Once hopeful in red areas, weary resisters become the resisted

By Campbell Robertson, The New York Times Company

Sunday, Feb. 9, 2020 | 2 a.m.

WASHINGTON, Pa. — In the winter of 2018, Cindy Callaghan knocked on doors. Lots and lots of doors. A new soldier in the sprawling ranks of the anti-Trump resistance, she spent her weekends in the small towns of southwestern Pennsylvania, telling strangers about Conor Lamb, the Democrat who was running for Congress in a district that President Donald Trump carried by nearly 20 percentage points.

When Lamb won his special election in a narrow but stunning upset, it seemed that there was an opportunity, if enough people put in enough work, to change minds and thus change the country’s politics. “I felt like there was,” Callaghan said.

Now, as she watches the Republicans’ swift rebuff of impeachment charges, the meltdown of the Iowa caucuses and the infighting among the supporters of various Democratic presidential candidates, she feels that less and less. “It doesn’t matter — find any kind of totally corrupt thing that Trump did, and it doesn’t matter,” she said. “Republicans are just unified. They’re a damn steel curtain.

“I’m taking a break until this summer,” she said.

Three years ago, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in protest of Trump, the resistance seemed immense. Two years ago, when legions of canvassers and postcard writers helped flip dozens of congressional seats nationwide, it proved effective. Now with the 2020 election approaching, the Democratic Party seems as disjointed as ever, while the Trump administration appears not only undismayed but emboldened.

And veterans of the 4-year-old resistance, particularly in places where they remain outnumbered, are facing up to an unwelcome truth: This is going to be even harder than it once looked.

Meetings are packed, protesters still gather on freezing sidewalks, and the big picture is repeated like a mantra: The goal is building a solid political infrastructure that will pay off in the long run. But in the back of crowded community rooms, activists murmur nervously about discord among the Democrats, the unshakable enthusiasm of the Trump faithful and the nagging suspicion that the mission of winning converts and allies might have reached its limits. The long run is nice, but 2020, as even the most patient concede, is The Big One.

“It just feels like life and death,” said Pam Maroon, 65, who was spending a weeknight with a dozen other women at a canvassing training session southeast of Pittsburgh. “I’m less optimistic,” she said, still sour from watching the news earlier in the day. “It’s exhausting, emotionally and mentally. But you have to keep going.”

This weary anxiety is in part a feature of geography. Democrats may be racking up wins in elections in the cities and inner suburbs, but their fortunes have been less bright farther afield.

Once a bastion of union power, rural western Pennsylvania has been veering rightward for years, a shift that went into overdrive with Trump. After the 2016 election, small Democratic groups began sprouting up all over, many started by mid- and late-career women who had done little, if any, political work before.

In Panera booths far from blue Pittsburgh, they were elated to find others who thought like them. Surely there had to be more — if not other Democrats, at least Republicans turned off by the president.

“He’s losing his vote base,” thought Christina Proctor, 42, when she joined the ranks of the newly energized in Washington County. She had been alarmed by the local fervor for Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election, but in the months that followed she thought this allegiance was flagging. She does not think that anymore. “They’re 100% on board,” she said.

In 2018, a strong year overall for Pennsylvania Democrats, Republicans mostly held the line in the counties outside of Pittsburgh. In last year’s local elections in some of the places that helped send Lamb to Congress — his district has since been redrawn, leaving several of those counties, including Washington County, in a more conservative congressional neighborhood — Republicans took control of one county government after another. In some places, the Republican Party is in its strongest position in nearly a century.

“I’m very pessimistic of winning anything here, anything of note,” said Jake Mihalov, a public defender in Washington, Pennsylvania, who ran for district attorney as a Democrat. He estimated that his campaign and its supporters knocked on tens of thousands of doors. He lost by more than 25 percentage points. Working toward the 2020 elections, in which he sees the only realistic goal for local Democrats as losing the presidential race a little less badly, “is going to take motivation that I don’t have right now,” he said. “It was tough when we were optimistic.”

