A trailblazing regional greenhouse gas partnership on the East Coast is considering possible changes or expansion that would allow it to keep building on its success — and the stakes grew higher last month with the reelection of Donald Trump.
The 11-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, established in 2005, is the country’s first regional cap-and-invest system for reducing carbon emissions from power generation. Since 2021, administrators have been conducting a program review, analyzing its performance since the last review in 2017 and weighing potential adjustments to make sure it continues to deliver benefits to member states.
The role of such programs is more crucial as Trump’s pledges to roll back federal climate action leaves it up to cities, states, and the private sector to maintain the country’s momentum on clean energy over the next four years. In RGGI, as the regional initiative is known, states have a potential model for scaling their impact through collaboration.
“RGGI has not only been an effective climate policy, it’s been an extraordinary example of how states can work together on common goals,” said Daniel Sosland, president of climate and energy nonprofit Acadia Center. “It is a major vehicle for climate policy now in the states, more than it might have seemed before the election.”
How RGGI works
RGGI sets a cap for total power plant carbon emissions among member states. Individual generators must then buy allowances from the state, up to the total cap, for each ton of carbon dioxide they produce in a year. The cap lowers over time, forcing power plants to either reduce emissions or pay more to buy allowances from a shrinking pool.
States then reinvest the proceeds from these auctions into programs that further reduce emissions and help energy customers, including energy efficiency initiatives, direct bill assistance, and renewable energy projects. Since 2008, RGGI has generated $8.3 billion for participating states, and carbon dioxide emissions from power generation in the nine states that have consistently participated fell by about half between 2008 and 2021, a considerably faster rate than the rest of the country.
“It has really thrived and been really effective across multiple administrations,” said Jackson Morris, state power sector director with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “RGGI is a winning model. It’s not theoretical — we’ve got numbers.”
Currently, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont are part of the program. Virginia joined RGGI in 2021, but in 2023 Gov. Glenn Youngkin repealed the state’s participation, a move immediately challenged in court; a judge ruled last month that the governor lacked the authority to withdraw the state from initiative, though a spokesman for the governor has declared the state’s intention to appeal.
There is widespread agreement that RGGI will endure despite likely federal hostility to climate measures. There was no attempt to take direct action against it during Trump’s first term, nor has there been any concerted industry opposition, said Conservation Law Foundation president Bradley Campbell, who was involved in the founding of RGGI when he was commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
Supporters also note that the program has historically had broad bipartisan support: Participating states have been led through the years by both Republican and Democratic governors and legislatures.
Politics has had some influence over the years, though only at the margins. New Jersey, a founding member of RGGI, left in 2011 when Chris Christie was governor, but returned in 2020 following an executive order from his successor. Pennsylvania joined in 2022 through an executive order from the governor, but its participation is now being challenged in court.
Still, RGGI’s foundations are solid and will remain so, experts said.
“The basic infrastructure has weathered the political winds over the decades,” Campbell said.
Looking forward
Nonetheless, RGGI will need to make some carefully thought-out program design decisions during its current review to make an impact in the face of falling federal support for decarbonization.
One question under consideration is whether to maintain the existing trajectory for the overall emissions cap for the program — a reduction of 30% between 2020 and 2030, then holding steady thereafter — or to continue lowering the limit after 2030.
The RGGI states are also contemplating a possible change to the compliance schedule that would require power generators to acquire allowances worth 100% of their carbon emissions each year, and certify compliance annually. The current system calls for certification every three years, and only mandates allowances equivalent to half of carbon emissions for the first two years of each period.
The program is looking for ways to appeal to potential new participant states that have less aggressive decarbonization goals than current member states without watering down the program’s overall impact on decarbonization, said Acadia Center policy analyst Paola Tamayo. Acadia suggested possible program mechanisms such as giving proportionately more allowances to states with more stringent emissions targets to incentivize tighter limits.
“At this point it is critical for states to maintain a high level of ambition when it comes to programs like RGGI,” Tamayo said. “There are different mechanisms that they can implement to accommodate other states.”
The program review is expected to yield a model rule some time over the winter, though updates may be made into the spring as the RGGI states receive and consider feedback on how to accommodate potential new participants.
States will also need to maintain and strengthen their own climate policies to magnify the impact of RGGI, Campbell said. He pointed to Massachusetts, where Gov. Maura Healey needs to show “bolder leadership,” he said, and Maine and Vermont, where the Conservation Law Foundation has filed lawsuits in an attempt to compel the states to meet their own carbon reduction deadlines.
“It’s especially important that the states that have strong emissions reduction mandates speed up the implementation of their climate laws,” he said. “State leadership on these issues is going to be more important than ever.”
The owner of a Franklin County school bus contractor in Pennsylvania has been accused of forging documents, in order to continue driving a school bus even though she was not cleared, reported ABC 27.
According to the news report, charges were filed against 72-year-old Theresa Keifman on Monday, the owner of Keifman Busing, for allegedly forging documents for years.
State police said Kelfman doctored original documents dating back to 2018 by changing the year to be more current. Keifman reportedly did this so she could continue to drive a bus with a passenger and school bus endorsement.
Officials said that 2017 was the last time Keifman passed the required medical examination. The new date was the only thing she changed on the documents, leaving the rest exactly the same each year.
Police said Keifman was not medically cleared to drive the bus. The articled noted that school bus drivers in Pennsylvania must obtain a valid physical examination every 13 months to ensure they are medically cleared to drive students.
During the investigation, officers reportedly reviewed Keifman’s Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and medical records. She now faces felony charges of forgery along with misdemeanor charges of tampering with records or ID, tampering with/fabricating physical evidence, tampering with public record/information, and unsworn falsification to authorities.
Keifman is reportedly out on unsecured bail set at $25,000 and has a preliminary hearing scheduled for Nov. 25.
The Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, gives her “closing argument” of the campaign in a speech on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 29, 2024. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
The fallout from a comedian’s racially charged joke at a rally for former President Donald Trump continued Wednesday as the campaign for the presidency raced toward its final weekend, with Democrats on the defensive about President Joe Biden’s reaction to the joke.
Republicans claimed Biden labeled Trump supporters as “garbage,” while Democrats insisted Biden was being misinterpreted, and a battle over the placement of an apostrophe in Biden’s comment spread from the White House briefing room to campaign stops.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Wednesday further clarified Biden’s comment, made on a Tuesday evening call to rally Latino voters. Biden brought up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s remark at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.”
“They’re good, decent, honorable people,” Biden said Tuesday of Puerto Ricans who live in his home state of Delaware. “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
An initial White House transcript of the call placed an apostrophe after the word “supporters,” making its meaning about multiple Trump supporters. A later transcript placed the possessive inside the word, so it read as “supporter’s,” making it about a single supporter, Hinchcliffe.
Biden posted on X Tuesday evening that was his intent.
“Earlier today I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage—which is the only word I can think of to describe it,” Biden’s post read. “His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable. That’s all I meant to say. The comments at that rally don’t reflect who we are as a nation.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, also told reporters early Wednesday that it was wrong to disparage people over political affiliation, while noting Biden clarified he referred only to Hinchcliffe. The flap over Biden’s comments came just as Harris was giving her “closing argument” speech on the Ellipse on Tuesday night before a crowd in the tens of thousands.
“Let me be clear,” she said. “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”
Latino voters in general and Puerto Ricans in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania in particular are seen as a crucial voting bloc in the closing days of the campaign, and both campaigns are trying to get their support.
Jean-Pierre said from the White House briefing room Wednesday that Biden does not think Trump supporters are “garbage.”
“What I can say is that the president wanted to make sure that his words were not being taken out of context,” she said. “And so he wanted to clarify, and that’s what you heard from the president. He was very aware. And I would say I think it’s really important that you have a president that cares about clarifying what they said.”
Trump repeatedly has said the United States is the “garbage can of the world” as a result of Biden’s immigration policies.
Rubio: Harris camp should apologize
But Trump and other Republicans jumped on Biden’s remark, immediately comparing it to 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s comment that many Trump supporters comprised “a basket of deplorables.” That comment was seen as damaging to Clinton’s campaign against Trump.
At a Tuesday evening Trump rally in Pennsylvania, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida disclosed news of Biden’s statement.
“I hope their campaign is about to apologize for what Joe Biden just said,” Rubio said. “We are not garbage. We are patriots who love America.”
“Wow, that’s terrible,” Trump added. “Remember Hillary, she said deplorable, and then she said irredeemable, right? But she said deplorable. That didn’t work out. Garbage I think is worse, right?”
Harris brings closing argument in N.C.
At a Wednesday afternoon rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, Harris echoed some of the themes she sounded in the “closing argument” speech she gave Tuesday night.
She urged voters in the battleground state to “turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump, who has been trying to keep us divided and afraid of each other.”
She said Trump was focused on personal grievances and seeking revenge on political opponents, while she would work toward improving voters’ lives.
“There are many big differences between he and I,” she said. “But I would say a major contrast is this: If he is elected, on day one, Donald Trump will walk into that office with an enemies list. When I am elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.”
First on her list would be lowering the costs of health care, child care and other expenses for families, she said.
Harris appealed directly to disaffected Republicans, saying she would seek common ground with those she disagrees with. That approach, she said, was also in contrast to Trump, who used charged language to describe his opponents and pledged to retaliate against them.
“Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy,” she said. “He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table. And I pledge to be a president for all Americans, and to always put country above party and self.”
Harris won another endorsement from a nationally known Republican Wednesday, with former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger saying he would vote for her despite policy disagreements.
Trump also campaigned in North Carolina on Wednesday, in Rocky Mount, a town in a more rural part of the state about 50 miles east of Raleigh.
He said his campaign was a welcoming one to all races and religions and said Harris was the one running “a campaign of hate” toward Trump and his supporters, while lobbing an insult at the vice president.
“Kamala, a low-IQ individual, is running a campaign of hate, anger and retribution,” he said, repeating a term he has used for her before.
Election integrity
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee said Wednesday they won a court case in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, over early voting hours, RNC officials said on a call Wednesday afternoon.
A judge in the key swing county extended the deadline to apply for a mail-in ballot after some voters said that long lines forced them to miss the 5 p.m. Tuesday deadline.
On the press call, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said a Trump supporter had been arrested after telling people in line near the deadline to remain in line.
Party officials, including Trump’s daughter-in-law, RNC Co-Chair Lara Trump, said the result bolstered their confidence in a free and fair election.
“We want to make people all across this country feel good about the process of voting in the United States of America,” Lara Trump said. “It is so foundational to who we are as a country that we trust our electoral process and this type of work allows exactly for that.”
