Pennsylvania’s Grassroots Revival

Tracy Wilson grew up in Luzerne Township, Pennsylvania, a cluster of unincorporated towns around which the Monongahela River loops as it winds its way from Fayette County northward toward Pittsburgh. Some five thousand people live here today, half as many as eighty years ago, when Fayette was at the peak of its economic growth. The Connellsville seam there bears some of the world’s best bituminous coal for conversion into coke, which was essential to early iron and steelmaking. By the 1880s Fayette produced nearly half of all coke nationwide, sending it downstream on wooden barges to the iron and steel mills burgeoning near Pittsburgh.

In the 1920s, at the height of the coal boom, Fayette’s county seat, Uniontown, had the most millionaires per capita in the United States. By then the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) were decades into the struggle to unionize Pennsylvania’s anthracite and bituminous coal fields. In 1922 in nearby Windber, a UMWA flyer urged nonunion miners to “[THROW] OFF THEIR FEAR.” “STRIKE!!!” it said: “650,000 Miners Are With You.” Further waves of strikes in the 1930s and 1940s cemented the UMWA’s representation of the mines; Pennsylvania’s organized miners sat alongside its steelworkers as allies within Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal industrial order.

Tracy’s father was born in 1922. As a boy he worked leading horses in and out of the mine. After graduating high school in 1941 he went to work in the mine full-time and remained there until 1982, apart from a stint in the army between 1942 and 1946. Like all the men around him, he belonged to the UMWA. Benefitting from strong industrial demand, internal cohesion, public support, and a sympathetic national government, the union secured its members decent salaries for dangerous work.

That legacy was still alive when Tracy was growing up in the 1970s. In those days Fayette County voted Democrat up and down the ticket. Union and local Democratic party organizations had a strong presence in civic life, holding monthly meetings and sponsoring youth sports. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency by a landslide, Jimmy Carter got nearly 60 percent of the vote here. In 1988 Michael Dukakis got 66 percent. “It was a proud thing to be a Democrat back in the day, in this area,” Tracy told me when we spoke on the phone in July. “One of my core memories was going to vote with my dad as a child. He would go in and seconds later would walk back out”—that is, he voted straight ticket, rather than choosing among nominees, office by office. “He said if anybody knows me, they already know how I voted. He was so proud to be a Democrat.”

For the past thirty years, however, Democrats have decreased their vote share in each presidential election here. The Republicans climbed from under 25 percent of the vote in 1992 to more than 65 percent in 2020. In this, Fayette County is similar to many former mining and postindustrial regions across the US and Western Europe, where economic stagnation and shrinking union employment have gone hand in hand with a turn toward right-wing populist parties that blame immigration and left-wing cultural elites for declining prosperity.

It is true that Fayette County is not thriving—and if you lived here, you would want an explanation too. Median household income is $18,000 lower than the state median; in Uniontown, once home to millionaires, it has fallen to under $38,000. Fayette is 90 percent white and 53 percent rural; less than a fifth of adults have completed a college degree. The opioid epidemic hit here early and hard. From 2014 to 2017 the county had the second-highest number of opioid-related fatalities in Pennsylvania. 

Today just 2.4 percent of the employed population in Fayette works in mining, oil, or gas—compared to 20 percent in health care. The 2010s boom in unconventional shale oil and gas extraction—fracking—across western and northern Pennsylvania never created significant direct jobs for locals. But it did bring big hopes and brief dynamism, as energy companies leased mineral rights from rural residents to drill on their land. For a few years in the 2010s, monthly royalty checks reached significant numbers of property owners in communities that hadn’t experienced a good business cycle in decades. But even this brief bonanza largely passed Fayette by: over the course of the decade nearly six thousand unconventional wells were drilled in neighboring Washington and Greene counties; Fayette saw barely five hundred.

Royalty checks have now largely dried up in southwest Pennsylvania, as new shale gas supply elsewhere drives down prices and makes further drilling unattractive. Yet many here blame the Democratic party. Shale oil companies, FOX News, and Republican politicians have painted Democrats as enemies of extraction, and they’re not exactly wrong. In 2020, responding to calls from climate activists, multiple Democratic presidential candidates promised to ban fracking, Kamala Harris among them. (Her stated position has since changed.)

