Kamala Harris’ Pennsylvania Problem

SCRANTON, Pennsylvania — America’s second Catholic president was visiting his childhood neighborhood in April, when he employed a bit of ritualized Irish Democratic politicking.

“I’m Joe Biden,” he introduced himself to a patron at a small coffee shop gathering in Green Ridge, long a bastion of Irish-Catholic families who work in law and politics. “I went to St. Paul’s.”

The greeting, an echo of the old Catholic habit of identifying oneself by church parish, was Biden’s homage to the parochial nature of Scranton, home to one of the nation’s highest concentrations of white Catholics .

Biden’s local ties and cultural roots helped lift him to victory in 2020 here in Lackawanna County, the population hub of increasingly red northeastern Pennsylvania. In this most Catholic part of the swing state with the second-highest Catholic population, Biden ran ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 pace, enabling his narrow, one percentage point statewide victory.

But now, as Democrats battle for the state with Kamala Harris as the nominee, their chances of winning in the region or performing well enough there to carry the state are looking considerably dicier. It’s not just the loss of Biden — an older, white, Catholic man with an affinity for the working class — from the top of the ticket that worries local Democrats. It’s the cultural dissonance with Harris, a Californian and woman of color who has spearheaded the party’s post- Dobbs abortion messaging. That profile makes her an awkward fit in a closely watched, economically hard-pressed working-class region that’s historically been a locus of anti-abortion activity.

Biden isn’t wildly popular here. But as a native son, Biden is viewed through a nostalgic lens. To many in this once staunchly Democratic region, he embodies an older iteration of the party that was closely tied to organized labor and focused on economic issues. Even though Biden moved to Delaware as a child, he remained in close contact with the city of his birth and was seen locally as a protective force against the national party’s progressive flank.

Biden’s discomfort with talking about abortion may have been a sore spot within the modern Democratic Party, but not here in culturally conservative northeastern Pennsylvania. Harris, by contrast, has been a leader on abortion rights — the first vice president or president to visit a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic — and has long positioned herself to the left of voters like northeastern Pennsylvania’s Catholics.

Until this fateful summer, Harris’ Pennsylvania deployments were often to places like suburban Philadelphia as part of her “ reproductive freedom ” tour. Now, with a recent campaign stop in Wilkes-Barre, just 20 miles from Scranton in neighboring Luzerne County, Harris is clearly aiming to make inroads outside major metropolitan areas with a message geared toward “ middle class working people .”

But if Luzerne and Scranton’s Lackawanna County are any indication, she has a heavy lift ahead of her.

Harris’ challenge isn’t limited to abortion. The region continues to inch rightward. And Harris didn’t do herself any favors in 2018, when as a senator she grilled a Catholic judicial nominee about whether he could remain impartial due to his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a respected Catholic fraternal organization with a strong presence in northeastern Pennsylvania. The questioning is fuel for a multi-million-dollar campaign in swing states, including Pennsylvania, led by CatholicVote, a conservative advocacy group. Seeking to leverage this effort, Trump referenced the Knights of Columbus incident this July at Turning Point Action’s Believers Summit, where he said Democrats are “[going] after Catholics.” Earlier this month, his campaign launched “Catholics for Trump.”

“We don’t have the Catholic connection with Harris. We don’t have the local connection with Harris,” said Phil Condron, an advertising executive and lifelong Scrantonian who describes himself as a “Joe Biden Democrat.” “So there’s really no reason to believe that she can approach the numbers that Biden was able to get when he ran last time.”

The polls suggest that disconnect. In a recent Franklin & Marshall College Poll , Harris led Trump by 3 points in Pennsylvania. But in the northeastern part of the state, Trump was ahead by a comfortable margin, 50 percent to 43 percent.

Catholic voters in the Northeast and Lackawanna County in particular had enough in common with Biden that they voted for him, said Christopher Borick, a Muhlenberg College pollster, but “that’s not going to be the same equation with Kamala Harris.

“She’ll have work to do,” said Borick, who grew up in Throop, a small borough outside Scranton.

