A Rust Belt Town’s Loyalties Divide as Pennsylvania Turns Purple

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- One afternoon in June, Mike Mikulich led a masked visitor into the empty chambers of the Ambridge Borough Council and dropped his mobile phone and thick forearms worthy of a former steelworker onto a table. As council president he’d been wrestling with one crisis after another for months. He confessed that after spending 32 of his 74 years helping run this former Pennsylvania factory town of 6,600, he was thinking of calling it quits..Covid-19 had claimed Ambridge’s police chief in April and the owner of its leading funeral home just a few days later. Two of its biggest employers had closed up shop, laying off some 300 workers between them. Within weeks, a third business would suffer a devastating fire..A few days before our meeting, Mikulich had presided over an acrimonious virtual council session: Town leaders had been trying to figure out how late-night rumors of an Ambridge-bound bus filled with Black Lives Matter protesters had ended in members of a far-right militia with sniper rifles taking to the roof of a downtown gym..All this was unfolding against the backdrop of a national election in which Mikulich feared his own Democratic Party seemed to be playing to lose in this purple corner of western Pennsylvania. Progressive Democrats’ and protesters’ calls to “defund the police” seemed like a gift to a president running a reelection campaign fanning fears of a collapse in American law and order should he lose. “Why would you say stupid stuff like that?” Mikulich said, grimacing. “The people who are just sitting on that fence leaning in your direction now are leaning back in the other direction because they don’t want to defund the police department. They’re going to say, ‘Where in the hell is my police?’ ”Mikulich has good reason to be concerned. In July, the Monmouth University Polling Institute, put Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania at as much as 10 percentage points under a high voter turnout scenario. But its latest poll shows that his advantage under the same scenario had dwindled to just 3 points..Pennsylvania is a prized battleground in this year’s election, and if Donald Trump carries the state again it will be because he either held on to, or built up, support in places such as Beaver County, in which Ambridge sits. Trump carried the county by 15,636 votes in 2016—or more than a third of the narrow 44,292-vote margin he had over Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania overall..If Trump does win again in Beaver County, it will be in part because of how alienated from national politics a Rust Belt town can still feel in 2020 and how a summer of turmoil has managed to amplify that alienation. If he loses, though, it could well be because even after four years of what he’s trying to sell as a working-class boom, it’s hard to answer a fundamental question: What’s the future for a place like Ambridge?.Trump’s pledge to bring the good times back to a blue-collar America—or at least an angry White corner of it—that had been “left behind” by globalization and the tech revolution hung on firing back up slumbering steel furnaces and repatriating assembly lines by administering a tonic of trade protectionism, deregulation, and tax cuts. “I’m going to take care of you,” he told a campaign rally at Ambridge’s high school less than a month before the 2016 election..Trump claims he’s gone a long way toward delivering on that promise, and he’s taken the same message to the stump in 2020. He’s levied tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. In the first three years of his presidency, the U.S. added 510,000 manufacturing jobs..That doesn’t tell the whole story, though. Trump inherited a robust economy that Republicans goosed with tax cuts in 2017. And by the summer of 2019, his trade wars were damping investment and hiring, contributing to a U.S. manufacturing recession. Pennsylvania lost manufacturing jobs last year..The coronavirus recession has only made things worse and exposed how tenuous Trump’s economic promise was in the first place. As of July there were 24,000 fewer Pennsylvanians working in manufacturing than in January 2017, when he took office. Beaver County’s unemployment rate sat at 14.5% in June, more than twice the 6.6% when Trump took office..A onetime steel town built into the hills along the Ohio River, a 25-minute drive west of Pittsburgh, Ambridge was still struggling to find its post-deindustrialization raison d’être when the pandemic hit. The layoffs came quickly in March as the town started to record Covid-19 cases..A factory owned by North Carolina’s Cornerstone Building Brands Inc. that made siding for industrial buildings announced it was shutting down, leaving 100 workers unemployed. That same month, a steel-tube plant owned by Luxembourg’s Tenaris SA laid off 200 people and shut down for the foreseeable future..Democrats blame the severity of the economic cataclysm on Trump’s handling of the coronavirus response. That message appeared to be hitting its mark in Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden, a native son, continues to outpoll Trump. Still, there’s not much in the Democratic candidate’s