Biden voters in Pennsylvania see promises kept on Covid. They're watching for what's next.
Erie County, which Biden flipped back blue in 2020, has struggled to reverse a decade of population decline and manufacturing job losses.
April 25, 2021, 4:30 AM EDT
By Henry J. Gomez
ERIE, Pa. — Robin Westcott remembers her joy when Joe Biden was elected last fall.
Not only had Biden won with a narrow victory in Pennsylvania, but he also had carried Erie County, where Westcott has lived for most of her 62 years. Once reliably Democratic in presidential elections, the voters here in 2016 broke for Donald Trump — the first time they favored a Republican White House hopeful since Ronald Reagan in 1984. The county, which pokes out from the northwesternmost corner of the state and into Lake Erie, became something of a Rorschach test for the Rust Belt.
In a region that has lost manufacturing jobs by the thousands, Trump’s politics of blame and grievance connected with just enough working-class voters. For a little while, anyway.
“Back to blue, thank God,” Westcott, a retired college admissions coordinator, said during a lunch stop this month at the Lawrence Park Dinor, a cafe inside an old train car and named for the township it serves just east of Erie (with a spelling that seems to be unique to the area). “I thought the world was coming to an end.”
more
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/biden-voters-pennsylvania-see-promises-kept-covid-they-re-watching-n1264940
