Rick Ainey lives on the northern tier of Pennsylvania, near the New York border in a region known as the Endless Mountains. The area is scenic, deeply rural and so reliably Republican that the last time it has given a majority of its votes to a Democratic presidential candidate was in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater just about everywhere. The time before that was 1852, when the two major parties were the Democrats and the Whigs.
Four years ago, Donald Trump won this part of the state with ease, but there was something different about the result: The margin of victory was even more lopsided than usual.
In Susquehanna County, where Mr. Ainey is the Democratic chairman, Mr. Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a bigger margin than any presidential candidate had achieved in the past six decades.
“I tell my people, ‘We’re outnumbered.’ We’re not going to win here but we’re part of a team,” Mr. Ainey said. “All I want is 35 percent of the vote. If we do that, we keep up our end of the deal.”
Mrs. Clinton did not get close to that goal. She won 27 percent of Susquehanna County’s vote, 11 percentage points below what Barack Obama managed four years earlier.
Elections are in part about issues and personalities, but those most deeply involved in the process also tend to view them as mathematical equations. The formula for a Democrat to win in Pennsylvania has been understood for decades: Come away with huge margins in the state’s two big urban centers to offset deficits in the rural counties, some of them so small that they are sometimes said to have more bears than people.
Even with a somewhat diminished turnout of Black voters, Mrs. Clinton ran up a bigger cushion in Philadelphia, its four suburban counties and Allegheny County (Pittsburgh and its close-in suburbs) than Mr. Obama did in 2012. But Mr. Obama carried Pennsylvania; Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic presidential candidate since 1988 to lose it.
To understand why — and to gain insight into the race between Mr. Trump and Joe Biden — it’s useful to look at the raw numbers, and particularly the size of the margin of victory.
In Susquehanna County in 2012, Mitt Romney received 10,800 votes to Mr. Obama’s 6,935. Mr. Trump’s victory four years later was 12,891 to Mrs. Clinton’s 5,123.
In neighboring Bradford County, the difference between Mr. Trump’s margin of victory and Mr. Romney’s was 5,986 votes. To the west, in Warren County, it was 4,317. In Clearfield, in the state’s midsection, it was 7,506.
And on and on. Pennsylvania has 67 counties. Mr. Trump ran up the score in all of the least populated ones. Even tiny Cameron County, the state’s smallest, contributed 423 more votes to the Republican margin than it had in 2012.
By the old formula, Mrs. Clinton should have prevailed. But these counties — some of which are 98 percent white — tilted the state to Mr. Trump. The totals in any one of them may seem small, but in the aggregate, they gave Mr. Trump a margin of victory at least 150,000 votes bigger than Mr. Romney had run up four years earlier. That was enough for Mr. Trump to win Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes by a razor-thin 48.58 percent to 47.85 percent.
“I’ve heard people lay the blame on the African-American community not supporting Hillary strongly enough, but I don’t buy it,” Terry Noble, the chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party’s rural caucus, told me. “Rural Pennsylvania went crazy for Trump. They literally came out of the hills.”
In the lead-up to this November’s election, there has been a focus on the suburbs. If you listen to cable news for any length of time, you’re likely to hear some pundit say, “It’s all about the suburbs.”
Mr. Trump’s 1950s-sounding appeals to “suburban housewives” — as well as his racist pitch that Mr. Biden will flood their pleasant neighborhoods with low-income housing — accentuate the feeling that the suburbs are what matters most.
But if the election is close again, rural voters — not just in Pennsylvania but in other battleground states — may decide its outcome.
Dairy farming was once a major industry and a way of life in Susquehanna County. It declined for a combination of reasons — not least, that Americans drink substantially less milk than they once did. With the economics more challenging, fewer young people have wanted to stay on the land and milk cows. The big employers now are the state and local governments, school districts and health care providers. It’s still possible to buy a three-bedroom house in the area for less than $100,000.
Mr. Ainey, 66, lives in the town of New Milford (population: 965), where he owned a grocery store for 25 years. He sold it and it has since closed. He splits his time between a part-time job as an auditor for the county and his work as party chairman.
Talking with him is a reminder of how much local issues matter. He noted that the Trump campaign has been running ads featuring the president’s support of hydraulic fracking, a method of extracting natural gas — and he fears Mr. Biden has not adequately answered them
Mr. Ainey is among the many rural Pennsylvanians who reap income from gas leases — from a family farm as well as from his property in town. He describes the money as a gift, even though the checks have shrunk lately along with the price of natural gas. “The old folks on the farm have new roofs, a brand-new tractor, money in the bank,” he said. “Farming is a hobby now.”