economic platform, which promises more dollars for infrastructure and scientific research, plus programs to wean the U.S. off its addiction to hydrocarbons, that might deliver an immediate payoff for towns like Ambridge..Biden has worked hard to take on a more centrist tone, and in the days since the Republican National Convention, he’s been more aggressive in countering Trump’s efforts to portray Democratic leadership as a route to anarchy, accusing him of fomenting violence in America. “Fires are burning, and we have a president who fans the flames rather than fighting the flames,” Biden said at an Aug. 31 rally in Pittsburgh..But local Democrats including Mikulich remain concerned that Biden has let a potentially consequential summer slip by and not fought back hard enough against the Trump campaign’s efforts to frame the Democratic Party as slipping ever leftward and away from voters in places like western Pennsylvania. Of all the attack ads the Trump campaign and its proxies have run in the state, the one that seemed to get the most traction accused Biden of wanting to ban hydraulic fracturing, the controversial technique for extracting oil and gas from shale rock that’s sparked energy booms in places such as southwestern Pennsylvania in the past decade..“I’m a proud union man, I’m a Democrat, and I do not support Joe Biden,” a man named Shawn says sternly in the spot. “I’m sick and tired of being taken for granted. Joe Biden’s ban on fracking would put me and everybody I know out of work.”.The ad, which is the work of a super PAC called America First Action, is misleading. Biden has called only for a ban on new fracking licenses on public lands, which would have little effect in Pennsylvania. His campaign in August tried in vain to get local stations to take the ad off the air. By then it had also become a Republican line of attack on the local Democratic representative, Conor Lamb..Lamb, a photogenic ex-Marine and former federal prosecutor, eked out a narrow victory in Pennsylvania’s 17th Congressional District, which includes Ambridge, in the 2018 midterms. His victory gave Democrats a playbook for how to win back the blue-collar voters that deserted the party when Hillary Clinton was on the ballot, as well as how to peel away committed Republican voters..The win turned Lamb into a rising star. He was one of 17 young Democrats featured in the party’s convention keynote in August. It also made him a Republican target. This year he’s facing a stiff challenge from another well-funded veteran, Sean Parnell, a conservative author of books with names such as Outlaw Platoon. Parnell, who launched his candidacy on Fox & Friends, has made his own inroads with ads mocking his opponent as Nancy Pelosi’s “lamb” and by using the same Republican fracking attacks against the incumbent representative as those run against Biden..To Mikulich, the fact that Democrats were even having to play defense on fracking seemed more evidence of political malpractice. He wanted Biden and Lamb to loudly proclaim they were all for those local energy jobs. “They need to get the message out,” he was telling a visitor by August..You won’t hear folks in Ambridge put it this way, but for much of the 19th century, their town was home to one of the most successful American experiments in what today would be called socialism. Founded in 1824 by George Rapp, a German exile who was the leader of a Christian sect called the Harmonist Society, the settlement was originally named Ökonomie—or Economy..Dedicated to communal living and God, Rapp and his followers built a business empire that included vineyards and laundries and produced silk and crude oil. Word of Economy’s success traveled far. Among its admirers was Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto..A commitment to celibacy ultimately doomed the Harmonists. The group had dwindled to just two members by 1904, when its leader, John Duss, sold the land on which Economy stood to American Bridge Co. An eccentric music teacher, Duss celebrated the deal by renting out Madison Square Garden and transforming it into an indoor Venice, complete with canals, for a musical extravaganza..American Bridge, a subsidiary of J.P. Morgan that supplied the steel for architectural icons like the Empire State Building and the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, renamed Economy after itself and turned it into a company town. Immigrants from Greece, Italy, Ukraine, and other European countries moved in, swelling Ambridge’s population to more than 20,000 at its peak in the 1930s. But by the ’80s, with the blast furnaces gone or leaving, the town’s economic fortunes began a downward spiral..Ever since, Ambridge has been in the grips of an identity crisis—one that’s intensified with the pandemic. Does its destiny still lie with industry, the final remnants of which seem to be departing? Or should it reinvent itself as a bedroom community—a grittier version of neighboring Sewickley, an affluent suburb full of grand Victorian homes that’s to Pittsburgh what Greenwich, Conn., is to Manhattan?.Although Ambridge sits just a 10-minute drive from Sewickley, it has a long way to go to catch up. Yes, the housing is cheap: The median cost of a home is $70,000, half what it is in the Pittsburgh