Consider the outcome of last week’s down-ballot elections in Luzerne, where Wilkes-Barre is the county seat. Republicans swept five vacant seats on Luzerne’s council, the county’s governing body. Now, Republicans have a ten-to-one GOP majority on the county council following post-election news that one councilman, Robert Schnee, changed his party affiliation in June. He told the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader that he’s no longer a Democrat “because of what was going on at the national level,” while adding that the party switch had “nothing to do with local Democratic leadership.” Following the election, a Hazleton-area township supervisor, who ran unopposed as a Democrat, announced his own party switch. “This wasn’t the Democratic Party I signed up for,” Jim Montone told the Hazleton Standard-Speaker, citing Democratic governor Tom Wolf’s pandemic leadership and the party’s national direction. “I don’t know where they are going with this party, but I have to be true to myself.”

In Western Pennsylvania, Westmoreland County is now solidly GOP territory in terms of local power and voter rolls. Two decades ago, a blue-collar base ensured Democrats’ control of the county and the party’s 62,000-voter-registration advantage. But last week, any signs of that Democratic past ended in Westmoreland, part of the bituminous coal region and the epicenter of Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry. As the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported, GOP victories last week “give Republicans control of every elected office in county government as well as every state and federal office specific to Westmoreland.” Three of the four GOP county office winners were once Democrats. “To my knowledge, it’s unprecedented for the Republican Party to control these [county] offices,” said Westmoreland’s GOP chair…

Overall, last week’s election returns in Pennsylvania and New Jersey clearly established that large segments of blue-collar voters believe the Democratic Party has betrayed their socioeconomic interests, even as progressive identity politics and accusations of “privilege” infuriate the party’s former base voters. The idea of privilege is alien to working-class communities in northeastern Pennsylvania, where older voters, living on fixed incomes, struggle to pay rising bills and property taxes. Now, as the region’s notoriously brutal winter arrives, they face the prospect of devastating oil and gas bills to heat their century-old homes.