Local Democratic Parties in Rust Belt and Rural SW Pennsylvania, 1970s-Present

• In Event: Parties, Activists, and Other Groups in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Abstract

Upscale suburbs have seen an explosion of new grassroots organizing in the era of Trump. From January 2017 onward, as Trump tweeted and congressional Republicans ducked comment and gutted healthcare protections, newly engaged activists were on the march. Anywhere there were college-educated women with disposable time and resources, some of those women took that time and those resources and poured them into the nearest political target. Less well understood, but with the potential for transformative long-term impact, is the rebirth of local Democratic organizing in rural and rust belt counties far away from metropolitan prosperity and cultural circuits. This paper draws on archival and oral historical research in southwest Pennsylvania’s steel and coal country. In these aging county seats, hard-hit river towns, and pension-sustained subdivisions, the local Democratic Party went from a ubiquitous presence and major source of patronage in the 1970s to a barely visible handful of office-holders, sometimes accused of corruption and often of inaction, by the first decades of the 21st century. Yet local party organizations have come to play an unexpectedly central role here in the post 2016 era. Many have seen fractious battles over internal reform and transparency, but they have also consistently emerged as uniquely generative spaces of encounter and alliance-building between new grassroots activists, revitalized labor councils, and aging Democratic faithfuls who are organically connected to neighbors and networks the national party stopped reaching some time ago: but might one day again. This paper presents in-depth case studies built from research in Beaver, Armstrong, Washington, Westmoreland, and Mercer Counties in southwest Pennsylvania.

Author

• Lara Putnam, University of Pittsburgh