area. But most of Ambridge’s schools rate below the state average. Its main shopping drag, Merchant Street, has so many vacancies that it’s cheaper to lease one of the downtown storefronts than to rent a storage facility on the outskirts of town..In short, Ambridge doesn’t have much to recommend it to the young families it badly needs to halt its population decline. “Nobody’s out there talking about ‘Well, I need to move to Ambridge. It’s the place to be,’ ” says Steve Roberts, a local real estate agent and community activist. This year’s decennial census is expected to show that 7% fewer people live in the borough than in 2010..Since moving from Pittsburgh almost a decade ago to buy a home in the historic Harmonist district, Roberts has been working with others to restore buildings in the area. It’s slow work. Across the street from the old log cabin he uses as an office sits a vacant building that once housed the Harmonists’ bachelors. A fading sign outside advertises that in 2015 it was designated as one of the seven most endangered historic properties in Pennsylvania. And that it’s still for sale..Some of Ambridge’s old industrial lots downtown have been repurposed. The municipal offices, a hotel, and a theological school all sit on the sites of demolished former steel foundries. But there’s also a fresh carcass. In July a mysterious fire tore through Sukup Steel Structures, gutting the plant’s main building, which sits across the street from the building that houses the council chambers..The company’s owners, Sheffield, Iowa-based Sukup Manufacturing Co., continued to pay the plant’s 120 workers through August, but the company still wasn’t sure about reopening. Coming hard on the heels of the two other steel plant closures, the fire seemed like another sign that what was left of Ambridge’s industrial economy was being gutted..“There’s downsides with heavy industry,” says Kimberly Villella, the owner of a local hair salon who grew up in Ambridge and jokes that she used to tell friends the fish in her stretch of the Ohio River had three heads. “People here had to sweep their porch every day because of the pollution. But I’d rather have bread on my table and sweep my porch every day than not have bread on my table,” says Villella, who also heads the local chamber of commerce..Then again, she and her husband made their own exit from heavy industry last year when they sold a company on the outskirts of town that produces bolts to a rival from New Jersey. Her husband works for the new owners, though he was laid off for a spell in the spring..If anyone is offering an example of how Ambridge might transform into a cozy suburb, it’s the owners of Altered Genius, a microbrewery that’s the only business of substance to open in town this year. It’s housed in a remodeled building on Merchant Street and features exposed masonry and reclaimed wood, among other markers of industrial chic. The two teachers from out of town and the Ambridge-bred property developer behind Altered Genius have big ambitions. Besides serving up a rotating menu of IPAs and porters and making their brews available for sale in cans and kegs, the trio have their eyes on a vacant building across the street scheduled for demolition. They’d like to turn it into a venue for food trucks, which would draw bigger crowds than the brewpub alone..The end goal is Ambridge as a destination. “We’ve seen the model work in other similar situations, and that makes me think, Man, this is a real opportunity to help this town and help ourselves,” says Michael Haas, one of the owners. Which all sounds great—until you learn Altered Genius has all of nine employees..In April, when Police Chief Mark Romutis died suddenly from Covid-19 at age 64, it hit the town hard. Paul Bohn, whose family ran the Bohn-Matich Funeral Home, succumbed to the disease shortly after, prompting a parade of more than 400 cars past his home..For a time it seemed as if those deaths were a wake-up call in a place where many people were skeptical of the attention given to a virus from China. But that passed quickly..Like churches around the U.S., pastor Rick Thornhill’s New Hope Community Church went online when Pennsylvania announced its initial lockdown in March. When New Hope reopened in mid-June, Thornhill, a 43-year-old former mailman, abided by the recommendations of public-health officials: He blocked off alternate pews and asked worshippers to sit 6 feet apart and wear masks..By early August, Thornhill had dispensed with the precautions. No one in his congregation had caught the virus, he says. But there’s more to it than that. Thornhill says the majority of the 120 people who show up regularly for Sunday services are, like he is, Trump supporters and politically inclined to ignore the virus..There were matters of theology to consider as well. New Hope’s umbrella church, the California-based Foursquare Church, believes in faith healing, which makes any precautions seem incongruous. “Do we preach and believe that Jesus saves and Jesus heals, but you’ve got to wear a mask just in case Jesus doesn’t heal and you breathe on me?” Thornhill asks..Members of his congregation are also being stalked by other silent killers that have been around a lot longer than the novel coronavirus, he says. New Hope runs a home for recovering addicts in what used to be a convent. Five of its 11 residents were kicked out after failing drug tests in June. One of them died of an overdose soon after. Two other members of the New Hope community OD’d this summer. Thornhill, who officiated at each of their funerals, believes the deaths were caused by a stew of factors ranging from lost jobs to the increasing isolation brought on by public-health measures used to fight the spread of the virus. “The issue isn’t just Covid,” he says. “There’s another side to that.”