The Catholic Church — both the Eastern and Latin rite — is the most vivid mark of the past in northeastern Pennsylvania, where the coal mining industry once thrived amid the world’s richest veins of hard coal. The flood of European immigrants who came to work in the mines created a landscape adorned with miniature cathedrals — their ornate steeples and onion domes rising above boroughs of pre-war double homes — that functioned as their cultural link to the regions of Ireland, Italy and the former Austro-Hungarian empire that they left behind.

You can still see the South Side churches towering over rows of gambrel and gable roofs from the President Joe Biden Expressway, which whisks drivers through Scranton, and past the campus of the University of Scranton, a Jesuit college where Biden, then a 32-year-old senator, gave the 1976 commencement address.

The immigrants who built this churched landscape also mobilized a labor movement that made them as devoted to the Democratic Party as they were to the Church. Today, many descendants of those workers remain registered Democrats, an allegiance rooted in inherited memories of a Republican Party once hostile toward their ancestors.

“The Irish sense of history makes 200 years ago seem like it was yesterday, and in the old days here, the Republicans … were the mine owners and business owners and the union breakers,” said Bob Cordaro, a former Republican Lackawanna County commissioner who hosts a local radio show. “And that sense has never left a lot of people’s internal psyche.”

Yet many of these ancestral Catholic Democratic voters are lapsed in church attendance and gradually peeling away from the party as well. Locals still mark summer’s course by parish festivals and pray to St. Anthony to find their misplaced car keys. On residential streets, it’s not uncommon to see statues of the Blessed Mother placed near potted flowers collected from family graves at parish cemeteries after Memorial Day. But they rarely, if ever, show up to Mass anymore. According to a 2022 report by the Diocese of Scranton , the number of registered parishioners declined by 16 percent between 2014 and 2020.

It’s part of a contraction of the faith in this part of Pennsylvania, hastened in 2009 by abrupt and widespread parish closures and consolidations, shrinking the number of churches by nearly 39 percent . Those parishes — formed more than a century before by ethnicity and even ancestrally tied to regions of Italy or Ireland, for example — were a spiritual and cultural anchor for older residents confronting temporal challenges in their communities: economic decline, population loss, and rates of demographic change that were among the fastest in the U.S .

At one time, Scranton was home to nearly 30 Catholic parishes — the South Side alone counted six churches servicing German, Irish and Polish families. Today, all of South Side’s Catholic parishes are shuttered or consolidated, and St. Mary’s, the Catholic hospital where Biden was born, closed decades ago.

Many older residents continue to hold a grudge over the closures.

“If there’s a death of Catholic politics, it’s death by suicide because the Church made it very clear that it was not interested in supporting those old ethnic parishes and ethnic differences,” said Philip Jenkins, a Baylor University historian who has extensively studied Pennsylvania religious history.

The church closures, which corresponded with national reports of clerical abuse, were compounded by another shock. In 2018, Pennsylvania’s then-attorney general, Josh Shapiro, released a state grand jury report detailing decades of cover-ups . The Scranton Diocese was featured prominently in the report, which targeted 59 abusive priests and religious leaders , in addition to criticism of three late bishops.

The effect of the tremors was to further fracture the region and erode institutional trust, including in the prevailing institution of the Church and its longstanding partner, the Democratic Party.

At the same time, Donald Trump proved appealing to many of the voters in this area. The Democratic Party’s leftward drift and focus on cultural issues alienated many older voters. Globalization hit northeastern Pennsylvania hard, leading to a decline in manufacturing jobs and a rise in lower paying warehousing jobs, fueled by the food processing and e-commerce sectors. The resulting economic discontent coincided with a period of rapid demographic change — most notably in Hazleton, a six-square-mile grid city that went from less than five percent Hispanic population in 2000 to more than 50 percent around the 2016 presidential election.

Hazleton’s Luzerne County, which had voted for Barack Obama twice, broke hard for Trump in 2016 and then voted for him a second time in 2020. It now has a Republican voter registration majority following decades as a Democratic stronghold. Scranton’s Lackawanna County has moved in the same direction, though not quite as rapidly — it was carried by Obama, Clinton and Biden, and Democratic candidates remain competitive there. Even so, Lackawanna has shed nearly 13,000 Democratic voters since 2016.

