OpinionGuest Essay

Riegelsville, Pa. Credit...Erik Hagen for The New York Times

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By Michael Sokolove

Mr. Sokolove grew up in Levittown, Pa., and is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He reported from Riegelsville, Pa.

One day last month I stepped out of my car in Riegelsville, Pa., and on to a sidewalk in front of the town’s post office, where residents come to pick up their mail and often spend a few minutes talking with neighbors. The first person I encountered was a young man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a pizzeria around the corner. He looked my way and said: “Hi! How are you doing today?”

Riegelsville is, first of all, tiny: a hamlet on the western bank of the Delaware River with roughly 800 inhabitants, many of whom live in three-bedroom houses set on small lots. It has one stoplight, a sit-down restaurant, three churches, an American Legion post, a general store and that pizzeria.

The problem of social isolation in America does not seem to apply here. People know one another and talk across backyards. When Hurricane Sandy knocked out the town’s electricity for about a week in 2012, residents gathered at the firehouse, which was powered by a generator, and cooked their meals communally. “It’s a Hallmark town,” the mayor, Viana Boenzli, told me. “We don’t even have a police department. We call the state police if there’s a problem, but there almost never is.”

In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump won 276 votes in Riegelsville to Joe Biden’s 274. Those are not enough votes to have made a big impact on who won Pennsylvania — nor are Riegelsville’s votes likely to swing who will win the state this November. But Bucks is the only one of Philadelphia’s four collar counties that has not swung strongly to the Democrats. It is, therefore, a nearly dead-even town, in a closely divided county, in the biggest and most important of the electorally deadlocked battleground states.

I have been interviewing voters in Pennsylvania for The Times since 2008 — and often in Bucks County, where I grew up. I find it a useful lens out into America through a place that has a reputation for civilized, or even genteel, politics.

In Riegelsville, I was curious to know if the two-vote margin in 2020 was a signal that the town’s residents might be open-minded as they consider the candidates running this year — or if they are cleaved into two tribes like much of the rest of the nation. Would the fact that they live in proximity and actually mix with one another make any difference?

Over the course of five days, in two visits, I talked with 60 voters. All of them were white, reflecting the nearly all-white town. Riegelsville is, however, economically diverse: Among those I talked to were small-business owners, teachers, an architect, a retired stone mason and a couple of retirees from a now-shuttered Bethlehem Steel plant in nearby Easton, Pa.

Of the voters I met, not a single one — zero, just to be clear — planned to switch sides from how they voted in 2020. The voters for Mr. Biden were with Kamala Harris, and the voters for Mr. Trump still with him.

The more time I spent reporting, the more I realized I was not really writing about the numbers — or even the candidates. This election, more so than any I can remember, is about us, and how we think about our presidents. The people I talked to in this friendly little town expressed two starkly different visions of what a president should be — and what he or she represents in American society.

Most of the Harris supporters I spoke to in Riegelsville cited the vice president’s personal qualities — what they perceived as positivity and decency — along with a desire for a president who might somehow calm our rancorous political climate. Most of the Trump supporters were unconcerned with matters of character. If they ever had a hope that a U.S. president would be someone they admired, a person who might represent the best of us — a war hero, say, like Dwight Eisenhower; a straight arrow like Jimmy Carter; or a trailblazer like Barack Obama — they had abandoned it. Many........

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