second Trump term and a President Joe Biden.
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