The Pittsburgh Paradox Could Hand PA to Trump

Pittsburgh’s transformation from Rust Belt phoenix to progressive tech stronghold was supposed to be the Democrats’ long-term ace in the hole for Pennsylvania. Instead, hubris might just hand the Keystone State to the GOP in 2024. As Allegheny County limps toward another election cycle, Republicans are eyeing an opportunity born not of their own strength, but of Democratic complacency and voter disillusionment.

The numbers paint a grim picture. Allegheny County hemorrhaged nearly 7,800 residents last year alone, placing it in the top 10 for population loss nationwide. Even more alarming, the county has shed 50,000 jobs in the past five years – five times more than any other Pennsylvania county. The county’s most impoverished suburbs, home to many recent immigrants and other non-white minorities, are facing another round of white flight. On top of that, the future looks even bleaker for those officials tasked with educating future generations of gainfully-employed citizens: Pittsburgh Public Schools are mulling the closure of 16 schools, a move that would disproportionately impact working-class neighborhoods.

Yet you'd never know any of this listening to the county's Democratic leadership. Take newly-minted County Executive Sara Innamorato. In 2018, she rode a wave of Democratic Socialists of America-fueled primary upsets to unseat center-left incumbent Dom Costa in the state legislature, infamously referring to the working-class voters she grew up with as “racist” along the way. By 2019, she’d ditched the DSA affiliation and made some concessions to organized labor, like many other young Democrats, but kept some of the progressive bona fides. Her narrow victory over well-funded Republican Joe Rockey in the county executive race in 2023 should have been a wake-up call. Instead, it seems to have lulled local Democrats into a false sense of security.

To understand where Allegheny County might be headed, one need only look south to Washington County. Once a union-labor stronghold for the Democrats, Washington County has rapidly become a petri dish for MAGA politics. In 2020, Trump won 61% of the vote there. But it’s not just about presidential politics. MAGA true believers have capitalized on low turnouts to seize control of local government, turning once-staid county commission meetings into wild shouting matches.

The rapid transformation of Washington County offers a playbook for how the GOP might chip away at Democratic dominance in Allegheny County. It hinged on voter apathy – depressing moderate-voter turnout, particularly those who saw Washington County’s Democratic machine as irreparably gridlocked and hopelessly corrupt, while galvanizing the MAGA base in both the primary and general elections.

The Pennsylvania Department of State reports that Democrats now hold their slimmest voter registration advantage in decades. Republicans, meanwhile, have added nearly 40,000 voters since 2020. In Washington County, this wild shift has greatly increased the temperature and radicalized the tone of local politics. Allegheny County isn't there yet, but the currents are detectable.

Consider the recent school closure debacle in Pittsburgh. Nothing saps voter enthusiasm quite like the news that your neighborhood school will shutter – with almost zero possibility for a better outcome, given the demographic catastrophe, further exacerbated by two years of unwelcome COVID closures, now facing the system. For every progressive cheering the city’s blue recycle bins and ban on plastic bags, there's an inflation-wracked working-class family wondering if they have a future in the city their grandparents built.

Or take the job losses. Pittsburgh’s much-vaunted “eds-and-meds” economy was supposed to be recession-proof. Now, even healthcare giant UPMC is tightening its belt. The promised tech boom, meanwhile, has largely benefited a small, highly-educated elite – mostly carpetbaggers happy to inflate property values in the city’s nicer areas and pleased by superficial progressive reforms – while leaving blue-collar workers behind.

Republicans don’t need to win these disaffected voters outright, especially in the city, since the county’s white flight-inflated suburbs have long ago been home to legions of right-leaning voters eager to paint the city in the worst possible light. To prevail, the GOP just needs undecided working-class voters to stay home on Election Day. And given the state of things, who could blame them?

The irony is that Pittsburgh’s current malaise is, in many ways, a product of its own success. The “Pittsburgh Renaissance” of the early 2000s drew all those carpetbagger yuppies and tech companies. Now, the very leaders who built their electoral brands and government pensions during this transformation are shocked to discover that a city can’t run on artisanal coffee shops and co-working spaces alone.

For Republicans, this presents a golden opportunity. While they're unlikely to ever again seize control of Pittsburgh proper, they can use the city’s leftward drift as a boogeyman to drive turnout in the suburbs and rural areas. Every time a Pittsburgh politician has talked about defunding the police, shutting down a polluting smokestack, implementing a Green New Deal, or – as with Innamorato – the racism of white working-class voters, that's fodder for GOP advertisements outside the city limits.

Democrats, for their part, seem aware of the danger – the takeover of Washington County received lots of local and national coverage, after all – but have few levers to pull to release all this built-up pressure. They’re so used to winning Allegheny County that they have no reason to make the concessions and cut the deals needed to win coin-flip elections. 

The result, alas, is a political monoculture that stifles debate outside of niche primaries dominated by left-leaning activists and rewards ideological conformity over practical problem-solving. To give but one example, instead of a robust public debate about how to right-size the failing Pittsburgh public schools while ensuring equitable education, we get vague promises and finger-pointing. It's the kind of thorny, politically fraught issue that single-party rule seems especially ill-equipped to handle.

Just judging from the numerous candidate visits and Kamala Harris’ pro-fracking forgiveness tour, it’s clear that all eyes are fixed on the region. For it's here, in the shadow of abandoned mills turned into malls and shuttered churches retrofitted into breweries, that America's political future may well be decided. Can its Democratic elite forge a center-left political identity that bridges the gap between its progressive pretensions and its working-class roots?  Can these leaders avoid becoming the weakest link in the Democrats' electoral chain? The anvil of Western Pennsylvania, once used to shape the nation's infrastructure, may yet forge an unexpected political realignment that reshapes the nation itself.