Still, the dislike for Democrats in places like Fayette goes beyond policy disputes. Over the past eight years, I’ve heard stories from active Democrats in rural and Rust Belt Pennsylvania: about voters yelling “demon-rat” in their face when they work the polls, about nighttime vandals  slashing yard signs, about coworkers accusing them of supporting “pedophiles” in the summer of 2020, when Q-Anon–adjacent conspiracy theories were at their height. Perhaps it’s no surprise that, as Tracy told me, “there are so many people who are, like, afraid to say they are a Democrat.”

Tracy didn’t think of herself as particularly political before 2016. But she was excited to vote for Hilary Clinton, and assumed voters in other, more progressive places would carry Clinton to victory. When Donald Trump won, Tracy felt she had to do something. She found her way to a newly formed grassroots group, the Fayette New Deal Democrats. She never imagined she would soon be helping rebuild the Democratic Party from the bottom up.

Across suburban, rural, and Rust Belt Pennsylvania, a particular demographic slice of women—middle-aged or older, largely college-educated, mostly white—not only got involved in grassroots political activism after 2017 but also entered local Democratic party organizations. Suburban women’s “Resistance” organizing briefly drew journalistic attention around the 2018 blue wave congressional elections. But its continuation and impact has gone largely unremarked, perhaps because the story unites three topics rarely associated with glamorous radicalism: aging women, the daily work that keeps volunteer organizations running, and the institutional Democratic party.

Thousands of locally initiated center-to-left grassroots groups formed nationwide after Donald Trump’s election. Women (and smaller numbers of like-minded men) connected at the Women’s Marches held across the country on the weekend of Trump’s inauguration, or at protests at the offices of Republican senators and congressmen. They turned Pantsuit Nation Facebook groups toward hands-on action, or reactivated Obama 2008 neighborhood teams. They were encouraged by new national organizations like Swing Left, Sister District, and Indivisible, whose “find your group” online map and directory became a de facto bulletin board for this groundswell. While many of the groups formed in that 2017 outpouring have not endured, some have. Perhaps even more consequentially, allies forged in that moment often went on to lead nonhostile takeovers of local party institutions: not kicking former participants out, just moving in and starting to get stuff done. In southwest Pennsylvania alone, the Democratic committees of Westmoreland, Washington, Beaver, Butler, Indiana, and Somerset Counties are all chaired by women who stepped into political activism in the aftermath of Clinton’s defeat.

In former mining and Rust Belt Pennsylvania, local Democratic party leadership had until this surge been in the hands of people who looked pretty much like the core of the region’s Democratic membership in its mid-twentieth century heyday: white, male, socially conservative, linked to industrial unions or building trades—that is, people whose local peers had been voting in declining numbers for Democrats at the top of the ticket since at least the 1990s. County committees in many such places resembled beleaguered fraternal organizations: hosting annual banquets for their dwindling ranks, lamenting bad choices made elsewhere, trying not to disturb the status quo. Many committees had large numbers of vacant seats. Bylaws (adopted by each county committee in line with guidance from the state party) specified that one male and one female member should be elected in each precinct, but sometimes no one bothered to run. Often new county chairs’ first task was to figure out how many precinct slots were actually filled.

Meanwhile, even in counties where Democratic vote shares were growing, local parties functioned quite separately from the passions of national elections. Precinct-persons, ward leaders, and even county leaders had little to do with presidential campaigns, which parachuted in with imported staff to direct field operations. Local volunteers—who generally had no connection to the local party organizations—were expected to show up, knock on prescribed doors, deliver a canned pitch, and play no further part once the election was over. 

Trump’s 2016 victory brought a stark break from this pattern of transitory cyclical engagement. Rather than turn away, the most active campaign volunteers leaned further in. After the inauguration and Women’s March, more newcomers joined them. They found local, county, and state-level Democratic organizations failing to reach out to new voters or host political discussions, letting downballot and even congressional seats go uncontested, and recruiting the same candidates or their demographic clones cycle after cycle. They rolled up their sleeves.

You might expect Democratic Party institutions in blue cities to have welcomed newcomers with progressive energy—but the opposite can happen. In Pennsylvania’s Democrat-run cities, local party entities, however sclerotic, are part of an endorsement system with electoral (and financial) consequences. New activists struggled for access, transparency, and involvement in decision-making. In much of Philadelphia, for instance, Democratic ward leaders controlled ward committees’ agendas and endorsements. Activists pursued “open wards” reforms to change the rules to allow committee members to hear from all candidates seeking endorsement, vote freely among them, and support nonendorsed candidates in the primaries without fear of retribution. Despite early momentum in 2018, as of 2023 under a dozen of Philly’s sixty-six wards had voted to become open.

