It was a gray morning when I met Susanne Green, a Lackawanna County G.O.P. volunteer who helps co\u00f6rdinate the Election Integrity Task Force, in downtown Scranton. A native of Lackawanna, Green, who is sixty years old with golden-brown hair and an efficient air, worked for a time at a Planned Parenthood branch in Washington, D.C. \u201cI grew up a Kennedy Democrat, my whole family was Kennedy Democrats, the whole valley was Kennedy Democrats,\u201d she said. \u201cThe Democrat Party doesn\u2019t seem to be Kennedy Democrats anymore. They\u2019re different. They\u2019ve changed. Our value system has not.\u201d After retirement, she returned to rural Lackawanna, which she found was struggling. In 2016, she and a friend founded a food share, where locals could come for free groceries. \u201cA lot of the neighbors\u2014there\u2019s some trailer parks that are nearby\u2014they\u2019re having such a hard time.\u201d During the COVID-19 pandemic, she said, they fed about twelve hundred families every two weeks. \u201cI saw a real need for resources in our rural community, which is still Lackawanna County, but we didn\u2019t really get any,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n
When Trump first came along, Green sensed that it was he, not any Democrat, who would best represent the interests of her community. \u201cI think that Trump is for women\u2019s reproductive rights,\u201d she told me. How, I asked, did she square that view with the fact that Trump had appointed the judges who overturned the right to abortion? \u201cThe Supreme Court is not just one Justice, O.K.? It\u2019s a group of nine, and they talk about things together. So, they found that Roe v. Wade should really be up to the states.\u201d<\/p>\n
We walked over to a pop-up tent, where a small group of Trump volunteers stood bundled against the fall chill, waiting to register voters or help people change their party affiliation. In recent weeks, Green has moved the tent to various locations throughout the county, including the local junk yard, which proved to be an especially target-rich environment for registering Trump supporters who haven\u2019t voted in years, people whom the campaign refers to as low-propensity voters.<\/p>\n
A seventy-year-old Black veteran named Dennis Frison stopped by the tent and tried on a Trump-themed hat. \u201cIt took me ten years to get a ten-per-cent service-connected disability,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I look around, I see people speaking another language, who just came from somewhere\u2014God knows where. I know it don\u2019t sound nice, but it\u2019s facts.\u201d He remains torn between Harris and Trump.<\/p>\n
Under the tent, Linda Bonczkiewicz, an organizer for Trump Force 47, the campaign\u2019s effort to recruit volunteers to get out the vote, and JoAnne Mayer, who wore a red coat and black patent-leather boots, started talking to me about January 6th<\/a>. Both had been at the Capitol<\/a> that day. \u201cPeaceful, loving, kind, right until the news media got there,\u201d is how Bonczkiewicz described the day to me. Mayer whipped out her phone and scrolled through her camera roll to show me in one picture how close she had been to the wall of plastic police shields, and in another, pointed to a woman she said she thought was Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who was shot and killed as she tried to climb through a smashed window. The pair didn\u2019t believe that the race between Harris and Trump was as close as polls indicate. Mayer showed me a graph from the prediction market Polymarket<\/a> which gave Trump a fifty-seven-per-cent chance of winning the election. I asked them how they were feeling about Election Day. \u201cIf God\u2019s involved, it\u2019s gonna be perfect,\u201d Bonczkiewicz said. \u201cPeople, I don\u2019t trust. People are evil. And they\u2019re gonna find something.\u201d<\/p>\n Earlier that morning, Bob Bolus, again wearing his bright-blue Trump-Jesus shirt, had appeared at a meeting of the county commissioners. He confronted Bill Gaughan about the way he had ordered Bolus\u2019s removal from another public meeting, two weeks prior. \u201cYou ordered the sheriff to grab me by my shoulder\u2014I\u2019ve got injuries to my shoulder, five shoulder surgeries, and I\u2019m under medical care right now,\u201d Bolus said. \u201cI want you to understand, you and I will be going around again.\u201d When I met Gaughan for coffee later that afternoon, at a local Starbucks, he seemed unbothered, even though he had become the focus of ire of a vocal contingent of citizens. \u201cAnyone who stands up and tells them the truth, then they completely go berserk,\u201d he said. \u201cThey don\u2019t want to hear the truth. And that\u2019s not just here in Lackawanna, that\u2019s everywhere. They don\u2019t want to hear any answers because it doesn\u2019t fit into their narrative; it doesn\u2019t fit into President Trump\u2019s narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n Gaughan, who grew up in the Minooka neighborhood of Scranton and graduated from the University of Scranton, became a county commissioner only ten months ago. Prior to his election, he had served on the Scranton City Council, while also teaching American government to high schoolers. When he started his term in January, the county government owed $18.5 million in unpaid bills. The day before we met, Gaughan and his fellow Democratic commissioner, Matt McGloin\u2014a former Penn State quarterback\u2014had announced a thirty-three-per-cent property-tax increase, which generated an outcry. I asked Gaughan if he was worried that his blunt approach with the public could jeopardize his re\u00eblection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was a gray morning when I met Susanne Green, a Lackawanna County G.O.P. volunteer who helps co\u00f6rdinate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7102,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[6273,6358,2954,28,30,29],"class_list":["post-7101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-audio","tag-blue-collar","tag-election-2024","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}