Interesting article from the NYT...will be front page on Monday. Chronicles the recent rebirth of the Lehigh Valley that is of personal interest. It also gives a view into a battleground state and how the electorate feels. I would say this is pretty accurate from what I see.
What the Rebirth of This Old Steel Center Means for Trump
The Lehigh Valley rebuilt its economy after foreign competition wiped out its mills. Now good times and bad memories may both help the president.
By Patricia Cohen
What the Rebirth of This Old Steel Center Means for Trump
The Lehigh Valley rebuilt its economy after foreign competition wiped out its mills. Now good times and bad memories may both help the president.
By Patricia Cohen
- Published Jan. 9, 2020Updated Jan. 10, 2020, 10:48 a.m. ET
- H.I.V. test kit, are products of a matrix of manufacturers, financial companies and health care institutions powering the Lehigh Valley’s $41 billion economy.
The region’s success distinguishes it from onetime industrial dynamos in the Northeast and Midwest that have struggled to replace shuttered plants and vanishing jobs. While many midsize and smaller cities have lost out to the superstars — large urban metropolises that gulp up scads of employers, workers and customers — the Lehigh Valley is booming.
“There’s jobs everywhere,” said Stephen Polczer, 46, as he inspected assembled swabs. Mr. Polczer, outfitted with a blue mesh apron for his beard and a head cap, started at the biomedical company less than two months ago, drawn by a $17-an-hour wage for manufacturing technicians and a four-day workweek.
The economic renaissance has been more than a decade in the making in this eastern stretch of Pennsylvania, and it has much to do with location, luck and local leaders.
“It’s transcended presidents and administrations,” said Don Cunningham, the president and chief executive of the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation, a public-private partnership. In the last five years, employers created 26,000 additional jobs. “It began under Obama and continued under Trump,” he said.
The valley’s political affinities have been less steady recently. The area includes Northampton County, one of the few counties nationwide — and among only three in the state — that voted for Barack Obama twice before giving Donald J. Trump a plurality in 2016. That pivot, in a county that a Republican presidential candidate had not won since 1988, helped Mr. Trump capture Pennsylvania by less than one percentage point.
Mr. Trump’s message on trade and defending jobs resonated in the Lehigh Valley, where there are memories of how foreign competition clobbered the local steel and cement industries.
Whenever the rebound began, people here are feeling more secure economically, and many credit the president. “The economy is 100 times better,” Mr. Polczer said, “and it has a lot to do with President Trump.”
Incentives for business and amenities for workers
Freshpet joined a growing cluster of food and beverage companies, including Boston Beer, Nestlé Purina, Ocean Spray and Just Born (maker of the chick-shaped marshmallow treat Peeps), when it took over an old dairy factory in Northampton County in 2013. Sales of Freshpet’s refrigerated meals for dogs and cats — made from giant vats of slow-cooked meat, vegetables and fruit that can be smelled before entering the parking lot — grew 27 percent in the last year.
Factory, a business innovation center for growing food and beverage companies founded by Richard Thompson, a former chief executive at Freshpet. Hoisting up a couple of bags, he explained that the creator of Stuffed Puffs had “spent seven years figuring out how to put the chocolate inside the marshmallow.”
With support from a New York hedge fund, Mr. Thompson opened the center in 2019. “I looked everywhere from Boston to Jacksonville,” he said, before choosing a site once occupied by Bethlehem Steel.
Building 96, a former tool-and-die shop built during World War II, is now, after a $10 million overhaul, Factory’s airy headquarters. The site offers a sensory lab, a podcasting studio, a kitchen, a packaging center and a stage. For offices, he hauled in bright red shipping containers from Port Newark and put them on wheels that bring to mind mobile dorm rooms. There’s also a simulated golfing range and a climbing wall, as well as a gondola cabin from a ski lift and a firepit surrounded by Adirondack chairs to hang out.
Just to the north in rural Upper Mount Bethel Township, Air Liquide opened a plant in 2018 to produce specialty chemicals for semiconductors, and construction on an adjoining facility has started.
Tony Stump began working there over the summer in a full-time maintenance job for $26.50 an hour, plus benefits.
He moved from Apollo, a former coal-mining town about 35 miles from Pittsburgh, to take the job. “It’s like two different worlds,” he said.
“There’s a lot of job opportunities,” Mr. Stump said of the Pittsburgh area, “but it’s harder to make a good wage.”
At his previous job, Mr. Stump made $15 an hour and had not had a raise in seven years. “There’s no way to survive,” he said.
Lots of jobs, but ‘not real good jobs’
Steelworkers’ Archives, an oral history project.
The rich and the well-educated techies are doing well, but the working class and the poor “are the ones that are really getting hammered,” Mr. Sedor said. “It hasn’t trickled down to them.”
Although the area’s median income is more than $65,000, a new report from the United Way of Pennsylvania found that 30 percent of the households in Northampton County and 25 percent in Lehigh County could be counted among the working poor.
‘I would keep riding the horse that works’
statewide poll, 57 percent of those surveyed said they did not think the president deserved re-election.
But Christopher Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion in Allentown, said that across Pennsylvania, the president remained popular among those who said they had voted for him.
“I don’t see an obvious reason they wouldn’t turn out to the ballot box in 2020 to support him,” he said.
Walter Dealtrey Jr., president and chief executive of Service Tire Truck Centers in Bethlehem, is a registered Republican who said he and many people he knew often split their votes between the parties. He voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, and for Representative Susan Wild, a Democrat, last year.
He does not care for Mr. Trump’s personal style, but he said, “As far as the economy, I would keep riding the horse that works.”
Recent polling by The New York Times/Siena College found that in Pennsylvania and five other battleground states, nearly two-thirds of voters with a similar pattern — supporting Mr. Trump in 2016 and a Democrat in the midterms — said they intended to back the president.
Among the more than 30 business owners, professionals and employees interviewed in the two counties, many said their votes were still up for grabs. But “Medicare for all,” free public college tuition and other left-leaning proposals championed by candidates like Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont aroused more skepticism than enthusiasm.
The Democrats named as possibilities were all moderates, like former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.; or the latest entrant, the billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg.
“I think there’s going to be a strong pull for Democrats in the county to come home if they can,” said John Kincaid, a government professor at Lafayette College in Easton. But the Democrats will need to offer more than someone-who-is-not-Trump.
“If Warren or Sanders is the candidate,” he said, “it’s going to be harder to bring those Democrats who voted for Trump over.”
- H.I.V. test kit, are products of a matrix of manufacturers, financial companies and health care institutions powering the Lehigh Valley’s $41 billion economy.
