‘I blame the party’: recriminations abound among Democrats – including in Scranton

From gold-high top sneakers to Women-for-Trump tank tops, iron-on “Fight, Fight, Fight” patches to a poster depicting a 19th-century cowboy outlaw, sales of Trump merchandise at the Trump store in Scranton, Pennsylvania, tripled in sales in the days after the once and future president’s landslide second-term win in the US election last week.

In a hard week for Democrats, the goods flying off the shelves added insult to injury as Scranton has long been intimately linked to Joe Biden, lauded as his home town and symbol of his affinity with America’s working class.

Store manager Thomas Rankin said he never believed polls predicting a tight race. Trump voters, he believed, had simply kept quiet because they didn’t want an argument. “A whole lot of the Democrat party, as soon as they got in the booth, went boom! They could see through the whole Democrat propaganda,” he said.

And then there were the rallies – Rankin, a former deadhead, said he used to go to a lot of concerts – and Trump had held hundreds with his trademark weave of folk tales, policy and political rhetoric.

“People travelled to them like they travelled for the Grateful Dead,” he said, and that’s what I did. He drew people in, just like the Dead. People had fun, but they also had an interest in what he is saying.”

Bitter truths were plentiful in Scranton, last week, as voters in “Scranton Joe” Biden’s home town broadly rejected Democrats’ proposition for a continuation under Kamala Harris.

Thomas Rankin at the Trump store in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Edward Helmore/The Guardian

Lackawanna county, which incorporates Scranton, lies at the top end of the Pennsylvania’s populous Route 222 voter corridor. It was once a Democratic stronghold but last week it swung five points toward Donald Trump compared with 2020.

Harris narrowly won the county by less than 1%, significantly down on Biden’s 8% in 2020 and Barack Obama’s 30% in 2012. Hopes that Latino voters would come through for Harris didn’t materialize. Democrats lost Pennsylvania and every other swing state if forecasts for undeclared Arizona hold up.

Despite only living in Scranton’s Green Ridge neighborhood for the first 10 years of his life, Biden made the city a key aspect of his political narrative – “Scranton values” – and not Delaware, the state supported by the financial services industry, where he actually spent his 50-year political career.

Biden closed out his limited campaign appearances in support of Harris in a carpenters’ union hall in the city on Sunday, acknowledging: “I’m going to be gone. I’m asking you to do something for yourself and your families.”

But they didn’t, or not in sufficient numbers, and now intra-party recriminations are in full flow in the Democratic party – as well as on the streets of Scranton. “The Democrats started too late to switch candidates,” said Robert Tosti, a retired doctor, at Wegmans, an upscale supermarket on the city’s west side.

“I don’t blame Biden, I blame the party. He’s 80. Give him a break. They should have been grooming someone else. They had to have seen this coming.”

Instead of recrimination, Tosti, a Democrat, said Democrats should ask themselves a question: “What does it tell you about Democrats when most people voted for a man of his caliber – a convicted felon, whose vice-president and cabinet won’t even endorse him?”

The short answer is that Democrats were selling a platform, a set of values and policies, that a majority of American voters don’t believe and don’t care to buy.

Wegmans and the Trump store sit across from a Walmart that was hit by a landslide and is now a quarry. But at a new Walmart nearby, the division between left and right – the Democrat elites and working class that now vote Republican – was in evidence.

Larry Cornelius, a Black voter who voted Democrat, predicted that Trump’s promise to remake the economy in favor of working-class Americans would end in disappointment. “This isn’t going pan out how they think,” he said.

Three women were loading groceries in their car. “I feel like she was a chameleon. So we went Trump,” one of them said. Her daughter said she was unmoved about having the first female president. “No, I care more about buying a house and being able to live on my own,” she added.

The closing days of the 2024 election were hit by counter claims about garbage. Democrats hoped a racist joke from a comedian at Trump’s rally in New York City about Puerto Rico would turn Latino voters in this area of Pennsylvania against Trump. But Biden then later appeared to call Trump voters garbage, complicating the issue.

Suheily Echevarria, 29, owner of a Puerto Rican restaurant in Scranton, said it hadn’t moved her. “I don’t even care, because I know I’m not garbage,” she said. As a mother of two young children, she didn’t want her kids hearing about gay and transgender identity in school. “I want that to come from the house, not from a stranger teaching them,” she said.

Suheily Echevarria in Scranton, Pennsyvlania. Photograph: Edward Helmore/The Guardian

Echevarria said the inference that Black and Latino men were resistant out of some unrevealed misogynistic impulse to vote for Harris was misconstrued. “We want to live better and we want to sustain our families,” she said.

Latino voters had been put in a bind: a vote for Trump signaled approval of the trash comment, Echevarria said, “but if they don’t vote for Trump it means approving of the economic suffering under the Biden administration”. Paying bills won.

At Garibaldi’s Mexican restaurant, owner Isabel Sanchez said the choice was simple. “Kamala is good, but Trump is better for the economy,” she said. “We are Mexican, we are in America to work.” Biden’s border policy had made life more difficult.

At every turn in Scranton, it was hard to find a core Democratic message that hadn’t been rejected, in part for its accompanying sense of entitlement and elitism. Democratic margins crumbled across the US, and the “blue wall” of the Rust belt states collapsed.

With even Pennsylvania’s Democratic senator Bob Casey tossed out of office, retired nurse Julie Zabrowski, 57, who had put in long hours during the pandemic and injured her back, said Lackawanna country was Democratic “true blue” but “people just needed a change” and Harris did not represent change.

“It was economics for me – and I did better under Trump. I’m pro-choice but that was one issue. It’s huge but it’s not everything,” Zabrowski said. A Democrat who voted for Trump, she said she was irked by the primary-free handover from Biden to Harris.

“I didn’t get a choice and I thought that was what we were about,” she said.

At the Local 524 pipe fitters’ union, Rick Elliott said his daughter, who works in New York, was distressed by the election result. “I said to her, whatever happens in this election won’t directly affect you in the near future.”

Elliott, a Democrat at least in spirit, ventured that Trump would provide relief from the two-party political game. “He’s a businessman. He’s going to get away from all these politicians. We can’t listen to them talk, and he’s not going to play their game.”

Another man, a member of the Most Wanted Riders motorcycle club, may have captured some of the prevailing mood in Lackawanna after an election that took 18 months and cost $15bn in advertising spending alone. He hadn’t voted because he couldn’t.

“I’m a felon. I can’t vote. A felon won, but a felon can’t vote. Figure that out,” he said.