In once-purple upscale suburbs like many of those in Allegheny County, around Pittsburgh, the newcomers encountered less resistance and more opportunity. Ward and township committees swelled with the influx of attendees. In some cases they created new “associate member” or “task force” categories to accommodate volunteers after open precinct-person slots filled up. These revitalized committees have built organizational muscle, become savvier about candidate recruitment and messaging, and steadily flipped school board, town council, and state legislature seats. Across Pennsylvania, Democrats flipped six state senate and fourteen state house seats in 2018–2019, then gained another twelve house seats in 2022—almost all in the relatively prosperous suburban and exurban communities where this new local organizing has been strongest.

The grassroots efflorescence has been smaller in rural counties, where support for Democrats has been eroding since the 1970s and 1980s, and former mining and steelmaking areas like Fayette County, where the slide started in the 1990s. It has also had less electoral success: here the new activists are swimming against the tide of an ongoing, nationwide realignment that is carrying less educated voters away from the Democratic party. This is not unique to Pennsylvania, or even the United States. Across Western democracies, more highly educated voters tend to prioritize cosmopolitan values and “post-material” issues: they worry about the wellbeing of immigrants and refugees; about shared global challenges, like climate change; and about rights to self-expression that may challenge traditional gender norms.

And yet you don’t have to have a college degree to worry about rising temperatures or think trans lives matter. In a county like Fayette, there are some young people, some queer people, and lots of women who grew up with abortion access as a given. There are also lots of people who would benefit from expanded collective bargaining in health care and service occupations, and therefore from policies like the Protecting the Right to Organize Act and union-friendly National Labor Relations Board appointees. (Some of those latter, of course, are young, women, or queer too.) In theory the Democratic Party should not only attract voters with “post-material” concerns here, but those with kitchen-table priorities as well.

But it’s not going to happen automatically. If people matching any of the above profiles come to see “Democrat” as a label for leaders who champion things they value—and to see voting as something people like them do—they would likely vote for Democratic candidates. Instilling those convictions among potential voters, not through hectoring ads every four years but by year-round personal example and organic outreach, is one of the things party organizations once did. Now, mainly, they don’t.

In their recent book The Hollow Parties, the political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld argue convincingly that since the 1970s both parties have declined as effective vehicles for participatory politics.¹ On the Democratic side, formal party organisms have been squeezed aside by individual megadonors and the various think tanks, super PACs, campaign professionals, and nonprofits they fund. Actors within this “para-party blob” might speak about “grassroots engagement” and even “movement building,” but nothing holds them accountable to the voters they claim to represent. Schlozman, Rosenfeld, and other scholars² have argued that to reverse these trends, local party have to be rebuilt from the bottom up—precisely what newcomers have been doing in Pennsylvania since 2017.

Is that tide already turning? Clear numbers on local party participation are hard to come by. National Democratic campaigns collect data continuously: counting door knocks and volunteer shifts, targeting subsets of voters in exhaustive detail. Yet there seems hardly any interest in tracking and aggregating data on precinct-person slots, meeting attendance, or any other aspect of local party health.

What is clear is that there is a real connection between the 2017 grassroots boom and the renewal of local Democratic party infrastructure. In 2018 the sociologist Theda Skocpol and her research team (of which I was a member) identified some 225 new Democrat-aligned grassroots groups across Pennsylvania, formed in the aftermath of Trump’s election. I tracked what happened next in the counties near me in the state’s southwest: in each case new stalwarts moved into local Democratic party organizations, with fresh ideas, connections, and outreach strategies. There has been friction and sometimes outright conflict. But channeling and adjudicating conflict is one thing local party structures are meant to do: they have rules about quorums and endorsements, and their bylaws can be revised, if you can whip up enough votes.

This is not a marginal development. The counties with Democratic committees led by grassroots-aligned female activists I first met between 2017 and 2018—Westmoreland, Washington, Beaver, Butler, Indiana, and Somerset—cover over a million people. In Allegheny County (population 1.2 million) similar processes have played out within many urban ward committees and suburban township committees, helping shape a well-orchestrated campaign that in 2022 replaced the old-guard leadership.

