It’s a small Pennsylvania town in Carbon County, just north of Allentown. It’s called the Gateway to the Poconos and America’s Switzerland. It only has 4,700 people. And yet, like in other parts of the state and in the Midwest, you see a once Democratic bastion flip in recent years. Jim Thorpe was once a union citadel and in 2016, it barely broke for Hillary Clinton by a mere 20 votes. Vice News did an excellent segment from this rural small town to see how these folks are reacting to the 2020 election results. It’s diverse. You have people from lifelong Republican households voting for Joe Biden. You have a man, TJ Garritano, a Republican, who voted twice for Obama, but then voted for Donald Trump. Then, there’s Marge Lux, who Vice described as “the woke-est grandma you’ll ever meet.” The one thing that people agree on is that the town is divided, like the rest of the country.
As of now, it looks like Joe Biden is on the cusp of being declared the winner of the 2020 election. I’m still waiting on the legal challenges and the counting of the legal votes, but the people here seem to have accepted that Joe Biden is the president-elect. And yet, there is no civil war erupting in the streets. The reactions here and places like Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington D.C. couldn’t be any more different for obvious reasons. In the cities, dominated by snobby urban-based professional elites—it’s a time to party. In normal America, for Democrats, there is the relief of a Biden win, but they’re not partying. They know there is an equal contingent of this country that is feeling rather different.
The one area, and maybe ESPN can take some notes here, that brought this community together was sports. The segment ends with a football game, where everyone of all political molds was in the bleachers cheering their teams on under the lights. There was no talk of politics.
Garritano said, and I’m paraphrasing here, as with any game, a loss sucks, but the election is over and now it’s time to unite. At the same time, he said that’s what should happen. It’s not. We’re just too divided right now.
It’s a lesson in how the “woke” react to a win and how everyone else does. Garritano added that the people in the stands are here watching some football, watching their kids play, and are pulling for their communities. That’s America. It will survive.
That’s in stark contrast to the cities where leftist thugs beat up Trump supporters in the streets of D.C. I sure hope we can survive a Biden presidency amid the Democratic Party’s hard shift to the Left. I just don’t know yet, but it’s refreshing to see that in Jim Thorpe and probably elsewhere that’s not a place dominated by condescending progressives, life has already begun to move on.