On Wednesday evening last week, as senators in the other Washington argued about calling witnesses in the impeachment trial, the new leaders of the local Democratic committee in Washington, Pennsylvania, sat in their headquarters, debating whether they had reached the limit of people in the county who were still persuadable.

Proctor, now the party’s vice chairwoman, believed they probably had. She and the current chairman, Ben Bright, 50, had both been part of the grassroots surge after the 2016 election, joining a group called the Washington County Democrats; Proctor would later learn this was not actually the local party. The county’s official Democratic committee was apparently not big on meeting, campaigning or advertising itself.

Proctor and Bright eventually took over the local party with plans to rebuild it from the ground up. The victory of Lamb, who lost Washington County but by a much narrower margin than Hillary Clinton, suggested all kinds of possibilities.

“The first race I was ever involved in was like the best candidate that comes around in a lifetime,” Proctor said.

But after the midterms, “things started puttering out,” she said. “People just didn’t care. They weren’t showing up at the grassroots anymore. They just weren’t. Nobody cares about municipal elections.”

In the meantime, the Republicans were getting to work.

Dave Ball, vice chairman of the Washington County Republican committee, agreed that local political sentiment had been blowing in his party’s direction, driven by the people moving in to work in the fracking boom and the dwindling of the old union faithful. But the scale of the party’s recent success, Ball said, would not have come about without aggressive organizing.

“We got a lot of people around here mobilized that had never been mobilized before,” he said, talking of a program to encourage employers concerned about Democratic policies to urge their employees to vote Republican. At the party’s booth at the county fair, he said, “we signed up 500 people to work.”

They have the victories to show for it.

Bright had a somewhat rosier take than Proctor on the prospects for local Democrats. He pointed out that the big picture in 2020 was the overall statewide vote, and here in Washington that came down to margins. If Trump were to win rural counties like this one by the same numbers that Republicans had been putting up in key state and local races, he would lose Pennsylvania.

Besides, he said, the Democratic Party in the county had been disintegrating for years; reversing that would take time. “After getting beat up for two years in a row maybe we’re not where we should be,” he said. “But we’ve built some infrastructure here. It’s not going to be short term.”

It is impossible to pinpoint the mood of something as broad and disparate as the Democratic grassroots. On the other side of the state, in the counties around Philadelphia, Democrats have been buoyed by victory after victory, even in longtime Republican strongholds. Around Pittsburgh, many suburbs have turned Democratic with surprising speed.

“I have a hard time seeing how Donald Trump can legitimately win Pennsylvania,” said John Craig Hammond, a college professor who was trounced in a Statehouse race in 2016 but has since helped flip multiple local seats to the Democrats in a Pittsburgh suburb. “People like me and the people who I knock on doors with, we recognize what we need to do.”

Still, in conservative communities, splits have opened between newly energized progressive activists and veteran local Democrats who insist that working with Republicans is the only way some things can get done. One former Democratic Statehouse candidate in a rural county north of Pittsburgh, soundly beaten in her first run for office in 2018, said she and her fellow activists now mostly gather just to drink wine and talk, exhausted by the uphill struggle.

With little preexisting Democratic Party infrastructure in many places and, for now, without a single cohesive candidate to unify the base, upholding enthusiasm “is a really heavy burden to put on the backs of these individuals,” said Dana R. Fisher, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland who has studied the new activism. “People are just burned out, and they’re worried,” she said, pointing to the Iowa Democratic caucuses, where turnout was lower than many had anticipated, as evidence.

Last Saturday morning, the day after the president’s acquittal in the impeachment trial had become all but certain and a new round had begun in the seemingly perpetual feud between supporters of Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the Washington County grassroots group met in the basement of the local library. More than two dozen people came, a good showing. But amid the talk of petitions and candidates, the reality of the daunting task ahead and the setbacks recently behind was not far out of mind.

“When we lost all of our county row offices I felt like somebody had died,” said Susan Bender, a retired schoolteacher, 72 and entering her fourth year as an activist. Talk turned to the primary, and Bender worried that Democrats further to the left would not do much better here. “But,” she went on, “you can’t stop.”