Pennsylvania's Politicians Have One Lockstep Issue

The April 20 PennLive/Bravo Group Morning Scrapple poll contains several headline-worthy numbers. President Trump’s Pennsylvania approval has slipped to 39% (national polls show it even lower, at 32%), with 60% disapproving and 52% of those “strongly.” U.S. Sen. John Fetterman sits at 46% approval against 47% disapproval, essentially unchanged since March. Gov. Josh Shapiro is on cruise control at 57% re-elect, including 36% who say they would “definitely” back him over anyone the GOP puts up. The state-focused poll in question asked voters about voter ID, mail-in ballots, a school-choice tax credit, and the direction of the country — but it did not specifically ask about the war in Iran.

They’ve got a point, because the war is underwater nationally. A late-March Pew Research survey found 61% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the conflict. Marist and Quinnipiac pegged opposition to the war itself between 54% and 56%. Fuel in Pennsylvania was running 18% above year-ago levels by mid-March, and the March BLS release showed a 21% national jump from February once the Strait of Hormuz seized up. 

I’ve written before about why Fetterman’s ugly-sweater defiance of Democratic orthodoxy has played so well with my aunts, uncles, and cousins in Ellsworth and Bentleyville. My stepdad, retired out of the UMWA after thirty years underground, occasionally gets a kick out of a man who tells his own leadership to suck it up. My uncle, a retired public school teacher, admired him for refusing to apologize for the 2013 Braddock shotgun incident involving a “citizen’s arrest” of a Black jogger when Conor Lamb tried to make it a cudgel in their primary. When my mom said Fetterman was a phony rich kid from York, her brother pointed to how, wealthy carpetbagger or not, he took justice into his own hands on Rankin Bridge.

What they’re now asking me is why Israel is the one issue where the loose cannon suddenly locks into formation with everyone else. They see Fetterman drape himself in the Israeli flag,  McCormick voting the same way on every war powers measure, and Shapiro tacitly backing the whole thing from Harrisburg — then watch the pump prices soar at the Kwik Fill just a few blocks from the bar my dad used to own. 

Rust Belt support for Israel has never been as uniform as the donor class wants to pretend. My father played tackle at West Virginia against Jim Traficant, Pitt’s savvy quarterback, in the early-sixties Backyard Brawl; a couple of years later the two of them were briefly teammates on a semipro outfit. Traficant went home to Youngstown, successfully defended himself in a federal racketeering trial, won nine terms in the House before his 2002 expulsion and federal prison term, and spent most of that career dodging the IRS, trying to slash foreign aid to Israel, and defending John Demjanjuk, the Cleveland-area autoworker convicted in Israel as “Ivan the Terrible” before the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1993. 

On an October 1990 Donahue taping at Stambaugh Auditorium in Youngstown, Traficant attacked a Jewish audience member who had asked him a question and informed the national TV audience that the next person in New York who called him an antisemite was going to get punched in the mouth. Three years later he flew to Israel himself to escort Demjanjuk home.

Those sentiments lived in Mahoning Valley ethnic-Catholic precincts, and they lived in Pittsburgh and Washington County, too – several of my mother’s Old-World cousins served in Slovakia’s World War II-era pro-Axis government – in union halls of the sort where Traficant gave his most fiery speeches, and they never fully went away.

My stepdad is not Jim Traficant and didn’t particularly care for his bombastic style. He is a retired miner who spent half his career on his knees and doesn’t want his declining years and inflation-wracked pension chewed up by another forever war while gas runs past five dollars a gallon. He’s one of many who doesn’t understand why the hoodie-wearing big-man senator he voted for because that senator wasn’t afraid to speak his mind has become a flag-draped yes-man for a war most Americans don’t want. Fetterman’s flat line in a state where Trump is sinking like a stone suggests plenty of voters still need to do this sorting in their own heads, making sense of the “Fettermania” that got him to break with his party on pardons and the border and Israel loyalist who will never break with Netanyahu.

At least for now, Shapiro won’t have to answer for any of it. The quixotic write-in effort for disastrous 2022 candidate Doug Mastriano against Republican primary nominee Stacy Garrity ensures that whatever heat comes from the war will redound to the state’s badly-disorganized GOP first, and the $30 million war chest the governor rolled into 2026 will do the rest. Expect Pennsylvania to stay purple, like a great big bruise. The war that Trump can’t shake and Fetterman won’t question will surely decide how black-and-blue — namely, Democratic blue, district by district — this state gets by November.