Deluzio Gives the Rust Belt a Fighting Chance

The afternoon light filters through the windows at Red Hawk Coffee Roasters in Sharpsburg, catching the steam from U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio's black coffee. The congressman – dark-haired, fit, quietly confident in a gray polo and jeans – sits across from me at a corner table, the place nearly empty on this Monday afternoon. Outside, the remnants of Western Pennsylvania's industrial past line the Allegheny River. Inside, there's just the hum of an espresso machine and the sound of grinding beans to accompany our conversation.

It’s this gap, between a Democratic Party hemorrhaging working-class voters and a 41-year-old Iraq veteran who keeps winning them back, that might hold the key to the party’s future in purple America. While Bob Casey lost his Senate seat and Trump carried Pennsylvania for the second time in the past three presidential elections, Deluzio expanded his victory margin in a competitive district against another strong, well-funded Republican opponent. The question isn't just how he did it. It's whether any of the power brokers in his party are taking notes.

Deluzio brings up East Palestine, the 2023 rail disaster that resulted in seven deaths and untold damage from the release of atmospheric toxins across the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. “I fought and continue to fight hard for rail safety against [Norfolk Southern]. But I’ll tell you the other part of it is I didn't give a shit that the railroad didn’t like what I was doing and were funding my opponent.”

This is not the carefully calibrated language of a McKinsey consultant explaining manufacturing to steelworkers – precisely the kind of tone-deaf messaging that sank Democrats statewide. No, Deluzio speaks like someone who grew up here. He graduated from Pittsburgh’s Bishop Canevin High School before attending the Naval Academy and Georgetown Law, which was more than enough time for him to absorb an essential political truth about this region: people want brawlers in rolled-up shirtsleeves, not smooth-as-silk Gavin Newsom or Mitt Romney types fresh from visits to the hair stylist and the focus group.

“I don't take corporate PAC money,” Deluzio tells me, unprompted. “I think that’s not the same for everyone in my party. Certainly, the Republicans are like pigs at the trough with corporate money.”

His Monopoly Busters Caucus, launched with a mix of progressives like Pramila Jayapal and moderates like Angie Craig, recently brought a father-son pharmacy duo from his district to Washington. The pair were getting squeezed by pharmacy benefit managers, the same corporate middlemen driving up drug costs everywhere. “Small business owners are part of the coalition that I want us to have,” he says, “who are getting screwed by corporate power.”

Economic populism isn’t new in Western Pennsylvania. But Deluzio has updated it for an era of strategic tariffs and supply chain nationalism. “There's a place for very strategic and focused trade enforcement,” he explains, distinguishing his position from Trump’s scattershot approach. “You've got to pair that with industrial policy. You've got to be doing pro-worker things.”

Many Democrats chide him for this. When a video surfaced of Deluzio defending strategic tariffs last April, Jonathan Chait and the usual X progressives went after him like he’d endorsed MAGA economics. The Center for New Liberalism – free-trade absolutists who think the solution to every problem is more globalization, more immigration, and a flatter world – went so far as to give him an “F” grade on their “Congressional Tariff Messaging Index.”

But that “F” grade might be the best endorsement Deluzio could get in Beaver County. The same voices attacking him for trade heresy are the ones who can’t understand why Democrats keep losing the Rust Belt. They’re grading politicians on their fealty to the very New Democrat-meets-neoconservative economic theories that brought us NAFTA in the 1990s and gutted these communities in the first place.

When I mention that Biden had started with a relatively sound industrial policy – the CHIPS Act, the infrastructure bill – Deluzio nods and takes a dig at Trump’s allegedly ChatGPT-abetted tariff chaos: “If you’re in an industry where you can’t pick up slack production capacity in the drop of a hat and you can't plan because the tariff levels are changing day to day, how the heck do you plan?”

He's walking a tightrope that shouldn’t exist in American politics but does: supporting some tariffs without endorsing Trump’s trade war, backing unions without alienating small business, promoting energy development without totally abandoning environmental concerns. In Washington, these positions might seem incoherent. In Beaver County, where young people need both good jobs and clean air, they make perfect sense. Especially as the future to which they’re heading seems unclear at best, constrained or straitened at worst. 

“I'm 41,” Deluzio says, leaning forward to really drive home this point, “And you're around my age or younger [I’m 43]. We’re the first Americans in a long, long time to expect to be worse off than our parents. That is a failure of our government across decades and parties, and we should not be shy about that.”

The acknowledgment that something fundamental has broken in the American promise runs through everything Deluzio says. But unlike the party’s progressive wing, which often leads with cultural critiques, or its moderate wing, which papers over problems with process-speak, Deluzio goes straight at kitchen-table economics.

Take Social Security. While millennials and Gen X have internalized its coming insolvency as inevitable, Deluzio refuses to accept it. “That's a choice that I'm not going to make,” he says firmly. He's backing legislation to keep it solvent through 2100 by lifting the payroll tax cap. “Someone who makes a billion dollars pays the same as someone who makes $180,000 for Social Security. It’s insane.”

When I point out that even explaining how the payroll tax works hasn’t convinced younger voters the program will survive, his jaw sets. He’s confident that, of all his fighting issues, this is among the clearest winners given how it implicates everyone. "[Conservatives] have, for now, won that fight. I don’t give up on that. This seems like the easiest fight to win back.”