When I spoke with Mr. Ainey’s counterpart, Donna Cosmello, the Republican chairwoman in Susquehanna County, the first thing she talked about, unprompted, was fracking. “The other side wants to shut it down,” she said. “It’s brought jobs and we can’t lose that. And people have made a lot of money from the leases. It’s people who never had money, but it didn’t change them.”
Mr. Biden has called for a ban on fracking on federal land — not on private property, where most fracking occurs. Speaking last week in Pittsburgh, he took the issue on directly. “I am not banning fracking,” he said. “Let me say that again, I am not banning fracking, no matter how many times Donald Trump lies about me.”
Social issues matter as well — abortion and guns, a sense that Christianity is under attack. But what may have counted most four years ago was not any single issue, but a sensibility. Mr. Trump’s mix of bluster and grievance struck an emotional chord.
“Trump is just on the wavelength of rural America in a way that previous Republicans were not,” said David Hopkins, an associate professor of political science at Boston College and the author of “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics.” “The very open nostalgia and nationalist themes in his campaign really appeal to people who live in parts of the country who feel their best days are behind them. I think that was a bigger factor than any specific issue, even immigration.”
Ms. Cosmello, 65, grew up in the county. She had a career as a hairdresser and now works in the office at a hospice. “Mr. Trump is not a politician. He’s just a regular person, and that’s what we are,” she said of the New York real estate developer who announced his candidacy in 2015 in the pink marble and brass atrium of his Trump Tower in Manhattan. “Sometimes he says things he shouldn’t, but the people I know just love the man. They trust him.”
Campaigns feel a little different in rural America. In large swaths of Pennsylvania, broadband access is not universal. Conservative talk radio runs like a loop on the AM dial.
“We get them all here. They’re so extreme that Rush [Limbaugh] is middle of the road,” said Jeff Eggleston, a Democratic State Committee member from Warren County, near the northwest corner of the state.
Mr. Eggleston is leading an effort to get tens of thousands of Biden-Harris placards planted around the state. Every Democrat I talked to for this article emphasized the importance of this low-tech tactic. In rural areas, just about everyone has a yard. For badly outnumbered Democrats, the signs tell them they are not alone.
Mr. Obama’s campaigns were digitally savvy and groundbreaking in their mastery of the internet. That was the model for the Clinton team, and Mr. Eggleston said he struggled in 2016 to convince them of the importance of signs. “You run into these militant campaign professionals,” he said. “They tell you, ‘Signs don’t vote.’ We didn’t have much of anything last time around.”
By contrast, he said, the Trump campaign “dumped a mountain of merchandise on these people. It was a sea of Trump signs, Trump hats, Trump buttons. People didn’t understand the impact of that. They made him into a brand.”
Mr. Eggleston has been delivering many of the signs himself to bulk drop-off locations, driving thousands of miles in a rental truck across Pennsylvania’s interstates. “I’m doing it partly for self-therapy,” he said. “There’s a sense of shared purpose that was missing in 2016. I feel good about Pennsylvania because of it. It is the exact opposite of 2016. People thought Clinton was a shoo-in and there was never enough energy.”
Pennsylvania Democrats have some solid reasons for optimism. In 2018, the party picked up a net of three House seats, and Tom Wolf, the state’s Democratic governor, routed his Republican opponent by about 855,000 votes. In local elections in 2019, Democrats took control of the county council in Delaware County, just west of Philadelphia, for the first since before the Civil War.
Those results suggest that Mr. Trump could do far worse in Philadelphia’s four suburban counties than he did in 2016, when he ran 188,000 votes behind Mrs. Clinton. “I don’t see it turning in the other direction,” Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who works with Governor Wolf, said of the trends in these suburbs.
And many believe that Mr. Biden appeals more to rural voters than Mrs. Clinton did. He was born into a working-class Irish Catholic family in Scranton, which serves as the big city to smaller communities in northeast Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden attended a state school, the University of Delaware, and this year’s Democratic ticket is the first since 1984 without an Ivy League graduate.
David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s campaign strategist, has described Mr. Biden as “culturally inconvenient for Trump’s re-election project.” The Democratic candidate “is just not frightening enough to the voters Trump needs to scare,” he wrote in an article for CNN.
“The difference this year is that Joe Biden is more likable and he is a white male,” Aaron Stearns, the Democratic chairman in Warren County, said. “I hate to say that about my area, but it helps.”