“There’s so many Democrats here because they grew up Democrat and they’re still registered Democrat, but they’re voting more Republican,” said Vince Galko, a Scranton area-based Republican strategist. “There are still people who grew up Catholic and say they’re Catholic, but probably haven’t been to church in years or aren’t raising their families in any kind of Catholic tradition.”

Regardless of the level of observance, white Catholics nationally voted for Trump by a wide margin in 2020 and were on pace to vote for him again, with a spring Pew survey finding that white, non-Hispanic Catholic voters preferred the former president by a 61 percent to 38 percent margin over Biden. According to a recent EWTN/RealClear poll , that gap has narrowed, with Trump leading Harris among white Catholics, 52 percent to 42 percent.

If Harris is able to remain competitive with white Catholics around the country, it would represent a significant achievement. A Brookings analysis earlier this year by University of Pennsylvania professor John DiLulio noted that Hillary Clinton lost the overall white Catholic vote by 33 points in 2016, but four years later, Biden cut that deficit in half, losing by only 15 points. “As much as any single shift in voting patterns between those two elections, the shift in the white Catholic vote away from Trump cost him the 2020 election,” wrote DiLulio.

Local Democrats, eager to accentuate the positive and embrace Harris’ suddenly competitive campaign against Trump, don’t concede that she faces any unique regional challenges. That is, if they talk about it publicly at all — a half-dozen local Democratic officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.

They’re aware that November will mark the first time in two decades that the Democratic presidential ticket won’t feature a candidate with Scrantonian roots. Aside from Biden, who also ran twice as Barack Obama’s vice president, Hillary Clinton in 2016 had her own Scranton connection — her father was born, raised and is buried here.

“It’s always tough to predict northeastern Pennsylvania,” said Paige Cognetti, the Democratic mayor of Scranton. “I think people are able to walk and chew gum at the same time. And we’ve been doing that all summer and we’ll continue to. So we … keep our gratitude and our pride in Joe Biden alive and simultaneously are excited to promote the Harris-Walz ticket and draw that contrast between that and the Trump-Vance ticket.”

Cognetti hopes Biden still campaigns in the city. “He’s part of our social fabric and so seeing him … is important.”

Ed Mitchell, a long-time Democratic strategist in Wilkes-Barre, believes grassroots efforts will play an important role. “We’re not relying on the Harris campaign here or the Democratic Party here,” said Mitchell, who sits on the board of Action Together NEPA, a grassroots progressive organization that he credits for pick-ups in local races last year.

“We are presenting issues to people regardless of their faith,” he said. “And I think … there’s Catholic doors that we’re knocking on because of the high proportion of Catholic people in northeastern Pennsylvania.”

Scranton once served as the home base of former Gov. Bob Casey, who was famously denied a speaking slot at the 1992 DNC convention due to his abortion position. One of the nation’s most prominent anti-abortion Democrats during his time in office, it was Casey who signed the legislation at issue in the landmark 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey , which paved the way for the Dobbs decision that rolled back Roe v. Wade .

Yet Mitchell contends the cultural changes that have buffeted the region mean abortion may not be as salient here as in the past. “The old idea that this is a real right-to-life area and all that, I don’t think that’s true anymore,” said Mitchell. “I think it’s at best 50/50 like most of the nation.”

Not everyone is so sure. Condron, the self-described Biden Democrat who grew up in Biden’s Green Ridge neighborhood, attended St. Paul’s and has lectured for 40 years at the St. Peter’s Cathedral, says abortion is “the kicker that causes Trump to be able to take the Catholic vote.”

Local Republicans are convinced the Harris campaign’s focus on mobilizing around reproductive rights in healthcare-driven suburbs like Philadelphia’s collar counties, rather than economic and social concerns in working-class communities, will prove costly 90 minutes north on the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s Northeast Extension.

“My strong sense is that Kamala will not do as well as Biden did … [among] those very Catholic voting blocs of the old school, especially Irish Catholics up in Lackawanna,” said Jim Bognet, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2020 and 2022. He cited the enthusiasm for Trump among parishioners at his own Hazleton church, Most Precious Blood, one of America’s oldest Italian parishes . “Biden made ‘Joe from Scranton’ the most prominent element of his political branding over the years. And I would say Kamala Harris’s political branding is very different than Joe Biden’s.”