On energy, Deluzio is equally pragmatic. Two shuttered power plants in his district might come back online to help meet AI data center demand. The Appalachian hydrogen hub promises clean energy jobs for as long as the Treasury makes the tax credits workable for natural gas with carbon capture. “The money came in for those hydrogen hubs,” he notes. “We should compete and get money. We should compete and get those investments and put that money into the technology and see if it works.” This is what climate policy looks like when you represent both nuclear plant workers and communities worried about cracker plant emissions.

It’s clear that Deluzio has mastery of the talking points related to these issues, which he has run on and won with twice already. But what about cultural issues, which can cost Democrats “bigly” when the Republicans plaster the airwaves with something like the “Kamala is for they/them” advertisements from the last election cycle?

Deluzio doesn’t retreat or equivocate. Instead, he reframes: “As I talk about corruption and the corporate power that's ripping people off, some trans person wanting dignity in the world is not why your prescription drugs are expensive.”

He continues: “I'm not going to backtrack on standing up for people for their basic dignity. It’s not one or the other to me. And so I don't take the bait. I’m clear on the economic fight, and I think we can do both of those things.”

When I press him on the small in number yet inescapable issues causing even Democratic heavyweights like the aforementioned slickly-coiffed Gavin Newsom to alter their positions, like assigned-male-at-birth trans athletes in women’s sports, he pivots back to his people. “You've got to listen to your voters,” he says. “People ought to be hearing from you the whole time you're in office about what you’re fighting for.”

This isn’t a perfect answer, and he surely realizes it. But it’s honest about the tension without surrendering either economic populism or basic human dignity. In a party torn between its college-educated base and the working-class voters it has been losing to the Republicans but still needs to win, Deluzio is trying to hold the center by fighting on terrain where both groups agree: corporate greed is killing the American dream.

January 6th is another potent form of quicksand for Democrats: too much focus and you sound like a #Resistance social media poster; too little and you appear to be normalizing an attack on the Capitol. Deluzio views it as a blue-collar issue at base, namely violence directed at hard-working union police officers: “I rage every once in a while about the fact that I will take no lecture from Trump or these other guys about patriotism as he pardoned January 6th cop beaters for crying out loud,” he says, his voice rising slightly for the first time in our conversation. “I've got 138 municipalities in my district. We know our local cops. We know our borough governments. So I will take no lecture from the Republicans about whether I’m backing the blue and being unpatriotic while you’re pardoning these guys who beat the hell out of cops defending the Capitol.”

As our conversation winds down, with the afternoon sun starting to slant through Sharpsburg's old downtown buildings, I ask Deluzio what his party needs to understand. “We need more of a fighting Democratic Party,” he says simply. “It’s got to be one that is laser focused on this economic fight. Not at the expense of anything else, but I think it has to be a central part of it.” Think James Carville’s highly-effective “It’s the economy, stupid” messaging in 1992, even if candidate Bill Clinton’s subsequent neoliberal reforms didn’t exactly set up the country for future success.

He talks about congressional stock trading bans, about the $35 Medicare insulin cap, about the infrastructure money flowing into Western Pennsylvania. But more than all these policies, he’s talking about posture. My steelworker and coal miner parents and grandparents would have liked what I’m seeing. Here, it seems, was someone willing to name enemies and pick fights he believes he can win.

“I think what they are doing is pretty clear, they’re gutting the Veterans Administration so they can privatize it,” he says of the Trump administration's veterans’ policies. “If you’re a rural veteran, there is not some excess of hospitals and doctor's offices going to be there to take care of you if the VA footprint goes away.”

“Life is expensive,” he says as we prepare to leave. “You talk to people, they know life is expensive. Republicans are in full control of Washington and costs continue to rise. They are failing at the number one issue for voters based on every poll I see.”

Deluzio’s unlikely ascent while his party collapsed around him speaks to how much his embrace of this issue has elevated him. As Justin Vassallo recently argued in Compact, the Congressman’s “perseverance” as other Rust Belt Democrats like Bob Casey and former Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown fell “adds a wrinkle to the prevailing narrative” about the region’s political realignment. There might still be a formula that guarantees the survival of Rust Belt Democrats and the election-deciding independent voters willing to support them.

That formula isn’t complicated, though executing it still seems to be beyond most of his colleagues. Fight corporate power explicitly and constantly. Support workers without apology. Invest in domestic manufacturing with the same fervor Republicans claim to but don’t. Treat voter concerns about crime and borders and drug prices as legitimate rather than false consciousness. And stop talking like a consultant.

“It’s all about doing the hard work, right?” Deluzio says near the end of our conversation. “People taking a shot, whether you’re a small business owner or you're someone who’s worked, it’s about an economy for people who are working hard. I think Democrats got to get that back to be more of the central part of how we talk about the economic part of the argument here.”

Whether Democrats listen to Chris Deluzio might determine whether they have a future in places like Western Pennsylvania. Whether they have a future in places like Western Pennsylvania might determine whether they have a future at all. Their path back to power runs through Beaver County, and it sounds less like a DSA-powered revolution than a centrist return – to fighting words, fighting faiths, and the fundamental promise that if you work hard in America, you ought to be able to afford a decent life.

Activists on the fringes of either party will rush to tell you that’s not everything, that there are so many other niche matters that must be resolved first. But given the deplorable state of American politics right now, it might be enough.

Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work.