Paul Kengor: Is Western Pa. home to a new Republican coalition?

“Has Trump launched a ‘second wave’ of the Reagan revolution — attracting blue-collar voters with his appeal that he and the Republican Party will do a better job of fighting for them than the Democrats, as well as representing their social values, including a pro-life stance?”

A Pittsburgh reporter asked me that question the Wednesday morning after the Nov. 3 election — i.e., the morning after many of us went to bed looking at what appeared to be a Trump trouncing of Joe Biden in Pennsylvania. Three weeks later, that trouncing is gone, but the question remains valid.

What President Trump appealed to in Western Pennsylvania is indeed a throwback to the Reagan coalition. Many of those voting for Trump in this region did so for traditionally conservative and Reagan Democrat reasons: pro-life, God and guns, domestic energy, steel tariffs, and to stop perceived threats of socialism, court packing, liberal-activist judges, Green New Deal environmentalism, China, NAFTA, and unfair trade deals and practices. As even Chris Cuomo stated on CNN, these Trump voters “fear the economic and cultural left.”

Trump has expanded the Republican tent to include blue-collar workers, union guys — akin to what Ronald Reagan did, and then some. That’s especially the case in this region with fracking, steel and coal. “What he (Donald Trump) did is what we’ve been fighting for for more than 30 years,” asserted Leo Gerard, president of USW, the steelworkers union. “What makes me sad is we’ve been trying to get Democrats to do this for more than 30 years.”

Those hard-hat workers related to Donald Trump in a way I’ve never seen them relate to a Republican. It will be curious to see if a future Republican nominee, like a Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Nikki Haley or Mike Pence, can fire them up like Trump did. They might be able to do so by battling radical environmentalism and socialism. I doubt, though, that these candidates would so vigorously go to the mat for fracking and steel tariffs, or to confront China on trade, the way Trump did for these workers. Trump pulled in a sizable segment of these voters to the GOP, certainly here in Western Pennsylvania (and eastern Ohio and throughout the Rustbelt).

Democrats are not oblivious to this.

Conor Lamb, who somehow pulled out a victory against Sean Parnell, gets it. “I’m giving you an honest account of what I’m hearing from my own constituents,” he told The New York Times after the election, “which is that they are extremely frustrated by the message of defunding the police and banning fracking. I, as a Democrat, am just as frustrated. Because those things aren’t just unpopular, they’re completely unrealistic, and they aren’t going to happen.”

This is a growing coalition. It is a resurrection of the Reagan coalition?

Well, a major difference between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump is the former’s reelection in a historic landslide. Reagan in 1984 won the Electoral College by an astounding 525 to 13, sweeping 49 of 50 states. Trump is one of only three incumbents not reelected over the last 40 years.

And yet, to Trump’s credit, he got almost 11 million more votes in 2020 than 2016, a very impressive increase. Many of them here in Western Pennsylvania, and Reagan Democrats. The question is whether the GOP long term can keep them.