The New Yorker:

On a Wednesday afternoon in August, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Lance Stange, the chair of the local Republican Party, led a dozen volunteers and campaign staffers in an effort to assemble a thousand Donald Trump yard signs. Stange, who is forty-four and wears his white hair slicked back, was calm, though the mood in the office was frantic. The President was arriving the following afternoon to host a rally outside of Scranton, Joe Biden’s home town, on the same day that Biden would accept his Presidential nomination, at the Democratic National Convention. The visit was spur of the moment. “It just came together in the last twenty-four hours, but we’re working through it,” Stange told me. He was hoping to line a two-mile stretch of road between the airport and the event space with boosterish messages, so that Trump would see them on his way to the rally and be pleased. Stange told me that he also uses the yard signs for another purpose: when someone orders one, he checks her voter registration, and if she isn’t a Republican he tries to recruit her. He said that he has been flooded with requests for signs from disaffected Democrats. “If I’m delivering a Trump sign to a registered Democrat, believe me, they’re going to hear from me,” he said.

Stange, who was born and raised in Scranton, comes from a longtime Republican family, a rarity in the area. For decades, Scranton was a coal town dominated by labor unions, and almost everyone was a Democrat. Stange’s family owned a chain of grocery and convenience stores, and kept quiet about politics—being outspoken would have been bad for business. At twenty, Stange called the local G.O.P. headquarters, asked to volunteer, and was told that he should try the Young Republicans. “I was a little disappointed,” he told me. But, before long, he came to chair the group, went on to serve as secretary of the local Party, and is now the G.O.P. chair in Lackawanna County and the caucus chair for the nine counties that make up northeastern Pennsylvania.

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