Lara Trump said the party was “incredibly confident” in its staffers dedicated to ensuring the election is fair.
The issue has been a major priority for Republicans since Donald Trump and others claimed, without evidence, that election fraud caused his 2020 re-election loss.
That claim was rejected in scores of courts and a federal grand jury indicted Trump on four felony counts for using the election fraud lie to inspire the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Trump and allies have also speculated that his political opponents would seek to use illegal means, including voting by noncitizens, this year.
But in a departure from that rhetoric Wednesday, the RNC officials voiced confidence that the 2024 results would be trustworthy.
“I think it’s really important that we get the word spread loud and clear that we are taking this seriously, that you can trust American elections,” Lara Trump said. “In 2024, we want to re-establish any trust that may have been lost previously.”
Former President Barack Obama speaks during a campaign rally in support of Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris at Temple University October 28 in Philadelphia. (Win McNamee | Getty Images)
PHILADELPHIA — Kicking off the final full week of campaigning before the 2024 presidential election, former President Barack Obama hit the trail for Vice President Kamala Harris for a rally that doubled as a concert with performances from Bruce Springsteen and John Legend.
As he’s done at other stops on the campaign trail this cycle, Obama wasted no time criticizing former President Donald Trump, the GOP nominee for president, accusing him of whining about his problems and only thinking about himself rather than the American people.
“Most of all, Donald Trump wants us to think this country is hopelessly divided between us and them,” Obama said. “Between the quote real Americans who support him, of course, and the outsiders who don’t. The enemies within.”
“These are your fellow citizens he’s talking about here,” Obama said. “Here’s a good rule: If somebody does not respect you, if somebody does not see you as a fellow citizen with equal claims to opportunity, to the pursuit of happiness, to the American dream, you should not vote for them.”
“You should not expect them to make your life better. They will not help you pay the bills. They’re not gonna work hard to make sure your kid gets a good education. They’re not gonna help you with a down payment on a house. We have to reject the kind of politics of division and hatred that we saw represented,” he added.
The Trump campaign issued a statement following the Sunday rally saying the “joke” about Puerto Rico “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”
Monday evening’s event in North Philadelphia is a part of the Harris’ campaign’s “When We Vote We Win” concert series that is aiming to drive up voter turnout in key battleground states, including Pennsylvania.
Former President Barack Obama speaks on stage at a rally for Kamala Harris at the Liacouras Center on Temple University’s campus in Philadelphia Oct 28, 2024. (John Cole | Pennsylvania Capital-Star)
Obama touted his administration’s record, including the Affordable Care Act, and brought up several times Trump’s “concepts of a plan” for replacing the ACA. Trump made the comment during last month’s debate with Harris in Philadelphia, during a discussion on healthcare. Obama also highlighted the economy he inherited when he took office in 2009 to the one he gave to Trump when he entered the Oval Office.
“Some people are saying ‘well, I remember the economy when he first came in, that was pretty good,” Obama said. “Yea, it was good because it was my economy.”
Legend and Springsteen also offered a few words during their performances on stage, echoing the message from some of the songs.
“Kamala Harris has a vision for all of us, a vision that includes everybody and fights for the freedoms we deserve and the future we can build together,” Legend said. “Like Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Teddy Pendergrass and the great Philadelphia artists said it’s time to wake up and Philadelphia, it’s time to choose where we stand.”
Legend performed Wake Up Everybody by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and opened with Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come.
“I believe in a brighter tomorrow,” Legend said. “I believe that a change is going to come, Philadelphia.”
U.S. Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), who introduced Springsteen to the stage, accused his Republican challenger Dave McCormick of being on the side of billionaires, while he is focused on delivering for middle class families.
“I love his entire family and I can tell you there is nobody who is more humble, more honest, more rooted in his community, more dedicated to this great state than Bob Casey,” Obama said.
Bruce Springsteen greets U.S. Sen. Bob Casey on stage at a rally for Kamala Harris at the Liacouras Center on Temple University’s campus in Philadelphia Oct 28, 2024 (John Cole | Pennsylvania Capital-Star)
The Trump campaign sent out a statement on Monday prior to the rally.
“Democrats’ continued reliance on celebrities and Barack Obama, a president from over 10 years ago, to make the case for their party’s presidential candidate is another indication that Kamala’s pitch for another four years of unlimited illegal immigration, inflation, and wars abroad is falling flat with Pennsylvanians,” said Trump campaign spokesperson Kush Desai. “Glitzy celebrities and presidents of yesteryear aren’t going to make up for a mediocre message, disastrous record, and less-than-appealing candidate.”
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker and Pennsylvania House Speaker Joanna McClinton, who both spoke at Harris’ rally on Sunday in Philadelphia, also delivered remarks on Monday evening.
McClinton said as she left her house before the rally, her mother said she looked nice and asked where she was going.
John Legend performs on stage at a rally for Kamala Harris at the Liacouras Center on Temple University’s campus in Philadelphia Oct 28, 2024 (John Cole | Pennsylvania Capital-Star)
“I said, I’m going to see the best president that ever did it,” McClinton said, to applause. “Tonight, in our midst, we are going to give a warm Philly welcome to our 44th president, President Barack Hussein Obama.”
Parker spoke for just over 10 minutes and engaged with the crowd throughout her speech. At one point, she directed half of the audience to say “Kamala Harris,” while the other half responded “for the people.”
While Springsteen and Legend headlined the event, music played throughout the evening between speakers. At one point, the DJ led the crowd for a popular Ludacris song from 2001, putting a twist on it by saying “Move Trump get out the way.”
Trump was most recently in the state on Saturday for a rally at Penn State. He’s returning on Tuesday for a roundtable discussion in Delaware County and a rally in Allentown.
The running mates have also hit the campaign trail in the past few days. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic Party’s nominee for vice president, campaigned through the eastern half of the state on Friday, while U.S. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP candidate for vice president, was in Harrisburg and Erie. Walz and Vance are also scheduled to be in the state later this week.
Bruce Springsteen is seen on an overhead screen at a rally for Kamala Harris at the Liacouras Center on Temple University’s campus in Philadelphia Oct 28, 2024 (John Cole | Pennsylvania Capital-Star)
The final Saturday is also shaping up to be a busy day for both campaigns. Trump is reportedly making plans to attend the Penn State vs Ohio State football game in State College, while former First Lady Michelle Obama will campaign in Pennsylvania for the Harris-Walz ticket. Visits continue to take place as the race is coming down to the wire. Polling shows both candidates in a dead heat for the state’s 19 electoral votes.
State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (D-Philadelphia), candidate for auditor general and Temple University alum, told the crowd on Monday that “none of us want to live in Donald Trump’s dark, twisted future from the 1700s.”
Kenyatta was very briefly interrupted during his speech with the sound of a ringing phone coming over the speakers, which could be heard through the entire arena.
“That is the future calling,” Kenyatta said, smiling. “And I hope you’re ready to answer.”
Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and X.
PHILADELPHIA, Pa.– The School District of Philadelphia has taken a significant step toward a cleaner and healthier future for its students by adding 38 propane-powered school buses to its fleet. In a ribbon-cutting ceremony held at the Shallcross School Bus Garage, district officials, industry leaders, and community members gathered to celebrate this move to the near-zero emissions buses that offer students a safer, quieter ride. As the eighth largest school district in the nation, serving just under 200,000 students every day, the move to clean propane autogas buses positions the district as a national leader in clean student transportation.
“We are excited to be leading the way here in Philadelphia as we grow our low-emission school bus fleet and create a healthier environment for our students, drivers, and the community-at-large,” said Superintendent Tony B. Watlington, Sr., Ed.D., School District of Philadelphia. “We are pleased to work with our top partner organizations to bring our very first propane-powered bus fleet to fruition. Together, we continue to turn our compelling vision of clean student transportation into reality.”
The district’s propane-powered buses, developed by Blue Bird Corporation and powered by ROUSH CleanTech engines, are projected to reduce emissions significantly compared to their diesel counterparts. In real-world testing, ROUSH CleanTech’s ultra-low nitrogen oxide (NOx) engines produced 96% fewer NOx emissions than clean diesel alternatives and virtually eliminated particulate matter. According to the EPA, these pollutants can worsen respiratory conditions like asthma and bronchitis and can cause children to miss school.
“Congratulations to the School District of Philadelphia for its commitment to reducing emissions with cost-cutting propane school buses,” said Todd Mouw, executive vice president of sales and marketing for ROUSH CleanTech. “Propane autogas is an affordable, abundant American fuel that allows school districts to reduce their operating costs while helping to preserve the environment.”
Propane-powered school buses provide districts with the lowest total cost of ownership. According to Blue Bird Corporation, school districts benefit from fuel and maintenance cost savings of up to $3,700 per bus annually compared with diesel buses. Thus, SDP’s propane-powered bus fleet could save the district more than $2.1 million over the 15-year life of its vehicles. The district can reinvest those savings into classroom initiatives and student resources.
“We are thrilled to supply the School District of Philadelphia, one of the largest in the nation, with our industry-leading, ultra-low-emission propane school buses,” said Albert Burleigh, vice president of North America bus sales at Blue Bird Corporation. “SDP already operates five Blue Bird electric, zero-emission school buses. Utilizing electric and propane-powered school buses, the school district combines the most technologically advanced clean school buses in its fleet leading the way to creating sustainable student transportation.”
As part of this initiative, the district has also invested in new propane refueling infrastructure at the Shallcross School Bus Garage as part of a partnership with propane supplier, Ferrellgas. An 18,000-gallon propane tank has been installed to allow for efficient and convenient on-site refueling. This not only reduces downtime for refueling but further supports the district’s efforts to lower operational costs compared to diesel.
“Propane is a low-carbon energy source that produces up to 96% less toxic emissions than diesel school buses while also offering a lower total cost of ownership,” said Michelle Bimson Maggi, vice president corporate for Ferrellgas. “Ferrellgas is proud to add the School District of Philadelphia to our growing list of customers nationwide who have transformed their fleet by making the switch to propane autogas. Their decision to add clean-burning alternative fuel buses into their fleet will benefit students and local taxpayers for many years to come.”
With this adoption, there are now more than 1,000 propane autogas school buses operating in Pennsylvania every school day. In total, there are more than 22,000 propane-powered school buses transporting 1.3 million students across the United States.
“At the Propane Education & Research Council (PERC), we believe that every child deserves a safe, clean, healthy ride to school. The School District of Philadelphia is showing true leadership by choosing propane as a clean energy solution and providing that ideal ride,” said Bridget Kidd, COO of PERC. “They are not just investing in buses; they are investing in the future of their students and the well-being of the community. By adopting this innovative technology, the district is setting an example for others across the country.”
