‘There’s a lot on the line’: Pa. voters on what Tuesday’s election means to them

When the pandemic struck, Nate DeFazio was hit hard.

After enjoying a long career in corporate event planning at such places as Hershey Resorts, he saw his bookings dry up. So DeFazio, 43, started a small home-improvement and woodworking business, thinking it would give him more control. It was growing well, he said, until inflation took a steep toll.

“Lumber, glue, painters caulk, anything you can imagine, everything’s up 25% to 30%,” DeFazio said outside a Lancaster County rally Wednesday for Republican Senate nominee Mehmet Oz.

“It feels like a critical time,” added DeFazio, of Elizabethtown. “We’ve got to pick a path, and the path that we’re on is not right.”

Across Pennsylvania, voters will go to the polls Tuesday in a state that’s used to being drowned in the political spotlight. Tuesday’s midterm elections could play a key role in determining control of Congress and, in the governor’s race, could dictate the direction state policy moves for at least the next four years.

Voters’ top concern has been inflation and the economy, followed by a rotating mix of crime, immigration, abortion rights, and threats to democracy, most polls show.

In conversations with dozens of voters over the last three months, people said they feel just as much anxiety — if not more — than ahead of the 2020 election, in which Pennsylvania played a key role in electing President Joe Biden. A Supreme Court ruling overturning the federal right to an abortion, economic woes, and worries over crime have voters looking at how whom they elect could affect their lives.

Paige Lockwood has seen, as a nurse at Einstein, the impact abortion restrictions can have on women seeking all sorts of treatments.

“We now have in states, people being refused to be treated for certain chronic conditions, people who need certain drugs who can’t get them,” she said at a recent rally for Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman. “There are so many implications on the freedoms that we hold dear, and I just don’t think women should be treated as second-class citizens.”

“It’s not really just about abortion. It’s about democracy and preserving it.”

Abortion has been a huge motivator for Democratic voters since the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to the procedure. Pennsylvania saw an uptick in the number of women registering to vote compared with previous years, and Democratic candidates Josh Shapiro and Fetterman have tried to highlight their opponents’ antiabortion stances.

At a Fetterman rally in Chester County, Ronna Dewey, 54, said she was “very scared” that, “if we do not maintain a majority in the Senate, that Roe falling will be just the beginning.”

Ashton Simmons, 45, said abortion rights would drive his vote. “I can’t think of anything that’s more important.”

Jordan Bailkin, an 18-year-old senior at Central High School, is voting for the first time. For her, registering and voting Democratic was in line with her views on abortion rights and climate change.

“There’s a lot on the line,” she said. “And they’re all things that would personally affect me if they aren’t able to stay legal or addressed. ... It’s really important to me to be able to graduate high school and enter adulthood in a state of having all my rights intact and not feeling like, ‘Oh, I wish I’d graduated 10 years ago.’”

Patricia Murray lost her little brother last month. He’d been struggling with alcoholism and drug use for years and died in early October of a fentanyl overdose.

“I knew he’d been headed in the wrong direction for a long time, but he had so much potential,” Murray said. “He was a smart, intelligent, good-looking guy.”

Murray, a lifelong Democrat, became a Republican this fall, largely in support of her sister-in-law who is running for state representative.

But her personal loss — and a belief that the city she’s lived in for all of her 66 years is in crisis — has her skeptical of Democratic leadership. She plans to support Oz, who has focused his campaign heavily on crime and the opioid epidemic.

“The stakes for me … I’m older, my kids are grown and out of the city, but for the kids growing up today, I want a better world for them than what we have right now. I would like for them to have the world my children had.”

Crime and the opioid crisis have been a major focus of both statewide Republican campaigns. Doug Mastriano and Oz point to a high homicide rate and growing opioid epidemic and blame years of Democratic leadership in Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania voters on both sides of the aisle talked a lot about freedoms in the run-up to the election: freedom to own a gun, freedom to have a say in a child’s schooling, freedom to get an abortion, freedom from overly punitive criminal convictions.

“I have a past marijuana conviction that’s given me trouble my whole life,” said Peter Gadebusch, 67, of Levittown, at a recent Fetterman rally.

“I couldn’t get in the service. No branch would take me. I couldn’t do a lot, and the thing I don’t get about this election is, I always thought giving people rights is what America is about. Not taking them away. It’s beyond me. What could be bigger than that?”

Jason Dekker, 43, of New Freedom in York County, worries about censorship and thinks conservatives are targeted by the Department of Justice. “Personal freedom and the freedom to dissent – I feel that both of those things are under attack,” he said. “I’m looking to support anybody that’s going to be a check on that.”

Several Republicans also said they were worried about their voices being stifled by liberal culture. Some were wary to talk to a reporter, saying they were afraid that if they were quoted expressing conservative views, they could be “canceled.”

Voters on all sides lament the fierce divisions that exist and expressed surprise that the other party’s candidate had a following.

“It’s because we got a lot of people that hate Trump so bad, it’s still about Trump,” Lavern Brown, an Oz supporter, said of why he thinks the state is so divided. “And of course they hate us just as bad, and they don’t care who they run on the left. ... We wonder how in the hell Fetterman would get 10 votes, but they just hate us so bad that they’re willing to vote for anybody.”

Lockwood, the Democrat from Bensalem, described a similar feeling of surprise that Mastriano has a following: “You know, the Republicans just demonize Democrats. Like we’re the enemy. We’re all Americans. ... Can we have a conversation instead of a war?”

And moderates – such as Clayton Wood, a 56-year-old registered Republican from Harrisburg – are still struggling to find where they belong, and whom to vote for.

“I think this country, it just seems like whatever party gets into office, they take the steering wheel and just kinda yank it this way,” Wood said. “And then we get someone who wants to yank it that way, and most of us just want to move forward and have a safe place for our kids to grow up and programs for our people.”

Staff writers Jonathan Tamari and Sean Collins Walsh contributed to this article.