In a Pennsylvania county, with its proud industrial past, why did voters who were loyal to Obama turn towards Trump and what do they expect now?
Donald Trumps face made it official. As his presidential victory was declared, the upper 32 stories of the Empire State Building, which for election night had been turned into a giant news screen, flickered, wept light, and revealed his portrait. The 45th president, it said.
The exterior of the building the part that reflected Trumps face is mainly limestone. The skeleton is steel. Half of the metal was delivered in the early 1930s by a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel, a company that not only shaped the Manhattan skyline but built some of Americas greatest bridges and its most formidable warships.
Eighty miles west of Manhattan, on the night of Trumps election, the blast furnaces at Bethlehem Steel sat silent, as they have for 20 years. But on 8 November, the community whose generations tended Bethlehems fires helped to build something bigger than the mill ever had. They helped to put Donald Trump, and not Hillary Clinton, in the White House.
Northampton County, Pennsylvania, where the remains of the old Bethlehem Steel plant sits, had voted twice for Barack Obama for president, but local Democrats saw early on that 2016 might be tricky. The Clinton camp seemed confident though, and most forecasters believed that the long tradition of Democratic politics in the region, historically reinforced by labor unions in the mills, mines and manufacturing plants, would carry the day.
The intellectual Democrats who were running the show, which included Hillary, all thought they were smarter than people like me, Frank Behum, a Bethlehem steelworker for 32 years, told the Guardian last week. What do they know? But you know what, people like me, even though I voted for Hillary, were smart enough to know that the crap that we went through we didnt want any more of it.
Trump won Northampton County by four points on his way to becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to win Pennsylvania since Ronald Reagan. And in two days, he will take the oath of office.
Former steelworkers alone did not account for Trumps victory in Northampton. Nor is the countys vote readable as a result, simply, of long-term economic decline. Unlike the Pennsylvania coal country to the north, which also flipped from Obama to Trump, Northampton has been adding residents in recent years instead of bleeding them, while incomes and home values have crept upward. Businesses have been moving in.
Northamptons vote for Trump was not only an act of frustration.As too many of Trumps opponents may have taken too long to realize, it was also an act of hope.