This clean energy initiative was made possible through a partnership between the School District of Philadelphia, the Propane Education & Research Council, Ferrellgas, ROUSH CleanTech, and Blue Bird Corporation, all of whom are committed to advancing sustainable transportation solutions for schools.
About The School District of Philadelphia: The eighth largest school district in the country currently serves just under 200,000 students guided by our five-year strategic plan, Accelerate Philly. Our students are accelerating academic achievement. We prioritize the social-emotional well-being, mental health, intellectual and physical safety of all students and staff. We also align our resources, trainings and accountability structures to a limited number of innovative and research-based priorities. visit philasd.org.
About PERC: The Propane Education & Research Council is a nonprofit that provides leading propane safety and training programs and invests in research and development of new propane-powered technologies. PERC is operated and funded by the propane industry. For more information, visit Propane.com.
About Blue Bird Corporation: Blue Bird (NASDAQ: BLBD) is recognized as a technology leader and innovator of school buses since its founding in 1927. Our dedicated team members design, engineer and manufacture school buses with a singular focus on safety, reliability, and durability. School buses carry the most precious cargo in the world – 25 million children twice a day – making them the most trusted mode of student transportation. The company is the proven leader in low- and zero-emission school buses with more than 20,000 propane, natural gas, and electric powered buses in operation today. Blue Bird is transforming the student transportation industry through cleaner energy solutions. For more information on Blue Bird’s complete product and service portfolio, visit www.blue-bird.com.
About ROUSH CleanTech: ROUSH CleanTech, an industry leader of advanced clean transportation solutions, is a division of the global engineering company Roush Enterprises. ROUSH CleanTech develops propane autogas technology for medium-duty Ford commercial vehicles and school buses. With more than 50,000 vehicles on the road, the Livonia, Michigan-based company delivers economical, emissions-reducing options for fleets across North America. Learn more at ROUSHcleantech.com or by calling 800.59.ROUSH.
About Ferrellgas: Ferrellgas Partners, L.P., through its operating partnership, Ferrellgas, L.P., and subsidiaries, serves propane customers in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Its Blue Rhino propane exchange brand is sold at over 68,000 locations nationwide. Ferrellgas employees indirectly own 1.1 million Class A Units of the partnership, through an employee stock ownership plan. Ferrellgas Partners, L.P. filed an Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended July 31, 2024, with the Securities and Exchange Commission on September 27, 2024. Investors can request a hard copy of this filing free of charge and obtain more information about the partnership online at www.ferrellgas.com
A 17-year-old was arrested in connection with a school bus shooting in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The teen’s lawyer claims his client is innocent.
According to a news statement released by Chester County District Attorney’s Office, the incident occurred on Oct. 17, when four suspects wearing masks and dark clothing approached a Coatesville Area School District school bus. Two of the suspects allegedly pulled out weapons and fired eight shots. The school bus was hit twice.
The shooting was a targeted attack on someone exiting the school bus, the district attorney’s office added. It is unclear who that person is. The students and school bus driver on board were not hurt.
In the statement, authorities said that Jaki White-Marshall is facing dozens of charges tied to the shooting, including aggravated assault, simple assault and recklessly endangering another person.
However, a statement released by defense attorney Vicent J. Caputo claims that White-Marshall is innocent and was only at the scene to witness a fight that had been promoted on social media.
Caputo added that White-Marshall also never had any communication with the alleged perpetrators of this crime prior to the incident.
White-Marshall was arrested on Friday and is currently being held at the Chester County Youth Center. Caputo said he wants the charges against his client to be dismissed.
District Attorney Christoper de Barrena-Sarobe reportedly urged the remaining suspects to surrender to authorities.
The one thing Kamala Harris and Donald Trump seem to agree on is that the road to the White House runs through Pennsylvania, the nation’s most populous swing state.
October polls show an even split in the Keystone State, and its 19 Electoral College votes could well decide the election. Not a week went by in September without one or more visits from each campaign. And Pennsylvania is where Harris and Trump met face-to-face for their first and only debate, during which both candidates vied to convince Americans that they can deliver more prosperity. Harris wants to grow the economy in part by continuing the clean energy manufacturing policies enacted by the Biden administration; Trump wants to roll them back.
Given the immense electoral stakes, I decided to visit the state to see if the idea of a clean energy future is resonating with Pennsylvanians and how that transition is starting to materialize in a place where coal, oil, and gas have reigned supreme since the 1800s.
Pennsylvania’s coal abundance jump-started the transition away from burning wood as a primary energy source. Coal later made the state the steelmaking capital of America and powered the nation for decades. Meanwhile, oil production surged beginning in 1859, when Edwin Drake tapped the country’s first oil well at Titusville, and the state led U.S. oil production through the end of that century.
More recently, when engineers commercialized fracking in the 2000s, the Marcellus Shale, which stretches under Pennsylvania, quickly became the biggest shale-gas-producing region in the nation.
Now, though, Pennsylvania is at a crossroads: The resources that fueled Pennsylvania’s past growth are plateauing or petering out.
“Coal employment has gone off a cliff,” said Seth Blumsack, who runs the Center for Energy Law and Policy at Penn State. “You had an influx of natural gas jobs — that growth has largely leveled off, as Pennsylvania hit this kind of steady state of gas production.”
This isn’t the first time Pennsylvania’s core economic drivers have waned. Factories and steel mills took a beating in the 1970s and 1980s, as foreign producers competed in earnest with America’s industrial machine. Plants that sustained whole towns closed down, with nothing to replace them. The ironworks Andrew Carnegie built in 1875 still operates on the bank of the Monongahela River, but owner U.S. Steel is desperately trying to unload it to Japan’s Nippon Steel.
These conditions have created new opportunities for the clean energy transition to take hold. Political leaders like Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and business owners are embracing low-carbon industry as an economic development strategy for the energy-rich state.
Shapiro has pushed to strengthen the state’s outdated clean energy standard for power production, and he signed a bill this summer to establish ground rules for developing carbon-sequestration projects. His administration recently won $400 million in federal funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“the second-largest federal grant in Pennsylvania’s history,” a spokesperson for the governor pointed out). Pennsylvania will disburse that money in competitive grants to industrial entities proportional to their ambitions at carbon reduction; the Shapiro administration wants the ensuing projects to slash statewide industrial emissions 10 percent by 2050.
Given the state’s long history of oil and gas, hydrogen production is sure to loom large. In the lower-carbon future, clean hydrogen could become the next key energy commodity. Last year, Biden’s Department of Energy awarded seven proposed hydrogen hubs around the country roughly $1 billion each. Pennsylvania, as Shapiro regularly points out, was the only state to win funding for two: The Philadelphia-based hub is slated to produce hydrogen with nuclear power and renewables, while the Pittsburgh-based hub will focus on turning fossil gas into hydrogen and stowing the ensuing emissions underground.
But Pennsylvania’s industrial decarbonization is just getting started.
“You’re not seeing the finished product, but so many things are falling into place,” said John Carlson, who oversees state policy engagement in the region for Clean Air Task Force, a climate-solutions think tank.
Clean energy manufacturing, though, is already beginning to put Pennsylvanians to work. A few entrepreneurs have retooled historic Pittsburgh-area factories to turn iron and zinc into batteries that store power from the sun and wind. Steelworkers forge the backbone that holds phalanxes of solar panels, bolstering America’s fastest-growing source of electricity.
Pennsylvania has fallen behind other states in building clean power plants, but renewables developers are getting more ambitious. In Clearfield County, northeast of Pittsburgh, developer Swift Current Energy is building the biggest solar plant in the commonwealth on 2,700 acres of reclaimed mine land.
“There’s this huge industrial knowledge base in Pennsylvania,” Blumsack said, “and people who want to work, and so how do you harness that?”
From coal and gas to hydrogen
The Marcellus Shale arcs from southwest to northeast Pennsylvania, undergirding the state physically and economically.
Other states talk of phasing out fossil fuel extraction to tackle their planet-warming emissions. In Pennsylvania, Shapiro, working with split control of the legislature in Harrisburg, speaks pragmatically of harnessing the state’s mineral wealth for the goal of decarbonization. In her Pennsylvania debate appearance, Vice President Harris renounced her earlier opposition to fracking: “Let’s talk about fracking, because we’re here in Pennsylvania. I made that very clear in 2020. I will not ban fracking.” Such is the gravitational pull of the Marcellus.
But talking about pumping fossil fuels while decarbonizing is much easier than doing it. So I ventured through the corduroy-like ridges of the Appalachian foothills to a place where people are working to make it happen: Penn State, formed as an agricultural school in 1855 and now home to nearly 50,000 students in a bucolic town aptly named State College.
Sanjay Srinivasan greeted me outside the beige concrete structure that houses the Energy Institute, where the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences conducts research to unlock lower-carbon opportunities for the state.
I did a double take as we approached the building — the sign on the exterior wall said “Coal Utilization Laboratory,” a relic of the not-so-distant past. In the lobby, we passed displays of actual coal in all its dark glory: an uninterrupted column of bituminous stretching to the ceiling, a pyramidal sampler of anthracite designated by colloquial gradations like Egg, Chestnut, Pea, and the fine little pebbles of No. 3 Buckwheat.
“We are interested in doing anything that we can to help communities in the Pennsylvania Appalachian region transition to the new energy economy,” Srinivasan told me.
Penn State’s Coal Utilization Laboratory has transformed into a research hub for ways to repurpose the state’s fossil fuel resources into lower-carbon energy. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
The institute approaches that task by looking for existing energy infrastructure it can repurpose. That means researching ways to extract critical minerals from the region’s mining waste ponds and fly ash piles, or tap hot briny water in abandoned mines as a heat source for buildings. And, thanks to the billion-dollar hub grant from the DOE, western Pennsylvania could turn its fossil fuels into hydrogen to clean up heavy vehicles and industry.
“In this part of the world, the formations can be used for storing hydrogen. But better still, can we use the shale gas for producing hydrogen and then develop a closed-loop process where you don’t emit anything into the atmosphere?” Srinivasan posited.
Almost all hydrogen made today comes from blasting methane with steam at high pressure, which yields hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide. The machines that do this, called steam methane reformers, historically just vent the CO2 into the atmosphere. U.S. hydrogen production is highly concentrated in the Gulf Coast petrochemical corridor, where refineries use the gas in their production process.
The Appalachian hub is planning to fund efforts, like the KeyState project in Clinton County, to make hydrogen this old-fashioned way but then inject the CO2 stream underground for geological storage. The DOE concluded negotiations with this hub in July, kicking off the active planning phase, which could last for three years.
