Looking for election clues in Scranton

SCRANTON - Near the end of the weekly "girls' night out" of bowling at Idle Hour Lanes on Tuesday, Glenda Yablonski figured the score as her teammates tossed nickels into a plastic tub, covering their fines for each missed spare.

As the team's kitty grew, she paused to discuss the presidential race. She'll be voting for Republican John McCain.

"I just feel safer with McCain," said Yablonski, 52, a Democrat who works as a customer-service representative for United Parcel Service. As for her party's nominee, Barack Obama, "I don't trust him," she said. "Obama has too many radical views."

Yablonski voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary in April, helping Clinton crush Obama by 3-1 in Lackawanna County, which includes Scranton. Obama can't touch Clinton, Yablonski said, and she respects McCain's years of experience and patriotism.

If McCain reverses his fortunes and wins the White House, it will be due to the support of thousands of white working-class voters like Yablonski in Pennsylvania and other Rust Belt battlegrounds such as Ohio. They are the swing voters of this election, polls show, and Obama has struggled for months to woo them.

This year, Scranton has become political shorthand for Blue Collarville U.S.A., its voters studied much as were the soccer moms and NASCAR dads of earlier presidential contests. Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, is a native of the city, and Clinton's father grew up here.

Scranton voters have been bombarded with information as the candidates, their running mates and surrogates swarm the city. When they're not here, their ads are; a nonpartisan research group said more than 8,300 presidential campaign commercials had aired on local TV stations since June.

Democrats typically rely on big margins in Scranton, a former coal-mining town of 75,000, to help win statewide. Recent polls, and detailed interviews with voters here this week, suggest that anxiety over the economy has helped Obama convert skeptics. Many blame President Bush for their economic struggles and are reluctant to turn to another Republican.

Still, there is a deep vein of support for McCain among voters who cite his experience, his record of military heroism, and his opposition to abortion rights. McCain strategists are counting on a silent majority of such backers to come from behind in Pennsylvania.

Voters in Scranton, many of them Catholics from Irish, Italian and Eastern European immigrant backgrounds, "tend to be liberal on the economy and conservative on social issues," said Leonard Champney, a political scientist at the University of Scranton. Yet the county stays loyal to Democrats in presidential elections, he said. (Indeed, Lackawanna supported Democrat Walter Mondale over President Ronald Reagan in 1984, albeit narrowly.)

Melissa Yanchak, who was bowling with her grandmother, Yablonski, and a few other women Tuesday, said that she planned to back Obama because "his policies are for everyone as a whole." She thinks McCain favors business.

"I don't feel he'll lead the country in the direction I want it to go," said Yanchak, 29, who works in a bank's call center. "I didn't care for him in the debates, the way he was interrupting Obama, the facial expressions he was making. He seems very shady."

Her grandmother, Reggie, 78, said McCain offered nothing for the economic struggles of working people. "People are losing their jobs, they're going overseas," said Reggie, who declined to give her last name. "Bush is worse than Herbert Hoover."

Mayor Chris Doherty, a Democrat who backed Clinton in the primary, said that he had lately found it easier to persuade skeptics to support Obama. "The downturn in the economy has changed this election," he said. "People are upset at Republican policies, and they vote their pocketbooks."

A Quinnipiac University poll released yesterday showed Obama leading 53 percent to 40 percent statewide, largely on the strength of his support in the Philadelphia suburbs, but found the two candidates running within a few percentage points of each other in northeastern Pennsylvania.

At the county Democrats for McCain headquarters on the west side, Maria Greco Syzmanski was making phone calls to identify registered Democrats or independents supporting the Republican.

"John McCain is a true patriot, and that has to count for something," said Syzmanski, 58, a retired educator who was a fervent volunteer for Clinton in the primary. "Who is Obama? With his 143 days in the Senate before he started running for president, there wasn't much to look at. I just don't know about him."

Fellow volunteer Ann Marie Derchak said she was disturbed at Obama's associations with William Ayers, a former leader of the radical Weather Underground. She also resents Obama's remark at a San Francisco fund-raiser last spring that voters in small-town Pennsylvania "cling" to guns and religion because they are "bitter."

"Well, I am patriotic and I don't hang out with terrorists," said Derchak, 56, "but I guess we're just uneducated, stupid miners in a rust belt here."

Inside the Judge-n-Jury bar on the courthouse square downtown, some buddies discussed the election, razzing one another about their opinions.

"I generally identify more with the liberal side, so I'll probably vote for Obama," said Bob Hall, 23, a hotel clerk, drinking a draft beer after work. "I'm not that impressed by Obama, but he seems half-decent to me."

Bartender Justin Simonetti, 28, is an Army veteran who said he will vote for McCain. "It's been about 3,000 days since there was a terrorist attack on the U.S.," Simonetti said, adding that he trusted McCain's military leadership. "We have to keep what's working. The best defense is a good offense."

Walter Wood and his wife, Shirley, were enjoying the $2.75 ham-and-eggs special at the Glider, the west side diner where Obama ate a waffle in April, just before the primary.

"I don't trust him [Obama] because he doesn't have the experience," said Walter Wood, 73, a registered independent. "McCain has the experience, but President Bush didn't seem to do right by us; he sold our jobs up the river."

He said he also feared that a McCain administration might be too close to Bush in its policies.

"We've got a lot of friends like us who don't know which way to go," he said.