But Democrats are worried — about potential problems with mail-in balloting, the threat of voter suppression and, most of all, the possibility of coronavirus-related chaos on Election Day.
In the spring primary, because of the coronavirus, only a fraction of Philadelphia’s polling places opened. If that happens again, Mr. Biden’s margin in the city could be shaved. “Are people going to be able to vote?” asked Neil Oxman, a Philadelphia-based Democratic consultant who ran the campaigns of former Gov. Ed Rendell. “That’s my concern.”
The rural vote accounts for roughly 20 percent of the state’s total, by some estimates. If the race is tight, it could again decide which candidate carries Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is not going to win in the small counties, but he may have to do substantially better than Mrs. Clinton did.
“When you look at the rural areas, it’s the margins that matter,” Mr. Hopkins, the Boston College professor, said. “The suburbs get a lot of attention because you have those counties that used to be red, and now they’re blue. When you see that on a map on TV, it looks dramatic. But all these places that went from like 60-40 Republican to 80-20 for Trump are just as dramatic, and they were critical to the result.”
Both Mr. Hopkins and Ms. Greenberg noted that the same dynamic applies in Michigan, which went to Mr. Trump in 2016 by an even narrower margin than Pennsylvania — in part because of its rural counties.
Mr. Trump, in one sense, rode the momentum of a wave that was already swelling in rural America, where the electorate has been turning more Republican for a generation. Mr. Obama did better in Pennsylvania’s small counties in 2012 than Mrs. Clinton in 2016 — but he did not do as well he had in his first presidential run in 2008.
“There’s a long-term and a short-term story to look at,” Mr. Hopkins said. “Long term, this is a trend that’s been going on for 25 years, driven by the polarization of the parties around cultural issues. Abortion, gay rights, race, gender. Those divide urban and rural America more than economics does.”
“Short term,” he said, “there was something about Trump’s appeal and Clinton’s lack of appeal to rural voters” that caused an even bigger divide. “We can imagine Biden will play better. He’ll talk more about economics. He’s seen as more of a moderate. My guess is that it will be a slightly less overwhelming margin in rural America, but still pretty red.”
There have been multiple reports of those Biden lawn signs on rural properties in Pennsylvania vanishing or being destroyed. It’s a piece of evidence that the nation’s politics have become not just polarized but also tribal. “I could give out more signs but they’re being stolen, and people are worried their properties will be vandalized,” Lisa LaBarre, the Democratic chairwoman in Bradford County, said. “It’s not even about issues anymore. People won’t vote for anyone with a D next to their name. It’s like you’d be siding with the enemy.”
Mr. Noble, the rural caucus chairman, told me that he went around the corner to his mother’s house a few days ago in the town of Dubois, in Clearfield County — “I just really wanted a BLT” — and looked out the window and saw a couple of young kids dump something in her backyard. It turned out to be a ripped up Biden sign. He chased them down. “One of the kids was like 10 years old, and he’s wearing a ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ shirt,” a slogan associated with conservative politics.
They denied vandalizing the sign. “I told them, ‘It’s got your fingerprints on it.’”
When I talked with Barbara Scott, a Democratic activist in Susquehanna County, she had just gotten off a Zoom meeting with a group of women backing Mr. Biden. Ms. Scott, a retired New York City schoolteacher, said Elizabeth Warren had been her candidate and “Joe had been pretty far down the list.”
She said a younger woman in the group had talked in a previous meeting about “how unfair” it was that Mr. Biden was the candidate, and Ms. Scott said to her: “People voted. That’s how it works.”
Ms. Scott and others in the state’s small counties told me that some left-leaning Democrats had either stayed home in 2016 or voted for a third-party candidate. I asked her if she thought that might happen again, and she gave a one-word answer: “No.”
One of the hopes among rural Democrats is that Mr. Trump’s personal conduct, tone and ceaseless lying will be enough to turn some conservative voters against him.
Mr. Ainey said he’s hearing from people who voted for Mr. Trump who tell him they’ve had enough. “Their feelings toward Biden is that he’s not Trump,” he said. “He’s got some class. They’re not going to shake their heads every time he says something.”
He believes he can limit the damage this time around, that he can be a good team player and help get Mr. Biden close to 35 percent of the vote in Susquehanna.
“I really don’t think it’s going to be as bad this time,” he said. “People do not usually want to go backward, but in this case, I think some of them want to turn the clock back four or five years.”
Michael Sokolove is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.
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