A key voting bloc in a key swing district is signaling a Blue Wave across America

As many of you know by now, I am busy settling into my new desk in my latest home state of North Carolina.

Settling in means changing licenses, license plates, utilities, insurance, and all the punishing bureaucratic stuff designed to make us scream out in pain. Nothing’s as easy as it should be, and I swear to God it is designed that way.

Leaving Wisconsin after 15 years also meant losing my loyal barber.

Ka was as good a guy as I have ever known, and did more with less than any barber in the world. How he turned that tangled mess on the top and sides of my head into something almost presentable I’ll never know.

He was also liberal as hell, which is important to me.

I am one of those people who simply will not give my money to anybody who supports the fascist regime that is wrecking America right now. I have a talent for sniffing these people out. I quickly work the sorry state of the United States into my initial conversation with a prospective contractor or business owner in the first two sentences of my interaction with them.

When they ask how I am doing I will tell them something along these lines, “Not good, man. We got a racist traitor in Washington who belongs in jail, and is instead wrecking our White House. So how are you doin’?”

Then I wait, and if they tiptoe around my rejoinder I point them in the general direction of the door.

Easy peasy.

I realize this isn’t a subtle approach, but New Jersey natives generally aren’t subtle people. Subtlety will only get you run over in the Garden State, where you learn at a young age that the shortest distance between two points is straight ahead.

So after getting scalped by two different wannabe barbers in my new home, I booked an appointment with a woman who came with a strong recommendation from my wife who successfully found a hairstylist who somehow makes her even prettier.

That’s when the sun came out.

I knew the minute I sat in the barber’s chair Nina was my kind of person. In fact she beat me to the punch, because when I gave her the Jersey, “How you doin’?” she answered this way, “I am just waiting to wake up on some beautiful morning and find out he’s gone …”

Yowza. (Unfortunately, he’s still here as of this writing.)

Turns out Nina’s done a lot of traveling like myself and ended up by the sea, because why wouldn’t you? She started her journeys in Northeastern Pennsylvania, though.

Pennsylvania used to be the Republicans’ great white whale. Every fours years they would get tantalizingly close to harpooning a presidential contest and putting the Keystone State’s generous haul of electoral votes in their column only to be left just short.

Democrat Ed Rendell, who served two terms as governor of the place between 2003-2011, famously said this about his state: “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia to the East, Pittsburgh to the West, and Alabama in the middle.”

Well, in 2016, Donald Trump and Alabama won, and Pennsylvania officially became a dreaded swing state. Joe Biden won it in 2020, and Trump won it back in 2024.

As a New Jersey native this just gave me another reason to curse Pennsylvania. It’s pretty much a border rival thing, but Pennsylvania has turned into Ohio East, which will surprise nobody in New Jersey. (NOTE: Here’s where I am losing Pennsylvania and Ohio readers. But, really: JD Vance, Ohio????)

Please don’t take it personally, good people. After all, I’m from Jersey, and let’s face it, nobody gets kicked around more than we do.

Anyway, I have a lot of friends from Pennsylvania, and on Friday I made a new one.

Nina grew up in Easton, Pa., which is hard on the Delaware River. And because it really is a small world after all, I told her that my ex-wife grew up in Phillipsburg, N.J., on the other side of that river. The two towns are rivals and separated by a bridge.

The area is also located in the Lehigh Valley, and one of those swingy political areas, where the party faring well among this sample of voters, will most likely be the party faring well in other places like it across the country.

While Nina was spinning magic on my head, she told a variation of a story I have heard too many times before: many of her family and friends voted for Trump, and that has made their relationship as bitter as an unripened lime.

I told her I was sorry as hell about that, and added that I had lost a lot of friends to this cancer myself. I told her that I have cut ties with them, because defending bigotry, misogyny, and the attack on America were deal-breakers.

I spent several years after the blast in 2016 trying to reason with my friends, but banging my head against the wall hurt a lot less. I left it with them this way: “If you come around, and realize the damage you have done, I’ll be here waiting and we can talk.”

Nobody has come around.

Nina approached this differently. She says she stays in touch with many of the people who have made their sickness our problem. I told her I saluted her patience, and asked this burning question: “How do they like what’s going on now?”

“They hate it,” she said.

That’s when I sat up in my chair at the risk of getting my ear chopped off.

“Oh, really,” I said with surprise.

“They think he is a lying pedophile, and they feel stupid for voting for him.”

“REALLY?????” I shouted, before composing myself.

“Yup. Really.”

Now Nina’s a lot younger than I am, because most people are. She represents a generation who have pretty much only known Trump as their president and attacker. Their sample size is limited, and they don’t carry around the baggage from administrations past — both good and bad.

The people Nina talks to know things are getting more expensive, that we are engaged in yet more unnecessary wars, and that Epstein’s corporate buddies are still free to rape more kids.

Things are getting worse, not better.

So basking in Nina’s heartening report about her friends in NE Pennsylvania, I decided to risk a final question: “OK, it’s great your friends have come around to this evil SOB, but how do you see them voting in November? Will they stay with Republicans or give Democrats a try? Or worse, will they not vote?”

“Oh, they’ll vote,” she said. “They’re pissed. And it won’t be for any Republicans.”

I guess I could learn to like Pennsylvania …

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.