The Gulf Coast has successfully sequestered carbon that oil companies pumped underground to push out more oil. In Pennsylvania, operators and researchers have yet to prove this is commercially feasible. The plan, Srinivasan told me, is to drill down 8,000 to 10,000 feet, through the Marcellus Shale, through the Geneseo Shale, to the Oriskany Sandstone. The shale formations above would act as a cap on the carbon dioxide. The National Science Foundation recently funded Penn State to study the Appalachian Basin’s carbon-sequestration potential.
Many climate advocates doubt that hydrogen production from fossil fuels will ever be particularly clean. That said, hydrogen producers elsewhere have proved that they can achieve high rates of carbon capture at steam methane reformers, noted Sam Bailey, industrial decarbonization manager at Clean Air Task Force. Pennsylvania operators would also need to secure low-carbon electricity to run their operations, and buy methane from a supply chain that isn’t leaky.
“Some producers in the region have some of the lowest leak rates, but those obviously have to be verifiable and transparent,” Bailey said.
The mid-Atlantic hydrogen hub, centered around Philadelphia, would focus on electrolysis powered by offshore wind and nuclear power. The Shapiro administration expects both hubs to create 41,000 jobs, though the DOE estimates the hubs will take eight to 12 years to fully materialize.
There might be other pathways for turning fossil gas into clean hydrogen. Down the hallway, Srinivasan’s colleague showed me a tabletop device that performs what’s called thermocatalytic decomposition: The machine essentially cooks methane at low temperatures until it lets out pure hydrogen and inert, solid carbon. That would be much simpler than catching and injecting gaseous carbon deep underground.
This machine at Penn State breaks down methane under low heat to yield hydrogen and solid carbons. If the emerging technology gains traction, it could process gas leaking out of old mines. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
The tabletop version I saw is still “frontier technology,” Srinivasan cautioned, made possible by recent advances in catalyst efficiency. But it could be a good fit for smaller installations to catch methane leaking out of Pennsylvania’s many abandoned coal mines. Modular decomposers could convert those decentralized streams of intensely planet-warming gas into harmless carbon solids that can be used as industrial feedstocks.
Pittsburgh steel goes solar
The town of Leetsdale hugs the Ohio River north of Pittsburgh, surrounded by sprawling industrial complexes and freight lines. During World War II, Bethlehem Steel fashioned barges and landing craft there. Historians describe that war as a clash of steel that the U.S. won because its factories cranked out more tanks, planes, and ships than its opponents.
Most of those factories are long gone, but JM Steel, an affiliate of the century-old company Jennmar, took over a site in Leetsdale one year ago and reopened it with a new mission: bending steel to the will of the burgeoning solar industry. Its preliminary success shows how federal clean energy policy is breathing new life into Pennsylvania’s legacy industries — exactly what the hydrogen hubs are supposed to do.
When I rolled up to the riverside lot, the factory looked like it was fortified for some kind of invasion. Thirty-foot steel tubes had been trussed up by the dozen and stacked to form an impenetrable barricade taller than a person.
Pittsburgh native Chris Bartley led me through the steely labyrinth, explaining that these pipes were torque tubes ready to ship. His employer, Nextracker, uses the tubes to mount huge numbers of solar panels that can change their angle throughout the day.
Early in the solar revolution, developers installed panels in fixed positions, at what seemed like the most advantageous angle. Silicon Valley startup Nextracker revolutionized the market by attaching panels to trackers that follow the sun’s arc, and pivot away from dangers like hail or high wind. This innovation enhanced solar power output and made Nextracker one of cleantech’s clearest commercial successes: It went public in 2023 and now trades with a market cap over $5 billion. To supply its booming business, Nextracker enlists specialists like JM Steel to sculpt metal to its specifications.
Chris Bartley stands before stacks of Pittsburgh-made torque tubes, which his company Nextracker sells to large-scale solar projects so the panels can track the sun. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
In a little meeting room off the factory floor, Negley Rodgers, who oversees plant operations for family-owned JM Steel, told me the plant ships an average of six truckloads of torque tubes per day — 350,000 torque tubes since last October. They go straight to solar plants in the region, where the tons of steel translate to megawatts of cheap, clean power rushing onto the grid.
We donned hard hats, earplugs, and orange scratch-resistant sleeves for my exposed forearms, then walked into the cavernous factory. First we saw the “master coils” of rolled-up flat steel that the company buys from domestic producers like Nucor and SDI. The coils don’t look overwhelmingly large, but are so heavy that flatbed trucks can carry only one at a time, Rodgers noted. The high-ceilinged factory has a built-in crane capable of lifting 40 tons to maneuver the coils into position.
Workers feed these coils into machines that use heat and immense force to roll the flat material into thick round pipes. Another station drills the holes that will attach the solar panels. JM adjusts the drilling arrangement for each project — some use bigger panels, some smaller, but the company can accommodate them all on the same production line.
Before Covid-19, Nextracker relied on a more typical globalized supply chain. Then CEO Dan Shugar decided to localize tracker production to where his customers operated around the world: Solar plants would get trackers made nearby, so nothing got stuck in port overseas. A couple of years later, the IRA sweetened the deal with meaningful financial incentives to produce solar-power components domestically.
The Inflation Reduction Act created an 87-cent-per-kilogram tax credit for torque tube manufacturing. Additionally, solar developers can access an extra 10 percent tax credit for their power plants by hitting a critical mass of domestic components, per an IRS rubric. Trackers include torque tubes, rails, controllers, and motors, Bartley explained; sourcing all those components in the U.S. unlocks a bonus, which nets 24.7 percent coverage for the overall solar project.
JM Steel uses heat and force to turn coils of flat, rolled steel into torque tubes capable of holding up solar panels in inclement weather. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
The exact level of domestic content varies by project, based on what a developer is looking for. A U.S.-made tracker creates flexibility for how the company sources other components while still meeting the IRS cutoff.
Conventional corporate wisdom long held that offshoring production to China cut costs and improved profits. Sourcing a 100 percent domestic tracker still adds a premium, Bartley said, but it’s already possible to make most of the system here without driving up cost.
“Looking at our cost of a tracker fully delivered to a job site, we’re seeing really competitive costs and pricing [while] making a significant part of the tracker domestically,” he said. “As time goes on, we’re expecting any sort of premium like that to go down, because we’re expanding capacity of these other components, like our electronic components.”
Part of that favorable comparison to foreign imports has to do with the inescapable heft of this product: “They’re not shipping nuts and bolts that they can pack into a tight box on a ship,” said Rodgers. “They’re shipping these large, 30-foot-long, five-inch diameter tubes that take up a massive amount of volume on a ship.”
Steel companies have opened 20 factory sites across the U.S. that exclusively produce torque tubes for Nextracker; the factories wouldn’t exist without the demand from the booming solar market. JM ships from Pittsburgh to places like Indiana, Illinois, and Tennessee, but business in Pennsylvania has been picking up, as evidenced by the blockbuster Mineral Basin Solar project. That one will put 400 megawatts on reclaimed mining land northeast of Pittsburgh. The power and its clean energy credits will actually flow to New York, but millions of dollars of lease payments and tax revenues will stay in the county.
For JM Steel, the imperative to decarbonize has given new urgency to the skills and products that Pittsburgh long excelled at. At the same time, U.S. Steel is trying to unload its flagship Pittsburgh steel plant to a Japanese company, arguing that it’s the only way to remain commercially viable. I asked Rodgers if that deal signaled the end of an era for American steelmakers.
“I can’t comment on that,” he said, referring to U.S. Steel’s position. “Just — manufacturing is still viable, and it’s still happening in the United States.”
Indeed, the growing pressure on big steel buyers to source lower-carbon or “green” steel could give U.S. companies an edge on overseas competition. The U.S. already uses a high proportion of electric arc furnaces to melt scrap metal into new products; those can run on clean electricity to further curb their carbon footprint. The industry is also exploring ways to decarbonize the carbon-intensive conversion of iron ores to metallic iron, by using clean hydrogen instead of coal. Pennsylvania doesn’t have any of those facilities operating yet — the world’s first large-scale commercial plant of this kind is under construction in Sweden. But the hubs aim to bring clean hydrogen supply to greater Pittsburgh, and the DOE has funded steel companies to build initial facilities to use it.
For now, JM Steel’s plant serves Nextracker’s needs with some 53 employees — a welcome addition, but not close to the scale of employment at the site in bygone decades. For clean energy buyers or green steel customers to make a mark on the regional economy, they’ll need to put many more people to work.
Reopening factories for battery breakthroughs
Solar panels planted on Pittsburgh steel clean up the grid during sunny hours. But as solar generation provides ever more electricity, new energy storage technologies will be needed to turn cheap renewables into round-the-clock power.
Federal policymakers hope to bring battery manufacturing back to the U.S. after China pulled far ahead in its capacity to make lithium-ion batteries. It’s extremely difficult to catch up to competitors who are already producing at tremendous scale — the recent financial struggles at Europe’s Northvolt attest to that. Pittsburgh, though, has become a hub for fabricating novel battery technologies that aren’t made anywhere else in the world, a risky strategy with the potential for a big payoff.
Habitually cash-strapped startup Eos makes zinc-based batteries at the junction of Turtle Creek and the Monongahela. For decades, Westinghouse built electrical generators on the site that powered the Hoover Dam and other icons of modern America. Nikola Tesla once toiled there, as did more than 20,000 workers in the plant’s heyday. But Westinghouse shuttered the Turtle Creek plant in 1988, gutting the economy of the surrounding Mon Valley.
Now Eos employs 300 people to manufacture energy storage in 150,000 square feet of the old Westinghouse complex. If the unconventional product takes off, Eos could expand and further boost the local economy — but that’s a big if.
The Westinghouse facility in Turtle Creek used to employ 20,000 people to make electrical generating equipment. It closed in the 1980s, but has recently opened up to growing businesses like Eos. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
Eos has toiled, since 2008, to commercialize a new type of battery that could beat lithium-ion on fire safety and cost for longer-duration energy storage. Lithium-ion batteries almost always win customers looking to deliver stored power for four hours, and increasingly five or six. Beyond that, lithium-ion gets prohibitively expensive. Eos markets its batteries as capable of delivering power for three to 12 hours, which runs the gamut from the incumbent technology’s sweet spot to a storage duration that few customers have ever purchased.
That’s a tough market to break into, and Eos survived its first decade with little commercial traction to show for it. In 2019, the board brought in a new management team, a crew of GE veterans, led by CEO Joe Mastrangelo. He stopped outsourcing fabrication to contractors in China and localized production in Pittsburgh.