If we want to understand how “the party” consolidated so quickly around Harris after Biden’s withdrawal, we need to consider the thick networks these grassroots groups have established on the ground. When Harris reached out to DNC delegates for their support during a momentous twenty-four hours in July, Pennsylvania’s delegation looked little like it had eight years earlier. There were many new members, and they had ties both with the broader community of engaged Democrats and with each other. These were the people with whom they had spent the past years knocking doors, recruiting candidates, and building coalitions. In a Facebook group linked to an Allegheny County grassroots network formed in 2017, one commentator marveled at the number of people she knew personally who were headed to the DNC, for the first time. I had had exactly the same thought.

To navigate moments of crisis, or for that matter steer through doldrums, an organization needs formal structures that simultaneously tie active core members together and connect them to a broader populace. This isn’t rocket science: the National Democratic Training Committee, the Christian Coalition, the left-wing Forge Organizing Magazine, and about two dozen other organizations all have detailed online guides that explain how to organize a precinct captain system. The hard truth, though, is that these techniques have grown more difficult to apply in recent decades. We spend less time with one another than we used to, and much less time in regular group commitments. But some people are still inveterate joiners and servers. And sometimes a political cataclysm can push many such people to find each other with a shared mission. Tracy’s journey shows how that might work.

The matriarch of a blended family, with seven kids and fourteen grandkids, Tracy had her hands full with the household and her full-time job as a customer care advisor in the gas utility industry. (“I am a trainwreck,” she told me. “Might be a trainwreck of glitter and pizza, but it’s a trainwreck.”) She helped out with the grandkids weekly during the school year and drove them to Vacation Bible School in the summer. Her husband, in addition to his own job, is lay minister and chairman of the board at his church.

After Trump’s victory, Tracy joined the just-founded Fayette New Deal Democrats. In these months, a dozen or more new grassroots groups emerged in each of southeast Pennsylvania’s prosperous suburban counties; in Allegheny County the figure was over two dozen. Fayette, as far as I have been able to find, had just this one. In the summer and fall of 2020 Tracy volunteered and canvassed, building relationships that didn’t end with the campaign. In 2021, when the local Democratic committee chair asked if she was interested in being her township’s committeeperson, she realized she was: “I really wanted to get involved on that side, not just as a club.” She also got elected as the township’s auditor, responsible for conducting a yearly audit of its accounts and taxes and filing financial reports to the state. And she joined the Democratic Women of Fayette County (DWOFC).

The Pennsylvania Federation of Democratic Women and its local affiliates are in some ways a throwback to an earlier time—one when men’s voices, rather than women’s, rang out in the halls of county Democratic Committees. When women poured into political action in 2017 in big cities and blue suburbs, they didn’t end up in Democratic Women’s chapters; there, as we have seen, they channeled their activism into wholly new organizations, often loosely affiliated to Indivisible or scoped around activist campaigns to flip congressional seats. The story was different in rural counties nearby, where the political cultures tend to be more conservative and there are fewer highly educated, highly politicized women. Here local Democratic Women’s organizations often emerged as a natural gathering point for local women’s new energies. In multiple cases leadership experience and friendships formed in these groups then became a springboard for women to renovate the county Democratic Committee as a whole.

By February 2023 Tracy was secretary of the Democratic Women of Fayette County; a year later, she was its president. “This is my hobby, this and the grandkids,” she said. Every weekend she tries to take her seven-year-old grandson out to do one thing for the earth, one thing for the community, one political thing, and ice cream. For the earth they recycle; for the community they fill up blessing boxes for the homeless. She took grandkids to the Women’s March, a Black Lives Matter rally, door-knocking for candidates, on petition drives.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, she said, “our group blew up.” They held an emergency meeting; membership grew to over a hundred; they organized a women’s rights march to the courthouse in Uniontown. In 2020 Joe Biden only got 33 percent of the vote in Fayette County, but two years later the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Josh Shapiro, got 43 percent.

I’ve written elsewhere about Democrats’ problem with “last-mile messaging”: trusted local interlocutors and communications channels—talk radio shows, church newsletters, literal bulletin boards, nonpolitical Facebook or NextDoor groups—that reach regular (which is to say non-political) voters where they are. The value of the DWOFC’s monthly events is that they not only build internal camaraderie but also reach outward, drawing likeminded community members into the party. These events often reflect values and priorities not so different from those of Democrats living in bluer terrain. For one early event Tracy brought three women from outside the organization as speakers: the director of the Fayette County Genders and Sexualities Alliance (“Some of our Dem ladies are older, I wasn’t sure how it would fly”); Angela Brown, the first black woman elected to the Uniontown City Council; and a single Black mom from Uniontown who gives talks at local churches about Black women’s history. “They loved it. I had feedback that was the best meeting they had ever been to. So many connections, new ideas come out of that.” The DWOFC organized a Period Product drive, collecting boxes of tampons and pads for two agencies in Fayette County; did a fundraising drive for a women’s veterans’ shelter; and hosted a voter registration table at Pride in the Park in Connellsville. Some of the older ladies ended up wearing pride stickers, Tracy told me in delight.

