The State of Erie
In three successive presidential cycles, Erie County has revealed itself as the state’s political bellwether. In voting for Donald Trump in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020, and then Trump again in 2024, Erie, as it has done in 19 of 20 presidential races since 1948, tracked Pennsylvania’s presidential choice. And in every presidential election since 2008, as the Keystone State goes, so goes the nation.
Now it’s 2025, and this time it’s a mayoral race – in the county seat, the city of Erie – that will offer insight into what voters are thinking. The race pits 74-year-old, two-term Democratic incumbent Joe Schember against 47-year-old Democratic challenger Daria Devlin.
Like many cities in the Rust Belt, Erie has issues. Pat Cueno, a retired journalist who has covered Erie for four decades, lists them: “Finance. Debt. How safe is Erie? Do they know how to plow snow? Housing.”
Tucked into the state’s northwest corner, Erie is like a miniature version of Buffalo, New York – down to the snow, blue-collar roots, and deindustrialization. In 1960, 140,000 people called the Gem City home. In 2025, the city’s population hovers around 100,000. Symbolizing the decline is the local General Electric plant. A century ago, Thomas Edison chose Erie as the site to build locomotives. In 1957, Ronald Reagan, then a GE spokesman, toured the plant and spoke to some of its 18,000 employees. The site, now owned by something called Wabtec, employs only about 1,000.
Erie’s issues start with population decline and end with jobs. Mayor Schember told me, “1,300 refugees moved to Erie in 2024. If they have jobs, they’ll stay. We connect jobs to immigrants and help them start businesses. But we need more quality, affordable housing.” Tall, grey, and amiable, Schember exudes calm. But Renee Lamis, his chief of staff, calls him “the Energizer Bunny,” saying that he “goes and goes and goes from one meeting to the next from early morning until late at night. We [the staff] are all amazed by his workload and level of commitment.” Cueno agrees. “He’s everywhere, all at once.”
A classic Rust Belt Democrat, Schember is the grandson of immigrants. He left a Catholic seminary to marry the woman who has been his wife for 45 years. In 2016, he retired from 40 years in banking to run for mayor. He can point to some real accomplishments. Homicides are down. The budget is balanced. He enacted a city tax-abatement program and tax-increment financing district, that will, he told me, “Result in more businesses and more people moving into the city of Erie.” Chuck Nelson, a local city councilman, is a sometime Schember critic who also gives the mayor credit. “In the last eight years,” he says, “there are great improvements in the city. More jobs. Property values are up. Schember has the right picture of a ‘world class downtown. Great Bayfront’.”
Cueno thinks so, too. “The city is far better off than it was 10 years ago,” he says, though many still feel “that there isn’t as much progress as there should be.” But progress can be hard to see when you’re digging out of a hole. The 16501 zip code, located on Erie’s lower east side, is Pennsylvania’s poorest. The city’s public schools only narrowly avoided insolvency in 2016 and still perform below state benchmarks. Challenger Devlin warns that the city’s structural budget deficit means “we are heading toward a cliff – a state Act 47 takeover.”
Then there’s the weather. Last Thanksgiving, a lake effect storm, juiced by unseasonably warm Great Lakes waters, dumped up to 50 inches of snow here.
Overwhelmed by the near-biblical amount of heavy, wet snow, the city closed down for nearly a week. Schools and universities were shuttered. Sanitation service was halted. Hundreds abandoned their cars in city streets. Plowing and snow removal became all but impossible. Erieites deluged City Hall with complaints. One resident, in a low-income neighborhood, complained, “It’s like they forgot our town’s little side streets … We can’t get out.”
From schools to snow removal, city government struggles to deliver. Maybe this is why Joe Morris, a political scientist at Mercyhurst University in Erie, says that “Erie Democrats … think we need some new muscle.” In this, Erie is a national bellwether of urban politics. Donald Trump, in 2024, successfully attacked liberals on their political leadership of cities. David Schleicher, the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Urban Law at Yale Law, believes that “big-city liberal governance isn’t working in many domains.” Trump made gains in cities from Detroit to Philadelphia to New York. And the urban voters moving rightward are working-class nonwhites. Across Pennsylvania’s nonwhite districts, such crucial shifts helped secure Trump’s narrow victory. “The Democratic coalition has shattered,” analyst Ruy Texeira warns.
To fix it, Democrats must fill the potholes, fix the schools, and shovel the snow. “At the local level, this is the job,” Daria Devlin told me. “It ain’t sexy. I want to talk about non-sexy stuff: snow removal, garbage, nuisance bars, and code enforcement.” But Schleicher warns, “Mayors are weak in America. They don’t have a ton of legal authority.” He told me, “Local institutions are very independent and bureaucratic.” And this is the Democrat’s dilemma.
To be fair, Schember has faced real constraints. He followed a three-term incumbent who left behind a city spiraling into decline. A generation of laissez-faire leadership created a city-worker culture resistant to oversight. The attitude of many long-time city employees can be summed up, in the words of Dave Forrest, Erie’s former city planner, as “We do it this way because we have always done it this way.”
“I’m hoping Joe [Schember] loses, Forrest admits. “We need better leadership.” He points to blight and unaffordable housing as top issues. Without real code enforcement, he argues, the housing stock degrades. Code enforcement is decidedly un-sexy, but it forces property owners to maintain their homes and rentals. This not only drives investment but is also essential in maintaining affordable, quality housing, which Erie lacks.
“Look around the city – rental properties aren’t up to code,” Forrest told me. “The city won’t provide any notices of violations.” In Forrest’s observation, the mayor’s office “gets along with everyone. They never cross swords. They never say no.” Forrest reports that early in Schember’s tenure, property owners complained about code violations, and City Hall stopped issuing them. Ultimately, Forrest charged, “If you are going to be in leadership, you will possibly piss people off – that’s the price of leadership.”
And there’s the rub. To fix the nation’s cities, Democrats need to motivate city workers and tame powerful interest groups. “Everyone loves Joe” is a mantra in Erie. The mayor’s approach, undoubtedly, brought city services back from the brink. But as Devlin argues, “If we are fine with things being ‘fine,’ that’s one thing – but Erie is at a pivotal moment. If City Hall is not engaged, then our success is not what it could be. We need real problem-solving and energy. We are 75% of the way there, but to get to the next level, we need more.”
The issues in Erie, and for urban Democrats across the nation, really come down to one issue: leadership.