I met Mastrangelo in a conference room above the factory. He wore thick-framed glasses and a company hoodie, lime-green logo on forest green. The outfit reminded me of Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman (D), who famously bucked tradition and wore hoodies in the halls of power. Mastrangelo pointed out that Fetterman lived a mile down the street in Braddock, where he used to be mayor, in a house overlooking the U.S. Steel plant.
Reshoring the supply chain surely saved Eos during Covid-19, Mastrangelo explained. If production had frozen for a couple of years when China closed its factories, “we would have been done.” Eos also avoided under-discussed costs of offshoring, like lengthy, expensive flights to China to check on manufacturing progress. Eos built the factory with its own money — a rare feat in the incentive-happy cleantech factory boom — but found itself ready to capitalize on the domestic manufacturing incentives created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Downstairs, I saw the fully automated line that Eos installed in June, capable of producing 1.2 gigawatt-hours per year. The machinery sat inside a wire-fenced perimeter. A succession of robots picked up gray plastic boxes, stocked them with Eos’ proprietary electrodes, then injected them with a liquid electrolyte in two carefully calibrated gushes, to prevent it from foaming and spilling.
Eos installed a fully automated line this summer to mass-produce its unusual zinc batteries. Inside the perimeter, only machines operate — unless they need a little human assistance. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
Eos employees patrolled the perimeter, many of them wearing the same green-on-green hoodie as their CEO. Their job was to keep the machines running: When a robot got confused, or the operating controls hit a glitch, alarms sounded and the technicians hurried over. This happened throughout my tour; as I’d seen in other cleantech factories, “full automation” is more aspirational than descriptive.
The bustling factory embodies the theory that Pennsylvania’s abandoned factories can spring to life to serve the material needs of the clean energy revolution. Pennsylvania’s minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, but Eos’ average wage is above $20, Mastrangelo said. Employees get a 3 percent direct contribution to their 401(k), and regular grants of company stock (Eos went public in 2020 via a special-purpose acquisition company). “We also view this as a massive opportunity for everybody to get wealth creation,” Mastrangelo said.
But startups are unsteady vessels for economic growth, and Eos’ finances are more unstable than most.
Last year, Eos spent $169 million to make $16.4 million in revenue. It’s normal for a startup to lose money while ramping up commercial production. But Eos’ public listing failed to net enough money to fully fund the buildout, so it has repeatedly beseeched investors for more infusions (like $100 million from Koch in 2021). This summer, Nasdaq nearly booted Eos for trading below $1 a share for too long.
Mastrangelo escaped that ignominy by closing a $325 million commitment from a domestic supply chain–focused fund at private equity firm Cerberus, on June 24, in the form of a loan with stock warrants (and surely one or two strings attached). Since then, Eos’ share price soared all the way past $3.
With this private-equity lifeline in hand, Mastrangelo has faith that demand for his unusual batteries will pick up. Eos is commissioning a 35-megawatt-hour storage system serving a microgrid on a Native American reservation in Northern California, funded by a California Energy Commission grant for long-duration storage. That customer already signed up for an expansion to 60 megawatt-hours. Eos also delivered a 10-megawatt/4-megawatt-hour standalone system in Texas for Pittsburgh-based developer IEP. These are small potatoes compared with lithium-ion battery projects, but substantial for the ragtag category of erstwhile lithium alternatives.
Once the gray, boxy battery cells are produced, workers install them in containers to ship to customers. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
“The one thing we’ve always told everybody is, the market needs a product like ours,” Mastrangelo said. “We continue to do things that haven’t been done before, and we just have to keep executing on our plan, and eventually the market will reward performance.”
An even more unusual battery is being fabricated about 36 miles west of downtown Pittsburgh. This one, designed by Form Energy, uses iron as a cheap storage material and promises to deliver clean power for up to 100 hours, far beyond what lithium-ion batteries can handle affordably. Unlike Eos, Form had no trouble lining up venture capital investment and hundreds of millions of state and federal dollars to fund its buildout; in fact, the company just closed another $405 million equity investment on October 9.
Form took barely a year to transform the slag-studded field of an abandoned steel mill into a gleaming new factory. Its white outer wall rises like a curtain to reveal a transparent entranceway, highlighted in the company’s trademark orange. Inside, an airy vestibule lined with greenery and an exhibit on the town’s industrial history gives way to the 550,000-square-foot production zone.
“We wanted it to be an inviting place,” CEO Mateo Jaramillo told me from a glass room on the mezzanine level, suspended above the factory floor. “It should feel like innovation. It should feel like something new. It should feel like a safe, clean place to work.”
Form developed its technology at labs near Berkeley and MIT, then expanded to a facility in the tiny town of Eighty Four, outside Pittsburgh. The company doubled down on the region for its full-fledged factory, and landed several hundred million dollars in state incentives from West Virginia to locate in that state, in the former steel town of Weirton. Pittsburgh is the closest big city to Weirton, and many of the workers commute from Pennsylvania. The success of this factory, like JM Steel or Eos, speaks to Appalachia’s ability to seize the clean energy era for its economic revival.
Form CEO and co-founder Mateo Jaramillo inspects a finished iron-air battery cell at his company’s newly built factory west of Pittsburgh. (Julian Spector/Canary Media)
Form chose a factory site rich in symbolic resonance: The startup is claiming a spot in the industrial landscape of the Ohio River Valley, creating jobs where the legacy industries seem capable only of shedding them (steel giant Cleveland-Cliffs was clinging on next door, but idled that operation in April; the company hopes to reopen the site to make electrical transformers starting in 2026). Form even uses iron, the same material that, with coal, fueled the region’s steel boom.
These layers of narrative meaning play swimmingly at ribbon cuttings, but I was curious what they offer once the tax incentives are secured. Jaramillo acknowledged that “grand poetry” isn’t what makes batteries.
“On the day-to-day, we don’t think a lot about the precise industrial legacy — we’ve got a job to do, so we go do the job,” Jaramillo said. “That’s probably the most direct legacy, is people who are really oriented on taking care of the job.”
Form has seen “huge demand” for open positions, and Jaramillo reported no problems finding the quality and number of workers needed. The company promised the state of West Virginia that salaries will average at least $63,000 per year — well above minimum wage, and substantial in a region with low costs of living.
So far, Form runs a single shift per day, for 10 or 12 hours. Some 300 people work at the factory, but that should grow to 750 in a few years, Jaramillo said. The plan is to quintuple capacity from 2025 to 2026, and quadruple it again from 2026 to 2027, at which point the factory will make 500 megawatts per year; for the long-duration format, that translates to 50,000 megawatt-hours.
The Pittsburgh metro area scores quite high for its capability to manufacture a range of clean energy technologies, per economic development analysis by climate think tank RMI.
Eos and Form were the first major battery makers to turn that potential into real jobs. Neither technology has been deployed on the grid in sufficient scale to ensure its longevity as a climate solution; that work lies ahead of them. But they demonstrate that it’s possible for the decarbonization mission to reanimate long-abandoned factories and put Pennsylvania’s workers back on the line.
Over two centuries, Pennsylvania’s energy resources brought clear gains in jobs and wealth. The nascent industrial decarbonization transition needs many more years of dedicated federal and local support before it can credibly substitute for the legacy energy economy. That’s not a convenient timetable for Democrats trying to make the case now for a Harris administration, and yet the outcome of the election will have an enormous impact on whether that support continues.
A 17-year-old in Chester County, Pennsylvania has been arrested after multiple shots were fired at a school bus.
Local reports said that police investigation has shown that the Thursday, Oct. 11 shooting was a targeted attack of someone who was getting off a Coatesville Area School District bus.
A statement posted on Facebook by the Chester County District Attorney’s Office confirmed that four individuals were involved in the shooting. The statement further noted that a total of eight shots were fired from two guns and that two of the bullets struck the bus. Local news reported that one bullet hit the bus grille, and another went through the front windshield, sending broken glass toward the driver.
The driver, who is employed by school bus contractor Krapf School Bus, reportedly alerted a dispatcher, who then called the police. A statement from Krapf School Bus indicated the driver drove the students to a safe location and that no one on the bus was injured. The district announced a virtual learning schedule the Friday following the incident for its senior and intermediate high schools.
Police arrested Jaki White-Marshall, 17, for his involvement in the shooting and said he will be tried as an adult. Chester County District Attorney Christopher L. de Barrena-Sarobe urged the remaining three suspects to turn themselves in.
“This is your chance to put the community at ease,” he said.
Republican vice presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, of Ohio, speaks at a rally at JWF Industries on Saturday, Oct. 12, 2024, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance campaigned Saturday in the key battleground of Pennsylvania, where early mail-in voting is already underway as just 25 days remain in the heated 2024 race that will be decided by a handful of states.
Former President Donald Trump’s running mate rallied a crowd of a few hundred at a sprawling riverside manufacturing facility in Johnstown, adhering to the ticket’s main themes of immigration and the economy.
During a question-and-answer session with the press following his prepared remarks, States Newsroom asked Vance if he will commit to the peaceful transfer of power no matter the winner in November.
The coming presidential election is the first since a mob of Trump supporters violently breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, delaying Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results. More than 1,500 defendants have been charged with crimes associated with the attack on the Capitol, during which 140 police officers were assaulted.
“Yes, of course,” Vance replied. “Look, this is very simple. Yes, there was a riot at the Capitol on January 6, but there was still a peaceful transfer of power in this country, and that is always going to happen.”
Vance, Ohio’s junior U.S. senator, in his speech painted Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, as “a tax-and-spend San Francisco liberal who wants to open our borders and destroy American manufacturing.”
“Are we going to give Kamala Harris a promotion to president of the United States? Hell no. We are going to tell Harris ‘You are fired,’ and we are voting Donald J. Trump to be our next president,” Vance said to cheers.
Vance spoke from a stage inside JWF Industries, a local plant that manufactures transportation, energy and defense equipment and vehicles.
Four military tactical utility vehicles framed the stage, where roughly 80 spectators lined the stage behind and to each side of Vance. A couple hundred people sat below the stage, with several empty rows behind them and an empty section to the left.
New poll numbers
Both campaigns and their surrogates are blanketing seven must-win swing states, as the presidential contest remains incredibly tight.
Trump holds an advantage in Arizona, while Harris has a slight lead in Pennsylvania, according to the latest poll results for the key battleground states released Saturday morning by The New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena College.
Vance urged the crowd to check their voter registration status and talk to family and friends about going to the polls.
“It’s the only way that we’re going to make Donald Trump the next president, so let’s get out there and vote, my friends,” he said.