Tracy’s chapter of the Democratic Women voted to take gender off the membership application, “because what about a trans person, or whatever? We are open to everyone, and every paid member in good standing gets a vote.” The DWOFC plans to send three people, including a man, as delegates to the state’s Federation of Democratic Women. “We need to expand, and we are never going to get Gen Z if we are not inclusive.” Tracy comes from a “process improvement” background in her professional life, she explains. It seems self-evident to her to that an organization that seeks to grow should help people participate with as few obstacles as possible. For Tracy inclusion is a matter of pragmatic common sense as well as values, and she expects people to be open-minded.

I first talked to Tracy in July—after the Biden debate, but before he dropped out. Even then she was optimistic. That month’s meeting of the DWOFC had more than twice the attendance expected: two dozen people showed up, including five newcomers who became members on the spot. Tracy attributed the swelling engagement to concern over Project 2025. She was raising awareness: directing group members to a virtual session about it by the historian Heather Cox Richardson, creating handouts for the county fair, contemplating selling T-shirts to pay for STOP PROJECT 2025 billboards.

I got back in touch in mid-September, after the Harris–Trump debate. “I have never seen such excitement in our red county,” she said. “We staffed the Dem booth at our county fair and handed out info on Project 2025.” The DWOFC is trying to make it easy for new volunteers, even those still leery about face-to-face voter outreach: “We have had one postcard party and another scheduled for this week. We are doing 2,500 postcards to swing states.” (They ended up doing three thousand.) But they are also building up a forthright local presence, helping staff the county Democratic Committee’s new physical office, door-knocking, phone banking. They have made Kamala’s signature look the theme of an upcoming “chucks and pearls party” fundraiser. “We even have had many Republicans stop at the office to pick up signs,” Tracy told me. “They say they are just done with the chaos. They said at some point you just have to do what’s right.”

Kamala Harris is not going to win Fayette County. Democrats do slightly worse here every four years, losing about 5 percentage points of vote share each time. In 2016 the decline accelerated; in 2020 it reverted to the trendline, which is to say that Hillary Clinton did eleven percentage points worse than Obama had in 2012, while Biden did only one point worse than Clinton. The decline affects the full range of offices. A decade ago some locally rooted downballot Democrats still hung on in Fayette and counties like it, but ever fewer still do: nationalized party brands are shaping not only presidential and congressional vote choices but state, county, and local races.

The DWOFC’s achievements—gaining new members five or six at a time, showing up at county fairs, registering voters at Pride in the Park—are not going to single-handedly change that. But nor were the labor struggles that moved men like Tracy Wilson’s father to identify as a proud union coal miner—and therefore as a proud Democrat—achieved single-handedly. There is a long game to be played here, which requires the energy of local leaders even as it cannot be won on those energies alone.

Fayette’s story is different from that of the upscale once-purple suburbs more commonly associated with “the Resistance.” But in both kinds of places, local Democratic party entities are being rebuilt by people who were newcomers seven years ago. In each case, they now include even newer arrivals, as well as members of the Democratic old guard who stayed around. Leaders also know each other across geographies; they trade success stories and sympathize over hard losses, especially in rural and Rust Belt communities where the going is going to stay tough.

Local party structures in 2016 were in most places like empty shells on the beach, the calcified leavings of the life processes of beings now dead and gone. Not unlike hermit crabs, the local grassroots activists spawned by Trump’s election scuttered along looking to take action, found those shells fit for purpose, and moved in. Tracy Wilson’s accounts of ladies staffing county fair booths, attending monthly meetings, and handing out yard signs outside a newly opened Democratic office suggest slow growth replacing atrophy: when there’s something to attach to, more people do just that.

In 1922, as they sought to persuade nonunion miners to come together and join the strike, the UMWA proclaimed that UNION TOWNS ARE FREE TOWNS. They laid out what could be won: “The Right of Free Speech. The Right of Free Assembly…. The Mine Committee’s protection against unfair bosses.” And they promised new joiners they would not be alone: “650,000 Miners Are With You.” It’s a hundred and two years later and we still need to know that others are with us, if we want to make change.