Rick Hampson

USA TODAY

TOWANDA, Pa. — Northeastern Pennsylvania was in the vanguard of the Republican establishment’s attempts to stop outsider Barry Goldwater in ’64 and outsider Ronald Reagan in ’76. But party regulars here aren’t leading the Stop Trump movement — they’re incensed by it.

Reps. Thomas Marino and Lou Barletta are two of only a handful of House members to have endorsed Trump. In his announcement last week, Barletta complained that party leaders have “spent more time trying to stop Donald Trump than trying to understand why is he is so popular.’’GOP voters in the 10th and 11th congressional districts, who gave big majorities to George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney, are rallying to the man their old standard-bearers detest.

Dan Meuser and Chris Hackett are Republican businessmen who once ran against each other for Congress. Meuser says the campaign to deny Trump the nomination at the national convention “just increases his support. People feel, ‘You’re still not taking us seriously.’’’ Hackett agrees: “The harder they try to stop Trump, the more likely he is to succeed.’’

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Northeastern Pennsylvania’s support for 2016’s outsider candidate illustrates how decades of economic stagnation and political dysfunction have eroded the GOP establishment’s power in its one time bastions like this.

The region — known as NEPA — has been Republican for as long as there’s been a Republican Party. Two figures loom large: David Wilmot, the anti-slavery crusader who helped found the party before the Civil War; and Gov. William Scranton, who battled for its soul a century later.

In 1964, Scranton waged an 11th hour presidential campaign to deny the nomination to Sen. Goldwater of Arizona, a conservative’s conservative who’d voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Scranton personified the moderate Eastern Republican establishment. Descended from industrialists for whom the city of Scranton was named, he studied at Hotchkiss and Yale and served in John Foster Dulles’ State Department. His mother, who traced her lineage to the Mayflower, was on the Republican National Committee for two decades.

As Theodore H. White wrote of Scranton in The Making of the President 1964, “The Republican Party was his, his since his grandfather’s day, his by inheritance from mother and father.’’

But he could not stop Goldwater, who suffered a massive defeat in the fall that was both the confirmation of the establishment’s judgment of him and the result of its attacks on him.

The establishment rallied again in 1976, this time successfully. Pennsylvania’s uncommitted convention delegates helped President Ford fend off the challenge of another Western insurgent, Ronald Reagan.

But today, the establishment is something with which nobody in NEPA wants to be associated, including those who are patently part of it.

Doug McLinko, a four-term GOP Bradford County commissioner, stands at David Wilmot’s grave site in this industrial town on the Susquehanna River and ponders what he’d make of the national party today.

He points to Wilmot’s white stone marker, so old that the inscription (from the Wilmot Proviso — “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory…’’ ) is illegible.

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“He’s down there spinning over what the establishment has done to the party of Lincoln,’’ he says. “I can’t stand the RNC. They hover at 15,000 feet. Totally out of touch.’’

He says “the forces of Hell have been unleashed’’ on Trump and warns against “any monkey business at the convention.’’ If there is, he says, and Trump “leaves the party in smoldering embers, then I’ll be happy.’’

‘Stir the pot’

Out on the old main road through town, the Jones Diner has a Trump sign on the knotty-pine paneled wall behind the lunch counter.

It would seem like a good way to alienate at least some customers. Eric and Blythe Jones, the couple who own the diner, thought about that. “But I loved Donald Trump as soon as he opened his mouth,’’ says Eric, who also repairs and restores vintage Harleys. "I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ Someone has to stir the pot.’’

“He sometimes speaks too quickly,’’ Blythe says of Trump. “But so do I.’’

Anyway, she says, the reaction has been positive, “especially from working men.’’

The Joneses say they hope Trump can bring jobs back to the area, secure the nation’s borders, curb illegal immigration and, of course, upend the establishment. “He’ll shake things up, that makes ‘em nervous,’’ says Eric.

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Although there’s no sign of a Trump organization ahead of Pennsylvania's primary on April 26, McLinko says he doesn’t need one: “His organization is the silent majority.’’