Vance spent the majority of his remarks faulting Harris and President Joe Biden for economic suffering, including inflation and credit card debt delinquency.
A consumer price index report released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed inflation is at its lowest since February 2021.
Vance also attacked Harris for participating in “softball interviews,” citing her recent appearances on podcasts, as well as daytime and late-night TV.
Vance took credit for the Trump campaign ad that features a clip from Harris’ interview on “The View” in which she declined to distance herself from decisions of the Biden presidency.
“The problem with a softball interview is that you still have to be able to hit a softball,” Vance said.
In addition to appearances this week on the podcast “Call Her Daddy” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” as well as a town hall for Univision, Harris also sat for an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” on Monday. Trump backed out of his own promised appearance on “60 Minutes.”
Jan. 6 protesters ‘knuckleheads’
Vance implied accusations of voter fraud during his speech, telling the crowd that “you have to make the margins so big in Pennsylvania that it doesn’t matter what shenanigans Democrats pull at the last minute.”
“We will never have the fake media or the Democrats telling the truth. We do have our own voices, and our own networks, our family and friends. That is the people power that is going to make Donald Trump the next president,” Vance said.
During the reporter Q and A, the crowd jeered when a student journalist from a Pittsburgh university asked if Vance condemned the Jan. 6 violence.
Vance defended Trump’s actions on that day, saying the former president encouraged the crowd to protest “peacefully.”
“And the fact that a few knuckleheads went off and did something they shouldn’t do, that’s not on him. That’s on them,” Vance said to cheers.
Vance chafed at journalists asking more than once about Trump’s refusal to accept that Biden won the 2020 race. The former president continues to repeat the falsehood that he won. Trump challenged election results across dozens of lawsuits in multiple states following the 2020 election and lost them all.
“What Kamala Harris and the media are doing is trying to tell us that we should hear more about what happened four years ago than about her failure in governance,” Vance said. “I think that on November the 5th, we are going to reject it.”
Other questions from the press focused on western Pennsylvania, veterans’ benefits and Project 2025, the 900-page “mandate” for the next government, produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Vance said the conservative project has “no relation” to the Trump campaign. An CNN investigation in June found at least 140 several former Trump administration officials were involved in the project.
Vance spoke for 23 minutes and addressed reporter questions for just under the same amount of time.
Fielding audience questions in Reading
Later on Saturday, Vance headed east to Reading for a town hall discussion moderated by former ESPN anchor Sage Steele.
Unlike his event in Johnstown, he didn’t take questions from the media, instead fielding questions from audience members. It wasn’t clear how the audience members and questions were selected.
When one audience member expressed concern about government overreach, Vance said the most important job after president in the next administration would be attorney general. “You need an attorney general who believes in true equal justice under law,” adding “we’ve got a few good candidates” without naming anyone specific.
He encouraged the audience to vote for Republican Dave McCormick for U.S. Senate to ensure an AG nominee would be approved, and called current Attorney General Merrick Garland “one of the most corrupt” attorney generals who should be fired
Vance relayed the story of meeting “a Latino immigrant to this country” and her thoughts on immigration.
“She came here 25 years ago, she paid thousands of dollars in fees and legal expenses just to become an American citizen and she is pissed off at the illegal immigration problem because it’s insulting to her,” he said.
On Wednesday, the Harris campaign announced the launch of a group aimed at encouraging support from Latino men titled “Hombres con Harris,” with events planned in Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley.
The Harris campaign sent out a statement ahead of Vance’s visit to Reading, criticizing the GOP ticket’s position on abortion and tax policy.
“Pennsylvanians are sick and tired of Trump and Vance’s extremism and divisiveness, which is why they are ready to back the only candidate in this race who is fighting to take our commonwealth forward: Vice President Kamala Harris,” Harris campaign spokesperson Onotse Omoyeni.
An audience member who said she was an immigrant from the Dominican Republic asked Vance what the Trump administration would do to assist small businesses like hers.
Trump, Vance said, would lower business taxes “but only for the businesses that are hiring American workers, we’re not going to reward people for shipping jobs overseas” he added.
Vance told an audience member who asked about competing with China that he wants to protect the U.S.manufacturing sector and reaffirmed the ticket’s position that tariffs are the most effective way to compete with China.
“When Kamala Harris goes against tariffs and she attacks tariffs all the time, what she’s effectively saying is we’re going to let slave laborers build products and then bring it into our country, undercutting the jobs and the industries of America,” Vance said. “We’ve got to cut that crap out.” Vance said, claiming China “pays slaves $3 a day.”
Several times during the event in Reading, Vance encouraged those to go to a website run by the Trump campaign that promotes voting by mail. Trump criticized vote by mail during his previous presidential election, but has appeared to embrace it over the past few months. But on multiple occasions in Pennsylvania this year he’s criticized vote by mail, calling it “corrupt.”
Vance will be in Pennsylvania for several additional campaign events next week. Harris and Trump will both be in Pennsylvania on Monday; she will appear at a rally in Erie, and Trump will campaign in Montgomery County.
A youngster holds up a pro-union sign during a break between speeches at Labor Fest in Milwaukee Monday. Both presidential candidates are trying to appeal to union members. (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)
Editors note:This five-day series explores the priorities of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as they consider the upcoming presidential election. With the outcome expected to be close, these “swing states” may decide the future of the country.
7 States + 5 Issues That Will Swing the 2024 Election
Wisconsin carpenter Efrain Campos just retired this summer after 30 years, working mostly in commercial multi-story buildings — “from 15 floors and up,” he said. For him the last four years have been a boom period.
Efrain Campos (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)
On Labor Day, Campos, 68, was among the thousands of union members and their families who turned out for Laborfest on Milwaukee’s festival grounds on the shores of Lake Michigan.
He had planned to vote for President Joe Biden for a second term in office, but when the Democratic Party pivoted to Vice President Kamala Harris as its candidate, he pivoted as well. “We need somebody to help the middle people,” he said, “so they can advance, get a little bit better than what we are now.”
Campos dismisses the notion that the Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump, is a pro-worker candidate despite Trump’s populist appeal that grabbed a slice of the working class electorate in 2016.
“Not at all,” he said. “It’s ignorant. He’s a rich man, he gets his way. That’s not what this country is about.”
As the Nov. 5 presidential election nears, Democrats are counting on union workers to deliver voters, particularly in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada where unions have remained an influential bloc, even as their strength has declined over the decades.
Many labor union leaders say they’re working as hard as they ever have to oppose Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump and elect Vice President Kamala Harris. The AFL-CIO, a federation of 60 unions that range from Major League Baseball players to firefighters to workers in the food industry, has endorsed Harris.
A growing share of rank-and-file union members, however, have been less likely to follow their leadership — some of them among Trump’s base.
Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, speaks on on July 15, 2024, the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images)
“It has to be recognized that union members are not monolithic in terms of the party they support,” said Paul Clark, a professor of labor and employment relations at Penn State University. “Many unions have 30, 40, maybe 50% or more of their members who either are registered Republicans or are going to support Donald Trump in this election.”
Last week, International Brotherhood of Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien announced the union’s executive council would not endorse either ticket and cited the support of a majority of his members for Trump. (The Teamsters aren’t part of the AFL-CIO).
Other union leaders insist that O’Brien is an outlier.
Nick Webber, a business agent with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and a political organizer for the North American Building Trades Unions, said, “It’s unprecedented the amount of interest in people in getting involved” as he marshals union canvassers this fall for the Democratic national ticket. He said in his conversations he’s hearing union members say “not only, ‘am I going to be voting,’ and [that they’re] tuned in, but ‘how can I get involved’ and ‘doing my part.’”
Appeals to steel and culinary workers
When Biden dropped out July 21, the national executive council of the 12.5 million-member AFL-CIO endorsed Harris the next day “because we knew that the administration that has been fighting for working people for the last three and a half years, we know what they’ve delivered, and we knew that her record spoke for itself,” said Liz Shuler, national AFL-CIO president, in an interview with NC Newsline.
In an appeal to United Steelworkers, the most powerful union in western Pennsylvania, Trump said in January he would block a potential acquisition of U.S. Steel by Japan-based Nippon Steel.
Nevertheless the union endorsed Biden, who said in a visit in April he also opposed the sale. Both he and Harris reiterated that stance during a Labor Day visit to Pittsburgh. “I couldn’t agree more with President Biden: U.S. Steel should remain in American hands,” Harris said.
In Nevada, Trump held a rally in June where he proposed ending federal taxes on tipped income — an appeal aimed at the workers in the state’s largest industry, hotel-casinos.
Harris adopted the no-tax-on-tips position as well in a visit in August, a day after the powerful Culinary Workers Local Union 226, endorsed her. The union reports that its 60,000 members are 55% women and 60% immigrants.
In a return visit in August, Trump suggested his “no tax on tips” position would draw Culinary members’ support — “A lot of them are voting for us, I can tell you that,” he said.
But the union responded by doubling down on its support for Harris, who on a visit months before had celebrated the union’s successful contract negotiations with the Las Vegas Strip’s largest gambling-resort corporations.
“Kamala Harris has promised to raise the minimum wage for all workers — including tipped workers — and eliminate tax on tips,” said Culinary Vice President Leain Vashon. Vashon said Trump didn’t help tipped workers while he was president, so “Why would we trust him? Kamala has a plan, Trump has a slogan.”
Making the case
For most union leaders, the case for Harris is the stark contrast they see between Trump’s record in the White House from 2016 to 2020 and that of his successor.
Kent Miller, Laborers Union Wisconsin District Council president and business manager (Laborers Union photo)
“When you talk about the politics of what’s at stake in this election, it’s very clear,” said Kent Miller, president and business manager for the Laborers Union Wisconsin District Council.
The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, the 2022 bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which passed with only Democratic votes, opened the sluices to fund a range of investments in roads and bridges, clean energy and electric vehicle infrastructure.
The programs include strong incentives for union labor and for the enrollment of new apprentices in training programs operated by unions and their employers.
“We’ve got record membership and apprenticeship [numbers] right now,” said Miller, crediting the legislation. “Just imagine what another four years of pro-labor, pro-worker investment could do for our union, our communities and for the state of Wisconsin and our economy.”
But the messages unions have been pushing about manufacturing growth, the infrastructure advances and jobs — even unemployment rates that have fallen to just over 4% nationally and 3% or lower in states such as Wisconsin — have been slow to resonate with voters who are focused on higher prices resulting from supply chain shortages.
“Part of that is the investment is still in the works,” said William Jones, a labor historian at the University of Minnesota. “It was slow to be distributed, and it depended largely on state and local government taking it up and creating jobs. It’s possible some people haven’t felt the full impact.”
