"We're going to make Pennsylvania so rich again. Your jobs are coming back," Donald Trump told a rollicking rally at an arena in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, last October.
Trump had only been on stage for a matter of minutes, but he was already repeating himself. "They've taken our jobs out of Pennsylvania. We're going to be bringing them back, folks, believe me," he'd said a few minutes earlier. This time, he delivered the line as a sort of aside, almost a throwaway, after nonchalantly tossing a page of his speech to the crowd the way a sweaty singer working a Vegas crowd might toss a towel to a particularly adoring fan.
Hard along the Susquehanna River, Wilkes-Barre's economy has been in decline since the 1920s, when the anthracite coal from the hills of Luzerne County that once heated millions of American homes began to be replaced by oil and gas. Americans aren't going back to coal cellars. Nor is employment in Luzerne County—which peaked in 1914—rebounding any time soon.
Still, the sheer audacity of Trump's promise—why would he say it if he couldn't really do it?—was effective. After voting for Barack Obama by 8 percentage points in 2008 and 5 percentage points 2012, Luzerne County flipped, going for Trump by almost 20 percentage points.
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