‘The people want to fight’: Western Pennsylvania Democrats lay out future for party under Trump 2.0

What does winning look like for a post-Biden Democratic Party?

Their party is re-litigating the 2024 election, day by day, over the course of successive news cycles centered around new revelations about the 46th president and the unprecedented effort to hide his decline from the public.

The Tuesday release of Original Sin, a book from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, promises more startling details about the Joe Biden that aides were insisting was plagued merely by a busy schedule and not, as has been reported, more severe memory lapses and moments of halted speech.

Biden’s party is truly in the wilderness after the 2024 election cycle. High-profile Democrats tied to the Obama administration and Harris campaign both have unleashed hell on the Biden family for insisting that the president would run for re-election and not, as many thought he’d indicated, serve one term before endorsing a successor.

Many are also worried that the coalition patched together by Barack Obama and his then-running mate, Joe Biden, in 2008, is on the brink of shattering in the wake of his disastrous 2024 campaign. Experts point to declines in turnout among Black voters and inroads made by Republicans among Hispanic communities as a sign that the Democratic base is splintering.

Party officials could look to western Pennsylvania as a way to make sure it doesn’t, elected Democrats from the region argue.

The state was one of seven battlegrounds lost by Kamala Harris in November. Worse, Democrats lost a key Senate seat with Bob Casey’s defeat and two members of the state delegation in the House of Representatives lost to Republicans as well. The vice president bet big on the Philadelphia metro area, only to lose three wards to Donald Trump, which Biden had won in 2020 — her campaign then traded insults with Bob Brady, a longtime Philly Democratic power broker.

Democrats held their own out west, gaining ground in the suburbs surrounding Pittsburgh and the city itself. Rep. Summer Lee, the state’s first Black congresswoman, won a second term with ease and ever-so-slightly drove up her margin over two years prior. Chris DeLuzio won a second term in the 17th district, one of the state’s most important battleground districts.

So what do those Democrats say about where the party goes from here?

“If the people want to fight, they’re going to want leaders that want to fight,” says Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey.

The first Black mayor of the largest city in the region, Gainey spoke to The Independent on Saturday ahead of a tight Democratic primary fight’s conclusion on Tuesday. The mayor laid out a vision for what he described as a “multi-racial, multi-generational coalition” that mirrored the demographics that propelled Democrats to victory in three presidential elections since the 2000s.

Gainey said his goal was to “unite the people behind a common message of making sure that we’re speaking up for the working-class families, families that have been attacked.“

Facing the son of a former mayor, Corey O’Connor, Gainey is betting that the voters who turned out for Harris to keep her afloat across the city, including Black voters, younger Democrats and progressives, will see him to victory. His campaign has focused on issues including affordable housing, while he’s pledged to continue rejecting any cooperation with Donald Trump’s deportation authorities.

“That type of coalition led to, you know, Congresswoman Summer Lee being the first African-American congresswoman elected throughout the state,” Gainey told The Independent. “Then from there, we were able to step up and make Sarah Innamorato the first woman to be county exec.”

“I think that momentum running, you know, going into Kamala Harris’s campaign, just kept up, and we were able to make sure that that coalition delivered for her,” he said. “A lot of the metro areas, they didn’t see the same thing.”

Alex Wallach Hanson, the executive director of the left-leaning group Pennsylvania United, said that such a coalition “doesn’t exist by accident.” His group focuses on organizing voters around progressive causes across the state, including calling for investigations into the tax-exempt status of the state’s largest employer, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC).

“People around the country are looking at what happened, what’s happening here in Allegheny County,” said Hanson. “Why is it that this is one of the few cities in the country where Kamala Harris did nearly as well as Biden did in the 2024 election?”

Local leaders, including Lee and Gainey, have run “rooted in the identities and the stories of this multiracial, multi-generational working class coalition,” he said, “and then have brought those people into government, to help shape how government delivers for people in a really material way.”

Gainey spoke passionately in his interview about why seeing leaders from every community in government was important for younger Americans, explaining how politics seemed an impossible future when he was a child.

“Growing up, I never met a politician,” said the mayor.

Now that he’s older, he says: “I get it. I get the fact that at the end of the day, the fact that I’d never seen a politician until I got to college, how that impacted me. I get why I got into this business. Because I wanted to see something that I didn’t see as a child, a city where we can use…our political instruments as a way of lifting people up.”

Pittsburgh is the fastest-growing city in the state, and is home to a growing tech industry. Under Gainey, it dealt with a bridge collapse while the mayor fought to address a number of familiar urban issues, including rising homelessness and a lack of affordable housing. The city has also struggled to address police staffing issues, though it has recovered from a Covid-era violent crime spike that hit many metropolitan areas.

With their party in the minority in the House and Senate, a number of Pennsylvania Democrats have taken to pressing the offensive against Trump and the GOP in town hall meetings and other events, while Republicans struggle to push the president’s first legislative priority, a budget bill, over the finish line. Gainey, Lee and DeLuzio are among them — hosting events and town halls together aimed at drawing attention to Republican threats of cutting Medicaid benefits and rolling back rights for visa holders and immigrants.

DeLuzio appeared recently at an event headlined by Sen. Bernie Sanders as part of the latter’s massively popular Fighting Oligarchy speaking tour. Gainey and Lee also held an event with Conor Lamb, a former congressman rumored to be plotting another bid for office. John Fetterman, the state’s senior senator, remains plagued by reports of his erratic behavior and hasn’t held a public event in months.

“We need unprecedented unity right now,” Gainey, standing beside Lee, said at one town hall event in April. “This is the time where if you don’t know other communities, get to know them. Don’t judge them, know them.”

For his party, the mayor also offered a simple prescription: do not back away from the communities responsible for your past wins.

“Cutting things back and being conservative is not going to empower anybody. We need to be about the business of empowering people,” he said. “That’s the message we should be pushing: ‘We are here to protect your civil rights.’”

He added: “And again, I’m gonna bring it back to the local. That’s why in these metro areas that we’re talking about, it is so important for mayors to stand up and speak out and talk about exactly what we’re doing.”