Jones also suggests there may have been inadequate messaging from the administration — something that unions are trying to make up for in their member outreach.
Beyond what Miller and other union leaders see as those bread-and-butter accomplishments are other policy stakes in who holds the White House, such as the makeup of the National Labor Relations Board and who holds the post of general counsel, the principal architect of the agency’s legal perspective.
Those differences further underscore what most union leaders see as a sharp distinction between the two tickets. “We’ve seen both these movies before,” said Webber of the electrical workers union.
Under the Trump administration the NLRB veered to positions less favorable to unions, Miller observed. Under Biden, it has issued more decisions that have supported union positions.
How much does Trump appeal?
Can the former president succeed in once again carving out some support among union voters?
In Wisconsin, union members’ connections to the Democratic Party appear to have softened since 2016, a review of survey data from the Marquette University Law School poll suggests. While about 65% of union members told pollsters they were Democrats in 2012 through 2015, that dropped to 59% in 2016 and has fluctuated since.
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, all previously reliable Democratic states with strong union political involvement, famously flipped to Trump by narrow margins in 2016, leading to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s defeat that year. All three flipped back to help carry Biden to victory against Trump in 2020.
Jones said Trump’s criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 2016 — enacted under Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1993 — “helped him among a certain demographic in 2016” — primarily working class white men from rural and small town regions.
When Teamsters President O’Brien announced the union wouldn’t make an endorsement this year, the union released a poll of rank-and-file members that found nearly 60% support for Trump compared to 31% for Harris. The union said the survey was conducted by Lake Research Partners, a Democratic polling firm.
O’Brien’s announcement followed his precedent-breaking speech to the Republican National Convention in July, where he called Trump “one tough SOB,” proclaimed a willingness to work with either political party and attacked business lobbies and corporations.
“I think he feels that at least half of his members are Trump supporters,” said Clark, the Penn State professor, in an interview before the non-endorsement announcement. “And while I think he recognizes that Biden has been very pro-labor, you know, politically, I think he felt a need to sort of send a message to his members that he hears them.”
The outcome opened up a rift in the union, however. Within hours of O’Brien’s announcement, local, state and regional Teamsters bodies representing at least 500,000 members of the 1.3 million-member union endorsed Harris, including groups in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada.
The pro-Harris Teamsters highlighted Biden’s role in signing legislation, included in the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, that shored up the union’s Central States Pension Fund. The fund faced insolvency by 2026 after years of underfunding.
Ken Stribling, retired Teamsters member and president of the National United Committee to Protect Pensions, speaks at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2024. (Screenshot | Democratic National Convention YouTube channel)
In August, Teamster retiree Ken Stribling of Milwaukee, president of a retiree group formed to campaign for the pension rescue, addressed the Democratic National Convention to thank Biden and Harris. Legislation had circulated during Trump’s term but the former president never took action to advance it, he said.
“The Biden administration and the vice president were really the ones instrumental in making sure that we got what we deserved,” Stribling said in an interview after his convention appearance.
In a statement, Bill Carroll, president of the union’s Council 39, representing about 15,000 Wisconsin Teamsters, said Harris would also build on Biden’s pro-union record. “In contrast, Donald Trump tried to gut workers’ rights as president by appointing union busters to the NLRB and advocating for national right-to-work,” Carroll said. “Trump’s project 2025 would go even further, attacking the ability for unions to even have the ability to organize.”
The labor-related provisions in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document — billed as a blueprint for the next Republican White House — include proposals that experts have said would eliminate public sector unions nationwide, make forming private sector unions more difficult and allow states to opt out of federal labor laws. Other proposals would reduce federal protections for workers whether unionized or not.
Union messaging to members has emphasized the document and its ties to Trump, despite his repeated disavowal of the agenda and claims of ignorance about its contents.
“It is absolutely his plan,” the AFL-CIO’s Shuler told NC Newsline. “He’s had over 100 former administration officials and the Heritage Foundation basically writing the blueprint for his next term, which would eliminate unions as we know it.”
Reaching out to members
Union leaders say they’re trying to make sure their members are seeing the campaign the way they see it.
In Nevada, where the Culinary’s canvassing and get-out-the-vote effort is regarded as one of the state’s most formidable, the union boasts that during the 2022 campaign cycle it knocked on 1 million doors.
This year, UNITE HERE says it is once again mobilizing its members and plans to knock on more than 3 million doors in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and Michigan “to ensure that Kamala Harris wins the presidency.”
In Wisconsin, the Laborers are building political messaging into a union project to engage members more closely, “connecting union members with other union members,” Miller said, to explain how negotiations affect wages and health and retirement benefits, as well as the importance of increasing union representation.
“We’re a jobs club,” Miller said. The message to the union members, he adds, is that “at the end of the day it’s everybody’s right to decide who to vote for — but we want to let you guys know these are the issues at stake in this upcoming election.”
Experienced union members are holding one-on-one conversations, particularly with newer and younger members. “We’re not just doing phone calls, we’re doing job site visits, and member-to-member doing doors,” Miller said.
Webber’s work with the building trades group is similar. “We’ve been doing a lot of reaching out and making sure to have those conversations,” he said — on job sites and during union meetings.
The message: “These jobs don’t come out of thin air,” Webber says. “There’s been strategic, intentional investment for a need in the community.”
The communications don’t just focus on other union members, either, he said. “You need to be sure people on the periphery of the union hear [the message],” said Webber. “Union household members are a huge part of these conversations — a partner, a spouse or child.”
The Wisconsin law known as Act 10, enacted in 2011, has weakened the once-powerful The Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s largest teachers union. But Peggy Wirtz-Olsen, WEAC’s president, said the union remains active phone-banking weekly and with regular canvassing planned for October.
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain speaks onstage during the first day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on Aug. 19, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
“We’re making the calls to ensure that our members are well educated on who’s on the ballot this go around and what they’ve done,” Wirtz-Olsen said.
Those calls focus both on the state races, where educators are hoping that a vastly different Legislature in 2025 could help unlock more funding for public schools, as well as on the national ticket.
“During the [presidential] debate we had a dozen house parties hosted by our members,” Wirtz-Olsen said. Along with Harris’ choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former teacher, as her running mate, the contrast between the Harris campaign’s support of public education and Trump’s vow to abolish the federal Department of Education “has them fired up and excited about this race.”
On Monday, the United Auto Workers union unveiled a national YouTube video aimed directly at members who might still see Trump through the lens of his attacks on NAFTA in his first presidential campaign.
The UAW has endorsed Harris. In the 3 1/2-minute video, UAW President Shawn Fain finds both Democrats and Republicans culpable for NAFTA and the factory closings over the quarter-century since it was enacted. In 2016, Fain says, “All of that pain had to go somewhere. And for a lot of working-class people, it went to voting for Donald Trump.”
The video, however, portrays Trump as a con man, highlighting his 2017 tax cut as favoring the wealthy and the USMCA, the trade law Trump enacted, as no better than NAFTA, which it replaced.
While emphasizing that “both parties have done harm to the working class,” Fain said that under Biden and Harris, “we’ve seen the tide starting to turn.”
Under Biden there’s been “more manufacturing investment in this country than at any point in my lifetime,” he says, and under Harris, “the Democratic Party is getting back to its roots.”
Paula Uhing (Erik Gunn | Wisconsin Examiner)
Paula Uhing is president of the local Steelworkers union at a suburban Milwaukee factory. She’s another enthusiastic Harris supporter, but said she and other labor leaders “know that we still have a lot of work to do” to pull more union voters behind the vice president.
“We have so many union members that vote against their own interests,” Uhing said. “It’s just because they’re not paying attention, they’re not listening to the right people.”
She describes herself as “optimistically cautious,” though. One reason has been some of the conversations she’s had with coworkers.
“There are people at work who are not necessarily turning away from the Republican Party altogether, but they are considering the Democratic ticket,” Uhing said. “They’re looking at it in a completely different way than they did last cycle, which is a good thing.”
Kim Lyons, Pennsylvania Capital-Star; Hugh Jackson, Nevada Current; Rob Schofield, NC Newsline; and Andrew Roth, for Michigan Advance, contributed reporting for this story.
This story has been updated to correct the spelling of UAW President Shawn Fain.
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris debate for the first time during the presidential election campaign at The National Constitution Center on Sept. 10 in Philadelphia. A handful of issues and groups of voters in battleground states could decide the race. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Editor’s note: This five-day series explores voter priorities in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as they consider the upcoming presidential election and the nation’s future. With the outcome expected to be close, the “swing states” as they are called are often a bellwether for the country.
7 States + 5 Issues That Will Swing the 2024 Election
It’s been a wild few months in the presidential race: President Joe Biden dropped out and Vice President Kamala Harris captured the Democratic nomination. Former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and was targeted again at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Despite the historic lead-up to Election Day, the race has now settled into familiar territory: Much like 2020’s contest, top political strategists on both sides of the aisle expect control of the White House could come down to just a few thousand votes in a handful of battleground states.
“This is not going to be an election where you will see a landslide. It’s going to be won in the margins in six to seven swing states,” Democratic strategist Donna Brazile told a crowd of state lawmakers from across the country last month.
Brazile, who ran Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, shared the stage with Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway, who managed Trump’s 2016 campaign and advised him in the White House.
Unsurprisingly, the pair disagreed on much.
But while speaking at the National Conference of State Legislatures in Kentucky, the two senior strategists framed the race similarly to the 2020 contest, when fewer than 50,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from an Electoral College tie.
“It is a different race. It has turned in very short time, but the issue set hasn’t changed at all,” Conway said. “And I think that’s what’s important here.”
Voters line up on the first day of early voting in 2020 in Las Vegas, Nev. (Jeniffer Solis/Nevada Current)
Like last cycle, the two campaigns are pouring millions into Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In this “Battleground” series, States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization, explores the political issues and groups of voters that could make the difference in those seven states and, consequentially, in the race for the White House.
Unsurprisingly, economic issues — namely, stubbornly high prices — are proving central for many voters across the swing states. But voters also are concerned about immigration, abortion access and the future of the Supreme Court.
In states such as Michigan and Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, labor unions could prove instrumental for Harris after years of significant gains by organized labor.
In Georgia and North Carolina, Black voter turnout could make the difference, while Latino voters are closely divided in Nevada after helping propel Biden to victory there four years ago. In every swing state, campaigns are focused on all-important suburban voters.
The election’s outcome also could be shaped by the work of officials who have been debating who can vote and which votes should count since the mayhem of the last presidential contest.