They’re not just the party faithful. Luzerne County elections officials said last week that 1,258 Democrats had switched their registration to Republican this year, three times more than in the same period before the 2012 presidential primary. (The primary is closed to independents and Democrats.)

Neither of the GOP congressmen in the region backing Trump are particularly conservative by party standards, nor the sort of politicians likely to support an outsider insurgency. But they seem to have an affinity for the New York billionaire .

Marino, who holds William Scranton’s old 10th District seat, rose from humble origins in Williamsport (site of the Little League World Series) to became one of the state’s top federal prosecutors.

Trump, he said, appeals to “the blue collar, hard-working taxpayers’’ of his district, who are sick of Washington “elites,’’ federal regulations and taxes, including the one on corporations. And he warned against attempts to “rig’’ the convention against Trump.

Barletta is the former mayor of Hazleton, Pa., where he cracked down on illegal immigrants, businesses that hired them and landlords who housed them. In an interview last week with The Washington Post, he evoked the pre-Pearl Harbor isolationists’ battle cry, saying Republicans should be “the party of America first.’’

So could Trump wind up like Goldwater? Malcolm Derk, a Snyder County Commissioner who ran in the primary against Marino in 2010, says Trump’s lifestyle and business practices hardly seem conservative. He won’t vote for him in the primary; as of now, he sees no reason to vote for him in November.

Trump and NEPA: Alchemical reaction

What explains an outsider-insurgent’s appeal in an area traditionally hostile to such candidates? One is Trump’s political alchemy. Another is the economic forces that have buffeted NEPA.

The region never fully recovered from the decline in the last century of anthracite coal, once a prime source of home heating, and the relocation of whole industries, such as garment making.

The natural gas boom that helped NEPA a decade ago is fading to bust. (Blythe Jones was laid off from her job selling equipment involved in gas drilling.)

Over the 15 months ending last September, three northern NEPA counties, Bradford, Wayne and Pike, lost about 4% of their jobs. People are afraid the recession that largely bypassed the area in 2008 will finally arrive.

“We have good colleges, but our kids have to leave to find work,’’ says Lynette Villano, vice chair of the Luzerne County Republicans. “The general feeling is that Trump would do better. We can’t do any worse.’’

When reached by phone, Villano was helping an elderly couple change their registration from Democratic to Republican so they can vote for Trump. “He’s a kind man,’’ the wife is saying in the background. “He only fires people if they’re caught stealing.’’

“Kind’’ may not be the first word most would use for Trump. But the comment goes to the chemistry between Trump and voters here.

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In the TV performer and promoter, they see a builder, “a guy who doesn’t just talk about getting things done but actually gets them done,’’ according to Dan Meuser.

In the penthouse-dweller, they see the common touch, someone, says Doug McLinko, “who can talk to people like my dad.’’ That’s Bob McLinko, a crusty 82-year-old Korean War vet. When Trump announced, he says, “I did a back flip.’’

In the boss best known for firing people, they see a job creator. “He’s signed a ton of paychecks,’’ says Marino.

Once, the man who signed the paychecks in these parts was regarded as an adversary, possibly an enemy. But Trump has transcended class conflict. He’s the billionaire who lies down with the blue collars.

In this Trump is not so different from William Scranton, whose rise was powered by a willingness to use government to mitigate U.S. industrial decline in a competitive world economy, and to deal with rivals. (In the House he voted with the Democrats so often from 1961 to 1963 he was known as a “Kennedy Republican.’’)

But in later years, Scranton also said that he ran for president only because — thanks in part to Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act — “Americans were getting the impression that the Republican Party was a white supremacist party.’’

Scranton died three years ago at 96. Last week a state commission approved the erection of an historic marker for him in the city that bears his family name.

He lived long enough to see his species of Republican become functionally extinct, but not long enough to see the rise of a presidential front-runner who advocates barring some immigrants from the country based on their religion.

If current events do, in fact, have David Wilmot spinning in his grave, one can only imagine their impact on William Scranton in his.

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