Revisiting a voter in Pittsburgh

One thing I have come to realize is that you can’t generally get someone else to change their mind.

A person can change their own mind. You can give people information, explain how you see it and your point of view. I suppose you can persuade someone who is open to be persuaded.

A couple years ago, I had a rare experience. I was talking with a steel worker in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and he was telling me why he was going to vote for Trump. He said he didn’t love Trump, but his economic situation was concerning him; inflation was biting; he had had some medical issues and he was very worried about his economic situation when he retired in a few years.

And listening to him, I had the experience of understanding how he felt the current situation was not working for him, and he wanted a change; I was able to see his point of view. If he’d been hard core MAGA, I am not sure I would have been able to understand it as well.

I had been wondering how he was seeing things a year into Trump’s return to office. So this past April, I went back to Pittsburgh and found him.

Though I did not know his name and had only a memory of his neighborhood, I found him pretty easily and was in his kitchen talking to him a day after my arrival. Indeed, by the fluke of the GPS settings on my phone having been programmed to avoid highways, I found myself passing his neighborhood in McKees Rocks on the drive from the airport to my hotel. I scouted around and found what looked familiar to me like his street and returned the next day and found him after work.

“You mean Bob?” said one of the neighbors, pointing to a pretty white and gray house on a hill, when I was describing the person I was trying to find.

Robert Feldbauer, 64, is a roller for Universal Stainless, based in Bridgeville, PA, a dozen miles southwest of McKees Rocks. A divorced father of a grown son, he told me he likes Trump’s policy, enacted in the 2025 Republican budget bill, that gives a temporary federal income tax reduction for a portion of income earned working overtime.

“I put a lot of money into federal income tax, about $15,000 a year,” he said. “And normally I get back about $1,500, right? And this year, I got $4,300. … That’s a big jump. That’s almost three grand. Of course, I [worked] $50,000 in overtime….I’m going for the record this year.”

Feldbauer says he tends to go into work about 3am and get off at 2pm. He was feeling the higher gas prices on his work commute because of the war on Iran. But he didn’t much object to Trump’s decision to go to war, saying “someone had to put” Iran in its place.

But when I checked in with Feldbauer today, Trump had just threatened to hit Iran again, after weeks of claiming he was about to get a deal to end the war. Inflation had risen to over 4% in May, and there had been none of the diminution in cost of living and gas prices that Trump had been promising was around the corner for months.

“I agree he’s not keeping his side of the bargain,” Feldbauer said today.

Back in April, I was describing someone else in his neighborhood that I had talked to two years ago, who had been a Democrat. Feldbauer said that he identified as a Democrat, but usually voted Republican. He said that for the American president, however, he should be president for all the people, no matter their party.

“I’m a Democrat, but I voted Republican, right?” he said.

“To me, that shouldn’t matter,” Feldbauer said. “Once you get in office, you should be for the people. That’s what I think, not for Democrats and not for Republicans.”

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