In the Suburbs of Philadelphia, a Swing Voter Swings

Valerie Ross.
Valerie Ross is exactly the kind of voter—a white, middle-class suburban mom, who now has qualms about her vote for Trump—whom the Democrats are relying on in order to help them retake the House.Photographs by Rosemary Warren for The New Yorker

Valerie Ross is a lifelong Republican who lives in Exton, a suburb of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania’s Sixth Congressional District, which is among the state’s fiercest battlegrounds. In 2016, she voted for Donald Trump, helping him to unexpectedly win the county and the country.

Two years into Trump’s Presidency, she is deeply ambivalent about what Trump has done to the country. “It’s hard,” she told me by phone on Tuesday afternoon. “I really don’t like him or how he treats people, but I can’t forget what he’s done for the country economically.” She went on, “I hoped when he was elected, he’d rein it in, stop using Twitter, and put on his big-boy pants.” Ross, who is thirty-seven, with bright blond hair, violet eyes, and perfect teeth, grew up in a military family in Illinois, and her family is staunchly Republican. But she’s also a school psychologist who believes strongly in democratic principles like inclusivity. “Everyone around me in education is a Democrat, so I keep quiet,” she said. “I’m kind of like a silent Republican.”

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Earlier this week, I texted Ross, whom I know from previous reporting, to ask how she would vote in the midterm elections. She still hadn’t decided whether to stick with her party and vote for the Republican candidate for the House of Representatives, Greg McCauley, or to switch sides and vote for the Democratic challenger, Chrissy Houlahan, a first-time candidate and military veteran. “I don’t know anything about McCauley yet,” she texted me. And on Houlahan: “She hasn’t quite sold me yet. Haven’t decided! Have a lot of thinking to do tomorrow!”

Valerie Ross is exactly the kind of swing voter—a white, middle-class suburban mom, who now has qualms about her vote for Trump—the Democrats are relying on in order to retake the House. In the nearby Seventh District, Susan Wild, another first-time female candidate, is poised to beat the Republican Marty Nothstein—educated women like Ross will be cast the deciding votes. Despite polling that shows both Houlahan and Wild in the lead, both races could be won or lost by a few hundred votes. Turnout was essential, and the suburbs of Philadelphia woke up to a deluge that didn’t let up into the afternoon. In the driving rain, Wild cast her vote around ten in the morning, at Calvary Temple, a large church in Allentown.

This was a progressive pocket of the district; along the highway, a billboard advertised, rather startlingly, “A MORE SOCIALIST PA.” The billboard was paid for by the campaign of Scott Wagner, a Republican running against the incumbent Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, a Democrat, who is also heavily favored to win. In the photograph, Wolf stood behind his candidate for lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, who loomed in the foreground, wearing black and glowering at passersby. Fetterman is the celebrity mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, and, although Pittsburgh’s popular Democratic Socialists declined to endorse him, Fetterman claims a close allegiance with Bernie Sanders. A hammer and sickle was emblazoned next to the candidates’ names. The ad was an attack on the Democratic Party’s perceived shift to the left; in the Pennsylvania primaries, four Democratic Socialists won out over Party incumbents across the state.

Wild, a sixty-one-year-old attorney, is closer to the center, and she saw the election as less about national sentiment regarding the President and more about “the bread-and-butter issues” of economic survival that affected her county. “I don’t know if this is a referendum on Trump or on a Congress that has served as a rubber stamp for the President’s policies,” she told me by phone, from Calvary Temple. Her district, she told me, was “a microcosm of America, divided fifty-fifty, and composed of working families who lived paycheck to paycheck.”

To speak to these voters, she was driving between battleground polling places, and headed first to the fire station in Allen Township. When she arrived, the line of voters stretched to the door. Among the hundred or so people waiting to cast their ballots, there appeared to be only one person of color. His name was Tahmid Chowdhury, and he’d driven twenty-five minutes to the polling place that morning. “My parents are citizens now, but they were immigrants,” Chowdhury said quietly, as a group of elderly voters stared at him. To protect people just arriving in the country—and, really, for his parents—Chowdhury had come to vote.

In the neighboring battleground district, Wild’s ally and fellow first-time Democratic candidate, Chrissy Houlahan, was also travelling between polling places. I caught up with her at 1 P.M. at West Chester University, a public university in Chester County with seventeen thousand students. Houlahan is a fifty-year-old industrial engineer with short blond hair. She decided to get involved in politics in large part as a result of the election in 2016. “It was an awakening,” she told me, as we walked across campus searching for the student rally. “We have a civic responsibility to know who our representatives are.” Houlahan, who is charismatic but shy, believed it was her civic responsibility to run for office. Pennsylvania is the largest state in America that has no female representative in Congress, a fact that Houlahan didn’t know until recently. “I knew my congressperson was a man,” she told me, “but I thought there must be a woman representative somewhere in Pennsylvania.” Now, she is one of more than two hundred women running for Congress across the United States.

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Houlahan met up with a group of two dozen young supporters and began marching with them across campus to the dining and career center, which was serving as a polling place. The students whooped and cheered as they crossed campus. Upon entering the building, Houlahan ran into Taylor Campbell, a twenty-year-old sophomore and political-science major, who was wearing a Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt and sheepskin slippers and holding a basket of red lollipops to offer to students who voted.

When Campbell saw Houlahan, she burst into tears. “It’s an honor to meet you,” she said. The two hugged. “This election is so important. Our lives are at stake.” Houlahan autographed an election sign, which Campbell clutched to her chest as she sobbed. “I’ve been passionate about politics ever since I was twelve,” she told me. For Campbell, the visionary power of politics was best embodied in President Barack Obama. “Seeing the first African-American President meant that a person like me could be President,” she said. The past several years had been frightening for Campbell. “What’s concerned me most is that what were once extreme ideologies—or oppressive or discriminatory—a greater group of people are thinking behavior like that is O.K.” At West Chester University, members of an extremist group called Matthew 24 Ministries sometimes show up on campus and shout homophobic slurs, or call women whores for wearing clothing that they deem promiscuous. Campbell finds them unnerving and believes that they’ve been emboldened by Trump. “People feel O.K. saying stuff like that now,” she told me.

Meanwhile, in Exton, Ross, the lifelong Republican, had reached a decision. With her six-year-old son, Tristen, stuck in bed with strep throat and the flu, Ross did some research from home on both Houlahan and her opponent, McCauley, by Googling their names and reading their political statements. She started with McCauley and was dismayed with what she found. “Pennsylvania is becoming an energy superpower,” McCauley said. The oil and gas boom would bring with it “thousands of jobs.” For Ross, who opposes the role that corporations have taken in funding politicians, that was enough to sway her against him, and to Houlahan. “What he said is just a flat-out lie,” she told me. “If you’re going to lie about that, what else are you going to lie about?”

She was going to vote for Houlahan. When it came to the Presidential election in 2020, she was currently undecided. Despite all of Trump’s talk of economic growth—which, she conceded, was real for some—she saw little change in her own life. “I’m not sure I’m going to vote that way again,” she told me. “I’ve seen the benefits don’t really reach middle-class people like me.”

A previous version of this article misidentified a billboard depicting Tom Wolf as a campaign advertisement, and mischaracterized Susan Wild’s background.