.This summer, Ambridge also got caught up in the national reckoning on race. One Saturday in June, a rumor circulated that a bus filled with Black Lives Matter protesters would be pulling in the next day. The mayor and the chamber of commerce called local businesses urging them to prepare. One of them, a gym, took that as a reason to call in the Iron City Citizen Response Unit, a militia that bills itself on its website as “the last line of defense against a tyrannical government.” By Sunday morning, a half-dozen men in camouflage and equipped with rifles were guarding the gym. The bus never arrived, and the militia was gone by late afternoon. But the incident left behind an uneasy atmosphere..For Felicia Mycyk, a Black woman living in a town where 75% of the population is White, it was a crystallizing moment. As the school system’s lone female football coach, Mycyk, who grew up in the area, had become accustomed to the occasional raised eyebrow. Nevertheless, she’d managed to establish herself in recent years as a linchpin in the community by starting Ambridge Connection, a Facebook page where boosterish posts about local businesses coexisted with what over the summer steadily became a vitriol-filled community discussion board..Mycyk knows how to navigate political minefields. Her White husband, she’ll tell you, is a Trump supporter. Where her own loyalties lie is a subject best kept to herself, she says. The phantom BLM protest incident inspired her to give voice to a question that had been nagging at her for a while: “Is Ambridge racist?”.That was the subject of a two-hour virtual panel discussion that Mycyk moderated in July. There she recounted how at the town’s annual international food festival, one booth had advertised “African cuisine.” Rather than an Ethiopian spread or a showcase for West African delicacies, however, it featured barbecued ribs, chicken, and macaroni salad, the same menu offered at the “American cuisine” stall nearby. “What was the difference between the two? The African cuisine booth was all Black people. The American cuisine booth was all White people,” Mycyk told the people watching..For all the ways Ambridge spent the summer navigating a very American confluence of crises rooted in economics, history, and political polarization, it’s a place that also resists political clichés. Despite Trump’s 2016 surge in surrounding Beaver County, Clinton won all five of Ambridge’s precincts..Mikulich says he thinks Biden will carry Ambridge this year. There are just too many old-school Democrats, like himself, still around, he argues. And he says Biden might manage to narrowly win a Beaver County that hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Al Gore..Even a narrowing of Trump’s margin in the county would have broader consequences. To overcome Biden’s lead in the polls, Trump needs supporters to repeat their heavy 2016 turnout in rural and semirural counties like this one, which pollsters see as unlikely. “Donald Trump threaded the needle in Pennsylvania in 2016. The eye of the needle is narrower now than it was then,” says Patrick Murray of the Monmouth University Polling Institute..There’s another trend Mikulich and other local Democrats see, though, that’s likely to outlast this election. Party affiliation matters less in Ambridge than it used to, in part because of the steady loss of industrial jobs and the weakening hold unions have on a dwindling membership that once voted overwhelmingly for Democrats..Villella, the salon owner, unsuccessfully ran for the state senate as a Democrat in 2012 and is still registered as such. If anything, though, the pandemic has hardened her support for Trump, whom she quietly voted for in 2016. But she also plans on voting for Lamb, as does Thornhill, the Trump-supporting pastor..“We are closer to purple than some folks realize,” says Rob Matzie, a former Ambridge mayor running for reelection to the state legislature this year..The swirling political cast is what makes Mikulich so nervous about this year’s campaign. By the end of August, as Republicans staged their convention and chaotic protests broke out in Wisconsin over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, he was increasingly worried about the consequences for Democrats in his corner of swing-state America. “The riots in Wisconsin don’t help,” Mikulich texted on Aug. 27 as Trump prepared to accept his party’s nomination. Read next: The Nine Types of Voters Who Will Decide 2020.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

A Rust Belt Town’s Loyalties Divide as Pennsylvania Turns Purple

Ambridge resisted the Trump tide in 2016. How will it vote in 2020?

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