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“Did you get the shot?” called drag queen and activist Pissi Myles as she posed for photos outside a nondescript pizza parlor in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Down the street, a massive semi-trailer truck bearing “Trump Pence,” “Hillary Benghazi,” and “All Lives Matter” signs honked its horn furiously. This was 5 p.m. on Tuesday, also known as Election Day, and the—to put it mildly—eccentric scene on Lackawanna Avenue felt in keeping with a sequence of political season that resembled none before it.
Pennsylvania has long occupied prime real estate as one of the country’s key swing states, but as the world anxiously awaits the results of the 2020 presidential election, it’s becoming clear just how outsize a role the Keystone State may play.
Earlier on Tuesday, voter lines were long from the moment the polls opened in Luzerne County—a hotly contested area of Pennsylvania that went for Trump in 2016—and predominantly white Trump supporters appeared to outnumber Biden voters of any race or ethnicity at the Holy Trinity Orthodox Church poll site in Wilkes-Barre. Some Biden supporters noted their discomfort at the imbalance: “Nobody else here is Indian,” noted Nima Patel, 25, who made the trek to vote with her brother Kishan, 20. The siblings agreed that the scene at the polls felt representative of the local demographic.
Ashley, 29, and Mack, 39, an interracial couple who chose to withhold their last names, each voted for Joe Biden in Wilkes-Barre, primarily out of concern for the futures of their seven young children. What they most valued from the election, though, was a sense of civility regardless of who won. “I hope everybody is respectful and stays in their lanes,” said Mack.
Half an hour’s drive away in Scranton, a university town with significant ties to Joe Biden, the mood among Biden supporters was more jubilant. Early-afternoon voters at the Scranton Cultural Center at the Masonic Temple poll site faced little to no wait, and many of them shared a sense of excitement at getting to cast their votes against Trump. “This is the first time in a long time that I’ve voted Democrat,” recalled Korean War veteran Bob Alper, who didn’t let the fact that he uses a wheelchair deter him from voting in person: “Trump is too loquacious, and he said that he wouldn’t move on if he lost the election. I don’t like that.”
Alper wasn’t the only Scranton-based veteran who showed up to support Biden in person on Tuesday. Amber Viola, a 34-year-old veteran-advocacy expert who spent eight years in the U.S. Navy, volunteered her time to drive voters to Scranton’s Everhart Museum poll site on Election Day. Although the effort was nonpartisan and open to all voters, Viola—a Black mother with years of experience working with survivors of military sexual trauma—voted for Biden because, in her words, “I’m tired of waiting around for the Supreme Court to decide whether I’m going to have rights or not.”
In downtown Scranton, a large group of activists—including Myles, a fixture on the New Jersey drag scene who was summoned to Pennsylvania on Election Day by the Scranton Fringe Festival to do direct outreach with local politicians—came together to keep themselves from obsessively monitoring the polls. “So many LGBTQ+ people are suffering because of the pandemic and the lack of leadership in this whole situation, and my hope is that in a few months, we’ll have somebody take over the reins who knows what they’re doing,” said Myles, who recently made a name for herself covering Donald Trump’s impeachment.
Although Myles was a hard-to-ignore presence on the streets of Scranton, her appearance on Election Day was bolstered by the ongoing work of local activists who are committed to making Scranton a better place to live regardless of who wins the 2020 election. “I voted early by mail because I wanted to volunteer as a poll worker,” said Glynis Johns, 27, who founded the Black Scranton Project, a nonprofit dedicated to archiving and celebrating local Black history in a majority-white town.
Johns proudly cast her vote for Biden, but she’s cognizant that his election alone won’t fix the racial unrest illuminated by this summer’s wave of protests. “There were Black people in Scranton well before Joe Biden was even born,” she noted, adding, “I don’t want Black and brown people, and Black kids in particular, to feel like this city is not for them.”
