JOHNSTOWN, Pennsylvania — Rachel Held will be voting in her first presidential election this November. The 19-year-old works as a waitress at The Fifth Alehouse on Scalp Avenue in this Cambria County city and plans to attend cosmetology school beginning Oct. 14.
She says the issues she cares most about are shared by her friends and family.
“The cost of everything is out of control,” Held said. "Groceries, filling up my car with gas, even being able to do the simple kind of local activities young people like to do are often out of reach, and I work all of the time."
Held’s father owns a small business in town, and she says he has similar worries.
“They have been really struggling in the past four years. It costs more to run a business. Then what do you do? Pass the cost on to your customers,” Held continued, clearly wise beyond her years.
Held is also concerned about the rise of unvetted illegal immigrants who have ties to cartels.
“What are their intentions?” she said. "What about the increased drug traffic that comes from some who are smuggling it here that then kills people in the community or gets them addicted?
“Too much chaos,” Held said, adding, “Too much uncertainty.”
Held is voting for former President Donald Trump. Ten years ago, maybe even eight, she likely would have voted for a Democrat. This is, or at least was, coal country, and just about everyone was a registered Democrat who had some sort of tie to the coal or manufacturing industry.
In 2008, when Barack Obama was running as the candidate of hope and change, he won Cambria County over Republican John McCain. By 2012, Obama not only lost Cambria County — he lost it by a whopping 18 percentage points.
Why?
Largely because Obama had abandoned hope and change and was aiming to reconfigure the Democratic Party by shedding New Deal Democrats.
“If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant. they can,” Obama said at the time. "It’s just that it will bankrupt them."
In Cambria County, coal is, or at least was, king. Even though climate change regulations, cultural scorn, and the rise of natural gas have decimated the industry, coal is still very much the identity of the people who live there.
Go to Ebensburg, the Cambria county seat, and you can get some great beers at the Coal Country Brewery on Ben Franklin Highway. There is the Pick and Shovel, a German Altbier; Sulphur Crick, a lovely hazy IPA; and Acid Mine Drainage, a West Coast IPA.
Early Welsh settlers found coal abundant in the 1790s, and the county was named after the nation of Wales. Fifty years later, coal, initially used by blacksmiths for forging, grew into a powerful industry alongside the iron and steel industries in Johnstown.
By the end of the 19th century, the mines here produced more than 1 million tons of coal.
By 1901, there were over 130 commercially viable coal active mines in the county. Eighty years later, coal began its decline.
Today, Rosebud is the only active mine, and the largest employer is a private, for-profit hospital system called Duke LifePoint.
Obama’s Pennsylvania margin of victory shrunk in that 2012 election from just under 10 percentage points in 2008 to 5 points. His decline was mostly driven by losses in counties such as Cambria.
In fact, there were five counties that went for Obama in 2008 that went for Mitt Romney in 2012. If more Democrats had paid attention to these losses, they might have been able to see Trump beating Hillary Clinton in 2016.
While the main focus in most elections is on Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, there are about 54 other counties just like Cambria that could shift the results this election cycle. They shifted for Trump in 2016 and back to Biden in 2020.
In 2016, Clinton made a rare visit to Cambria, visiting a wire factory, where she and her team found out pretty quickly that her policies on trade and climate were unpopular. Despite the pouring rain that day, I can remember covering the event and seeing the people outside the factory protesting her visit.
Since 2016, Trump has intuitively understood that you go to Cambria to ask for voter support. I remember the Washington Post headline in October 2016 that read, “Why was Donald Trump campaigning in Johnstown, Pa.?” And I remember thinking the question seemed short-sighted.
On Friday, after spending five days in Pittsburgh, doing one retail stop and one stroll through a military compound by the airport 17 miles from the city, Harris will return to Pennsylvania three more times. She will debate Trump on Tuesday evening in Philadelphia, then attend 9/11 events at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, then come here to stop at a coffee shop for an event.
She will then go to Luzerne County for another stop. Both counties are very important in winning the state. Whatever message Harris delivers at these stops is as important as showing up.
You cannot win Pennsylvania without maintaining numbers in Cambria County. Yes, Cambria County. You also cannot win Pennsylvania without maintaining numbers in Luzerne County. But you also have to earn that support. So far, only Trump has made the effort to earn it.
Clinton was seen by voters here as a candidate for the elite, and in many ways that is the danger Harris faces here as well. She has never had to win over a conservative Democratic, independent, or Republican voter because all of her elections have been held in California, where Republican candidates are nonexistent.
Because of that, her message is viewed skeptically. Is she against fracking? If so, why has she not lifted the ban on liquefied natural gas her administration placed in January? Does she still support taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained illegal immigrants, decriminalizing drug possession, and drastic cuts to Immigration and Customs Enforcement?
The latest New York Times/Siena College poll shows that 31% of people say they need to learn more about Harris, and 63% of those people say they want to know more about her policies and her plans.
Voters just don’t know who she is. Her new policy page, which she put up Monday, did not separate herself from Joe Biden, a president whose policies were increasingly unpopular before he dropped out in late July.
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That same poll showed that more than 60% of likely voters said the next president should represent a major change from Biden, but only 25% said the vice president represented that change, while 53% said Trump did.
To win Pennsylvania, Harris will have to stay competitive here, and that means meaningful interaction with voters, not a tightly controlled stop. The same goes for Luzerne, Erie, Bucks, and Northampton counties. Those are the places where Pennsylvania is won.
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