By CHRISTINA LENGYEL

The Center Square

HARRISBURG — In the purple Keystone State, thousands of working people turned up to the Pennsylvania Farm Show complex on Friday to hear Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders speak about corruption in the U.S. government.

Sanders spoke alongside Congressman Chris Deluzio, a Pittsburgh native, former legal scholar, and Iraq War veteran who won his seat in competitive District 17 with a pro-worker message. They were joined by state Rep. Nate Davidson, D-Lemoyne, and leaders from several labor unions.

Asked what drew them there, attendees pointed to a wide range of issues. Two themes remained consistent — dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump and mounting frustration with wealth inequality and economic instability.

“I think if you’re someone who’s my age or younger, you have seen the American dream or something like it be ripped up,” said Deluzio. “It’s a big thing in this country to say that if you’re 40 or younger, you shouldn’t expect to be better off than your parents.”

The president expressed a similar sentiment on the campaign trail last year, which brought him to the Harrisburg Farm Show just weeks after he surived an attempted assasination on July 13 in Butler. The crowds spilled into the street, creating a sea of red Make America Great Again hats.

The slogan, first coined during Trump’s unorthodox run in 2016, encapsulates the desires of many disaffected working class voters who say they’ve seen wealth and opportunity slip away due to corrupt leadership and special interests.

Sanders sees it too, though he believes millionares and billionares across all classes – including business moguls like the president – are part of the problem.

In his speech, he noted that despite massive leaps in productivity over the last half-century, workers are actually making less than they did in 1973 when adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, he pointed to CEOs who make up to 350 times their workers. “That is what’s going on in America today — very rich becoming unbelievably rich while, at the same time — again, hard to believe — in the richest country on Earth, 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck,” said Sanders.

It’s a message that resonated with the crowd. At one point, Sanders asked audience members to raise their hands and tell him what financial constraints make it difficult for them to live paycheck to paycheck. Housing, student debt, medical bills, prescription prices, utility costs, and groceries were all mentioned, painting a portrait of the claustrophobic economic picture in which they find themselves rather than the wide middle class of the past.

“Unions built the middle class, and the middle class built America. It was built with our hands and our sweat and our blood and our sacrifice,” said Jim Enders, president of the Central PA Building Trades. “We created the strongest economy this world has ever known, not billionaires, not CEOs. Working people made America.”

The speakers said they don’t think most of these problems started with Trump, nor are they exclusive to the Republican party. Rather, they say the status quo in both major parties has been to allow corporate interests to run unchecked. Many see the current administration laying bare a stark reality that has been building for decades.

“I guess my concern is that I don’t believe that the people in the White House have the best interests of the American people in mind, that they’re, you know, they’re selling the idea that they’re trying to make things more efficient and raise up the lives of working class people, but everything that they’re doing is making it less likely that that is going to happen,” Jean Najjar, an attendee from State College told The Center Square.

Few figures illustrate the perceived marriage between the nation’s top 1% of earners and the upper echelon of government than Elon Musk. After spending over $270 million on Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, including giving Pennsylvania voters $100 checks for signing a petition supporting the first and second amendments, Musk was appointed to lead the Department of Government Efficiency.

“I am [also] angry with the tech billionaires because technology came with a revolutionary face and they were promising that, like, hey, we are gonna be the voice of the voiceless, and people are going to have a voice, because technology is going to give you those opportunities,” said Ilhan Kucukaydin, an attendee from Harrisburg. “Now, they have become the apparatus of the fascist state.”

For some, including many who live there, it’s hard to imagine how a state known for its steel mills and blue-collar blend of Appalachian heart and East-Coast grit could relate to the billionaire class, yet the commonwealth swung definitively toward Trump in the 2024 election. In fact, the Republican party swept all of the state’s row offices.

“I think the overlap is that people are tired of the same old same-old and want change, and people might just be confused about how to go about that change,” said Ryan Hazel of Hershey, who called the two men “polar opposites.”

Yet the question remains — can the working class see themselves in the Democratic party once again? Its concern for the middle class has long been overshadowed by what many view as out-of-touch elitism and intellectualism, allowing Republicans to make gains with salient points from the culture wars.

A recent poll from The Center Square found that Democrats are uncertain about who leads their party. While there’s energy behind progressives like New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders, the party received criticism for courting moderate Republicans in 2024 at the expense of its own base and the larger left.

The Center Square asked Deluzio who he saw leading the party.

“The leader of the House Democrats is Hakeem Jeffries. And I say that to mean the national leader of the Democrats will be whomever our presidential nominee is in 2028,” said Deluzio. “That means that there’s, I think, a debate about ideas and a debate about the future of the party that’s playing out right now. I think what I and the senator did tonight is part of that.”