“All eyes” — as the cliché goes these days — will be on… well, never mind. Scratch that. They will most certainly not be on Fulton County, Pennsylvania.
But should they be?
Analysts everywhere are focusing on which bellwether purple areas of this purplest state — and most populous of all the purple states — might report results election night that portend good or bad things for Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
Fulton County — in the central part of the state, on the southern border with Maryland — is not one of those places. In 2020, 85% of Fulton County voters voted to re-elect then-President Trump, an increase from 83% in 2016 even though Pennsylvania flipped over the same timespan from a narrow Trump win to a win for President Joe Biden.
It wasn’t always that way here. You might say Bonnie Mellott Keefer’s political career started when she was six years old.
“I saw John F. Kennedy and he looked like my daddy,” Keefer said. “So I took his buttons to school and handed them out in first grade.”
Her father took that as a compliment, because he was a Democrat. So was nearly everyone in Mellott Keefer’s family.
“And then when Ronald Reagan came on the scene, it changed my mind about things, because what he talked about were things that I believed in,” she said. She voted for Reagan and switched her party affiliation.
Still, the county didn’t vote majority Republican for another decade. Mellott Keefer remembers friends in the 1980s saying they would never switch.
Then she recalls standing in line one day at a bank and running into one of those friends.
“He said to me, ‘You know what? I hate to say this, but you’re right. I believe more in what the Republicans believe in,’” she said. “And I ran up the street to the courthouse, got him a voter registration form and ran back down” so he could switch parties.
Today, Mellott Keefer is the county government’s treasurer and a former chair of the Republican committee of Fulton County, where — according to the U.S. Census — an estimated 14,533 live. It among the least — but not the least — populous counties in the state. But the 85% vote for Trump was the most supportive of the former president.
After that election, county leaders drew harsh criticism from state leaders and election equipment vendors and ultimately had to forfeit $1 million of taxpayer money for a move that was largely uncontroversial within the county: opening and examining voting machines after the election, a move partisans cheered but others considered a rogue audit.
Not the kind of place Democrats might be expected to open a new campaign headquarters. Granted, some luck was involved, but the Democrats say that luck speaks to the reason they did it.
“We had a Republican approach us and say, ‘Hey, I have an empty building and I basically don’t want Donald Trump at all to be in office,’” recalled Gen Harper, chair of the county’s Democratic committee. “‘Can you guys use it as a headquarters?’ And we said, ‘Absolutely.’”
It wasn’t just any building. It was at the corner of 3rd and Lincoln in McConnellsburg, the county seat, one of only two intersections in the whole county with a traffic light. Signs for Kamala Harris and other key Democratic candidates — like Bob Casey, who is trying to defend his Senate seat in a close race against challenger Dave McCormick — are in all the windows.
“We just can’t believe we can have that kind of a presence,” Harper said. “But what that does is allows people then to say, ‘You’re here!’”
People including swing voters, Harper said.
“We know the Democrats, right? There aren’t very many of us, so we know who they are,” Harper said. “But these are Republicans coming in, and these are independents coming in.”
She said the key is to understand some of these people aren’t enthusiastic — not about Donald Trump, but not about Kamala Harris either.
“And so we’re trying to basically say, ‘Hey, you know what? We understand and we appreciate that you don’t want this man in office. But please feel confident that you can vote for Kamala Harris and feel good about it” rather than just “holding their noses” and voting for her.
And if ultimately they can’t bring themselves to vote for Harris but they don’t vote for Trump either, even while voting for other downballot Republicans?
“By all means, we’ll take it,” Harper said.
After all, a vote withheld from Trump is — mathematically — half a vote for Harris. Just like a vote in Fulton County is worth just as much for either candidate as a vote in the purpler counties. Hard as it might be to believe, if the former president wins closer to 80% than 90% of the county’s vote, that could be a good sign for the current vice president.
Mellott Keefer said she hasn’t encountered the kind of equivocation about Trump described by Harper.
“Most of the people who I talk with, and see in interactions, who are Republican are very enthusiastic about it,” she said.
Lee Cisney, finishing lunch at McConnellsburg’s McDonald’s, is one of those people. Why?
“I liked all his policies last time he was in office,” Cisney said.
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