By Dave Lindorff
Fishs Eddy – I’m going to make a bold prediction based (admittedly on a small sampling): Trump has lost the support of his non-college educated white base — or at least enough of it that he’s toast in a blue-collar working-class and rural state like Pennsylvania and probably Michigan and Ohio too.
I’ll admit that I haven’t been to those latter two states in ages, but there’s not much difference between a city like Flint, Michigan that has lost its auto industry or Youngstown, Ohio that’s lost its steel industry, and Scranton, Pennsylvania that has lost its coal industry, in terms of the frustrated and angry white workers who populate these areas and who voted for Trump overwhelmingly in 2016. Both places also are similar in having a significant and growing minority populations and increasingly integrated suburban regions that have watered down the racism that is Trump’s go-to vote motivator.
I was nervous when we made our first trip since the Pandemic from our home in exurban Upper Dublin outside Philadelphia to Fishs Eddy, the town near the Pennsylvania/New York border where we have for 36 years owned a former church and rectory we bought in 1984 for less than $20,000, and that we have spend the years since trying to rescue from collapse and fix up. I worried that the largely Republican population in that region might be ignoring basic safety precautions to minimize the risk of Covid-19 contagion, given Trump’s aggressive dismissal of mask wearing and social distancing guidelines.
So I was pleasantly surprised, on going into Bisbee’s, the local family-owned hardware store in neighboring Hancock, to find everyone — the staff and customers — wearing masks. A local Sunoco minimart with a counter and two adjacent tables with benches to seat four customers each had one table taped off with a sign saying “Covid rules.” And at the popular local eatery, the Circle E Diner in Hancock, masks were ubiquitous.
Interestingly, the little village of Fishs Eddy has not had a single case of Coronavirus infection, and according to a state dashboard, even the much larger Delaware County that encompasses our town and that includes the entire watershed of the Delaware River, has only recorded about 100 cases and four deaths. One might think that under such circumstances, especially in a region where virtually all local elected officials are Republican, often running for election without an opponent, there would be a lot of people calling the Pandemic a hoax and being critics of Covid-19 safety rules, but in fact, people up here take it seriously.
To reach the bridge that brings us from Pennsylvania across the West Branch of the Delaware River into Hancock, NY, the nearest town to Fishs Eddy, which is located six miles upstream on the East Branch stream, we have to drive on secondary roads for some 40 miles from the I-81 interstate highway in Scranton through gritty old played-out mining towns…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/prediction-biden-is-going-to-win-the-nov-3-election/