This is not going to be an election where you will see a landslide. It’s going to be won in the margins in six to seven swing states.
– Democratic strategist Donna Brazile
Four years ago, a false narrative that questioned the security and integrity of elections took hold in some legislatures. New laws changed ballot-counting practices and made it more difficult to vote in many states, including swing states. In states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, there is broad concern that despite the checks and balances built into the voting system, local Republicans tasked with certifying elections will be driven by conspiracy theories and refuse to fulfill their duties if Trump loses again.
Fears that these efforts could sow chaos and delay results is not unfounded: Over the past four years, county officials in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania have refused to certify certain local elections.
With such a close race, voter turnout and motivation will be key in all the battleground states.
As in other swing states, North Carolina’s 16 Electoral College votes could hinge on how political independents vote, said Carter Wrenn, a longtime Republican strategist who has worked on many campaigns.
And those independents can be unpredictable in North Carolina: Their votes helped both Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and Trump carry the state in the last two general elections.
“It’s the independents that are up for grabs, and they don’t mind splitting a ticket at all,” Wrenn said. “Ultimately, in the general election, that’s the key group.”
The economy
In every state this year, the economy is a central issue.
As Trump tries to fault Harris and Biden for the high costs of everyday living, polling shows voters blame Harris less for the situation than they did Biden — though likely voters profess more confidence in Trump’s ability to manage the economy.
For her part, Harris has unveiled plans to lower prices of rent, homebuying and groceries, arguing she will remain focused on the middle class from Day One, contrasting her ideas with what she characterizes as Trump’s catering to billionaires.
In Georgia, Republicans and Democrats alike have found success in recent statewide campaigns by highlighting similar kitchen table issues. After attending a Harris rally in Savannah last month, Georgia voter Sarah Damato said she doesn’t believe Trump will fight for the middle class.
At the event, the vice president told listeners she would lower costs by fighting corporate price-fixing and touted her proposal for a “care economy,” a set of progressive proposals including benefits for parents of newborns and credits for first-time homebuyers.
“Kamala Harris made it very evident today that the American family is the most important thing on her mind these days, and she’s going to make it easier for each one of us to have a brighter future,” Damato said.
In Kenosha, Wisconsin, meanwhile, Republican Party volunteer Sharon Buege said she supports the GOP ticket because she sees the race as a matter of “good versus evil.” Speaking outside a news conference by Trump running mate J.D. Vance, Buege said she opposed “the whole left agenda,” adding that her top issues in the race were border security, the economy, human trafficking, homelessness and “indoctrination” in public schools.
It is a different race. It has turned in very short time, but the issue set hasn’t changed at all.
– Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway
At that same news conference, a man who would only give his name as “John” said the economy and inflation mattered most: “I don’t need a reminder of why to support Trump. I can get that every time I go to the gas station or grocery store.”
Groups of voters
With Republicans looking to run up margins in rural parts of the battleground states and Democrats banking on big leads in cities, the suburbs remain pivotal.
In Georgia, diverse and growing suburbs have helped move the state from reliably red to purple.
In the state’s two largest suburban counties of Cobb and Gwinnett, Biden picked up more than 137,000 votes in 2020 over 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, according to data from the Georgia Secretary of State’s office. The same year, Trump boosted his total by just under 32,000 votes over his 2016 performance.
The Trump campaign boasts a mighty in-state operation: nearly 15,000 volunteers signing up between mid-July and the end of August, nearly 300 events scheduled for September, and 4,000 neighborhood organizers and canvassers — known as Trump Force Captains — joining the cause in July and August.
But Team Harris says they are running the largest Georgia operation of any Democratic presidential campaign cycle, with more than 200 campaign staff in 28 offices. Harris’ recent visit to the more conservative south side of the state marked her 16th trip to Georgia since becoming vice president and her seventh trip this year.
Harris is hoping to fire up the young, diverse Democratic base, but her team also is hoping she can hang onto or expand on Biden’s coalition of older, affluent, educated and largely white suburbanites.
“Those are the people who are actually kind of pivotal and who will modify or change their behavior,” said University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock.
“These people are largely Republicans, but they can’t bring themselves to vote for Donald Trump or for Republicans who are closely associated with him,” Bullock said.
Larry Ceisler, a Philadelphia public affairs executive and political analyst, said the four suburban Philadelphia counties surrounding Pennsylvania’s largest city are key to winning that state. Once a Republican bastion, the so-called collar counties of Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery have swung strongly in the other direction since 2016.
That complicates messaging for both campaigns, Ceisler said. Trump’s anti-abortion stance and Harris’ effort to back away from her earlier statements against fracking — both positions that appeal to rural and western Pennsylvania voters — are potential liabilities in suburbs.
Democrats have a 343,000-voter registration advantage over Republicans in Pennsylvania. But the state has been decided by narrow margins in the last two presidential elections.
Daniel Mallinson, an associate professor of public policy and administration at Penn State Harrisburg, noted that the Trump campaign has paid attention to Black and Latino voters.
“One of the weaknesses that Biden had as a candidate was he had weakening support among African American voters. And then Trump has actually done fairly well, particularly in some other states, like in Florida, with Latino voters,” Mallinson said, adding that Harris’ nomination changes the equation somewhat.
After Democrats seemingly all but wrote off Arizona for Biden, the contest there is proving more winnable for Harris. Biden narrowly won Arizona in 2020, but he had been hemorrhaging Latino support this year.
Employees join the picket line in September 2023 at General Motors’ Lansing Redistribution Center in Lansing, Mich. (Anna Liz Nichols/Michigan Advance)
In the manufacturing-heavy upper Midwest, labor unions could prove consequential in not only persuading voters but also motivating them to the polls.
Biden was the first sitting president to visit a picket line when the United Auto Workers last year took on the “Big Three” Detroit automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis — by going on strike. That effort led to significant increases in pay and benefits for workers.
The UAW, which in August announced a national campaign to motivate its 1 million active and retired members to vote for Harris, says its membership accounted for 9.2% of Biden’s 2020 votes in Michigan alone.
“To me, this election is real simple,” UAW president Shawn Fain told a crowd of about 15,000 people last month at a rally in Detroit for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. “It’s about one question. It’s a question we made famous in the labor movement: Which side are you on?”
Political weaknesses
While Democrats are more motivated than when Biden was the presumptive nominee, they still face internal conflicts, the most high-profile of which has been about the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Dee Sull, a Las Vegas attorney who works in immigration and family law, is a registered Democrat who said she would never vote for Trump. Yet she doesn’t really want to vote for Harris, leaving her “very torn” this election.
“I believe our foreign policy in Gaza is completely ridiculous. I’m very disturbed,” she said of U.S. military aid to Israel. “If we’re going to spend money, I want it spent on my kids here — on my neighbors’ kids here.”
Sull said both parties have silenced the voices of those who protest the death and destruction in Gaza. And she was irritated that Palestinian American activists were not allowed to speak at the Democratic National Convention last month.
Sull won’t sit out the election, but said she would prefer to vote for a third candidate with a viable shot at winning.
“Probably like a lot of Americans would if they had that opportunity,” she said.
For Trump, voters’ overwhelming support for abortion rights could prove a huge liability in swing states.
While Trump has wobbled in recent months on whether he would veto a national abortion ban, the Supreme Court justices he appointed dismantled abortion access across the country in 2022 — an unpopular position even in red states such as Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio that since have voted to expand abortion rights.
In Wisconsin, Planned Parenthood stopped offering abortions at its health clinics after the court’s Dobbs decision because of an 1849 “trigger” state law that immediately took effect. Wisconsin women lost all abortion services there for a year and a half, until a court re-interpreted the state law.
This summer’s shakeup has reset the race, said Amy Walter, publisher of The Cook Political Report, an independent, nonpartisan newsletter that analyzes elections. So far, likely voters in the swing states view Harris more favorably than Biden, she said. But with Trump benefiting from an electorate skeptical of the state of the economy, the newsletter characterized the race as “a battle of inches.”
The campaigns both face a lot of voters who are disenchanted with politics altogether, or else unhappy with their options.
Amy Tarkanian, a conservative television commentator who once lauded Trump to national audiences and was chair of the Nevada State Republican Party in 2011-12, said she’s at “a complete loss” this year. She remains a Republican, even after the state party heavily criticized her when, two years ago, she endorsed a pair of Democratic candidates for state offices.
“I’m not happy, or necessarily sold on Kamala,” Tarkanian said. “… But I absolutely do not want to vote for Donald Trump.”
Arizona Mirror’s Jim Small, Michigan Advance’s Anna Liz Nichols and Jon King, Nevada Current’s Hugh Jackson, NC Newsline’s Galen Bacharier, Pennsylvania Capital-Star’s Peter Hall and John Cole, Georgia Recorder’s Ross Williams, and Wisconsin Examiner’s Ruth Conniff and Henry Redman contributed reporting.
A Hagerstown man is facing a misdemeanor charge after he allegedly entered a Greencastle-Antrim School District school bus near the Pennsylvania-Maryland border to accuse elementary students of bullying, reported The Local News Authority.
The incident reportedly occurred on Sept. 11, when Richard Hillery boarded the school bus to “address” the primary school students on board about bullying another student.
According to the news report, the school bus driver told Hillery that he was trespassing, but the man did not care and continued to lecture the students before leaving.
Greencastle-Antrim School District Police reportedly interviewed the bus driver, who told authorities that she did not know who that man was. A surveillance video from the bus was taken by police after the incident.
According to the news report, it appears the suspect eventually left the school bus on his own his own and police later tracked him down.
Authorities then contacted Hillery, who argued with officers about his relation to students before admitting to being on the bus and acknowledging that he was told to exit multiple times. It is unclear if the man was related to any student on the bus. His preliminary court hearing is being scheduled and he is free awaiting that date.
A school bus driver in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania is facing numerous charges including child pornography, reported WPXI News.
The bus driver, identified as Michael Singer, was also a former police chaplain and allegedly sent explicit photos to one of the students he drove to Westinghouse Arts Academy Charter School.
The investigation reportedly began when the student’s mother told police that her son was being “groomed” by his school bus driver. Police said the inquiry revealed that Singer allegedly exchanged explicit images with the 17-year-old student via a dating app.
Police added that Singer admitted to texting the teen but denied knowing he was speaking to the same person on the dating app.
The Pittsburgh Bureau of Police told local news reporters that Singer served nominally as a police chaplain but had not been actively involved in with law enforcement for several years. He is no longer permitted to access any Pittsburgh Bureau of Police facility.
Singer is facing multiple charges, including possession and dissemination of child pornography, unlawful contact with a minor, and corruption of minors.
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