MONESSEN, Pa. — A simple sign outside a restaurant greeted visitors as they drove into a small, western Pennsylvania town ahead of Donald Trump’s policy speech last week.
“TRUMP 2016: MAKE MONESSEN GREAT AGAIN.”
Monessen, a town of just over 7,000 that sits about an hour south of Pittsburgh, is a sign of what used to be in American manufacturing, where steel mills ran the show and exemplified American vitality along with similar towns in the Steel City’s suburbs. While tree-covered hills and the Monongahela River give the town a scenic view from afar, the town itself is a far cry from that, with signs showing that its better days are in the rearview mirror.
Now, however, Monessen and western Pennsylvania are part of where Trump is pinning his hopes on winning Pennsylvania and (perhaps) topping Hillary Clinton.
Since becoming the defacto Republican nominee, Trump has made two stops in western Pennsylvania — an early June stop at Pittsburgh International Airport, and another last week for the policy speech, which centered on trade, globalism and manufacturing. Most notably, he called for pulling the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement and withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership before ratification.
Those issues have been a winner in this region, especially for Trump electorally, having scored an overwhelming victory in a contested primary in April and with things looking up for him in the state in November, according to polls.
“He’s a natural for western Pennsylvania. The people here, they seem to like his campaign style. They came to him, he didn’t come to them,” said Rob Gleason, chairman of the Republican Party of Pennsylvania. “They picked up on him early and they like outsiders.
“They see Mr. Trump as a guy who knows business and they see him as perhaps as a person — they’ve been fooled before — but they feel perhaps that this is a man that will bring economic opportunity and family-sustaining jobs to western Pennsylvania,” Gleason said. “Its always the No. 1 issue out here — jobs and economic opportunity.”
Monessen has been hurting for some time now. The city’s population has halved since 1970 and has been in decline since Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel (formerly the Pittsburgh Steel Company) closed almost all of its operations there in 1986, shutting down for good one year later.
As he spoke in front of stacked blocks of aluminum last week, Trump noted the hard times that have hit the area and have even hit Alumisource, an aluminum mill located in the center of town.
“He’s delivering the right message … We have a candidate that’s focused on making sure that the American worker is not left out of this conversation,” said former Sen. Rick Santorum, a western Pennsylvania native, who mentioned trade, immigration and economic policy as the keys to doing well in the area.
“All of those things are what a lot of folks here in Mon Valley have been concerned about for a long time, and there have been very few politicians who have echoed that,” said Santorum, who attended Trump’s speech.
Unlike many politicians of the past, especially in GOP circles, Trump is looking to make western Pennsylvania the key to electoral success, which flies in the face of political thought in the state. Historically, the key to political victory in statewide contests has been the Philadelphia suburbs, otherwise known as the “collar” counties (Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery).
The real estate tycoon’s plan differs greatly from that of Mitt Romney’s four years ago, who viewed the Keystone State as an afterthought. Having campaigned only once there during the general election season, Romney never campaigned in western Pennsylvania and held his only event in Bucks County as part of a last-ditch effort two days before Election Day.
However, since becoming the party’s presumptive nominee, Trump hasn’t ventured out to the “collar” counties, which have been trending blue in recent years, but still holds a major bloc of the state’s vote, as Gleason notes.
“It is important because in the Lehigh Valley and Philadelphia and Southeast, it’s about 40-42 percent of the vote, so it’s very important,” Gleason said. “But the difference this time is that these other counties like Fayette, Beaver, Cambria and then up in the Northeast [Schuylkill] are going to over-perform and give huge majorities to Trump this time. Not just 51 or 52 percent, but maybe 60 and 70 percent … It’s a start.”
However, problems remain with some in the western part of the state. Throughout his stops, both during the primary and after becoming the nominee, Trump has spoken at length about how much he “loves steel” and his plan to bring the steel mills back to the region.
Despite the raucous cheers he gets from supporters during events after making these promises, some believe he is a false prophet by making any such promises, since many of the mills were shut down more than 20 years ago.
“How is he going to do that? Is he going to build these steel plants and call them the Trump Steel Company?” said Mary Ann Meloy, a former official under President Reagan. “There are people that don’t know he can’t do things he says he can do, and so I think those people will vote for him.
“He has a very good chance of winning based on these issues,” Meloy said, referring to trade. “If he has a strategy of going into these communities that have been devastated, targeting these Democrats who are essentially, in another generation, Reagan Democrats.”
Those Democrats and independents in the region will be key to Trump’s chances in the state and give him the opportunity to fulfill his promises, many of whom simply want western Pennsylvania — and Monessen — to (as his slogan and moniker say) become great again.
