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PITTSBURGH — Shawn Steffee was at a political function in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, last Thursday evening when he started receiving an overwhelming number of calls and text messages.
"My phone started going off like a slot machine. Initially, I had no idea what was going on," he said from his home in Homer City.
Steffee, a Boilermakers Local 154 business agent and executive board member, soon found the flood of texts and calls were because Joe Biden lied about Steffee and his union supporting him during the ABC News town hall event last week. Host George Stephanopoulos noted Steffee by name in a question about the sincerity of Biden's support of fracking.
Steffee had told the New York Times that Biden's sudden vocal support of fracking is inconsistent with his goal of ending the use of fossil fuels, and Stephanopoulos pressed him on Steffee's statement.
"The boilermakers overwhelmingly endorse me, OK?" Biden snapped on Thursday, adding, "So, the Boilermakers Union has endorsed me because I sat down with them, went into great detail with leadership, exactly what I would do, No. 1."
Except they didn't.
In truth, the Local 154 endorsed President Trump in a September message from business leader John Hughes. They appeared with him onstage at a massive rally shortly after. "Biden flat-out lied. I'm only speaking for my local union, which is the largest boilermaker union in the country," said Steffee.
The International Boilermakers Union has not endorsed anyone.
Steffee is not one of those Democrats who have left his party. He's not even one of those guys who say the party has left him. He is still a registered Democrat, proudly so, and believes it has the potential to right itself to return to its working-class roots.
But right here, right now, for him and the rest of his local union brothers and sisters, Biden is not the one to right the ship of the Democratic Party.
The party abandoned its New Deal coalition beginning with the presidential campaign of Al Gore, dismantling it permanently by the end of Barack Obama's second term in favor of the ascendant coalition of young people, minorities, women, and just a smidge of the white working class.
Steffee is still part of that smidge of the white working class still trying to hold on to a party that even on the state legislative level is becoming increasingly afraid of standing up for its constituents, for fear it will be primaried out by the emboldened progressive left in the party, causing it to flirt with voting for holding its seats instead of representing its constituents.
Steffee, 53, attended an Indiana County vocational tech school and earned a degree in mine equipment maintenance. He then attended Williamsport Area Community College, which is now Penn Tech, and received a degree in welding. His previous job at FMC Technologies was outsourced overseas in the 1990s, thanks to NAFTA, Steffee says flatly.
Biden voted for NAFTA in the Senate, while Trump pushed for a renegotiation, resulting in the USMCA. Furthermore, when Biden was vice president, he supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Steffee said Biden's inconsistency on trade and fracking is a problem, and he and other union members can't find a way to believe him or trust him. "[Biden] has openly come out, multiple times, and said he was doing away with fossil fuels. He said that he's doing away with fracking, and now, he's flip-flopped. And that is my whole point.
He's now flip-flopped because, in my opinion, he feels that this is something that he needed to change a little bit on because he wasn't getting the support he needed in the state of Pennsylvania with these comments or an agenda in his energy policy."
The union's business agent is not finding any of his members buying into Biden's sudden pro-fracking epiphany. It is even harder for Steffee now that Biden has flat-out lied about having his support, his local union's support, or the international union's support.
"If I could best describe most of my members, every one of us, we love our families, we pledge allegiance to our flag under God before every meeting, we're all for our Second Amendment. And we all want to see the fossil fuel industry move forward, but we want to see it move forward in an environmentally friendlier way, which is possible through technology like carbon capture or any other new technologies that come out to reduce our carbon footprint," Steffee explained. "We want to be the ones to build and maintain these facilities. And we feel that that's where we need to move in the future. We know, and if anybody follows the facts or connects the dots that renewables will never be able to replace our fossil fuels, it's a no-brainer. But let's just take, for instance, our wind and solar. You cannot even conceive a windmill or a solar panel without fossil fuels."
"I have stayed with the [Democratic Party] because I still believe there's still good, moderate Democrats out there," Steffee said. "But right now, I feel that my party's under siege by far-left Democrats. And I don't agree at all with their positions, but I think that we could make a comeback. And I actually feel that, right now, my party is under siege, just like the Republican Party was with the Tea Party."
"I voted for Barack Obama twice then Donald Trump in 2016," Steffee said, adding that he soured on Obama in the second term on energy.
He expects his over 1,500 union members, their family members, and retirees to come out to vote in two weeks. "I think they'll overwhelmingly vote for Donald Trump because they understand that our trade is fossil-fuel driven, and they understand that the Green New Deal, or any kind of framework deal that Joe Biden's speaking of, has nothing in it for us," he said. "Those green jobs in wind and solar have nothing to do with the boilermakers. We'll never work in either one of those industries unless we leave our trade."
For now, Biden holds an average 4 percentage point lead over Trump in the Keystone State.
Biden's lie about the Boilermakers' endorsement will go unchallenged by the national press; they seemingly only chase candidate lies that ruffle their sensibilities. Nor will the lie trend on Twitter because 69% of highly prolific Twitter users are Democrats. Most Twitter users are not the kind who live in places like Homer City. Rather, most are the kind of people that spend their time on Twitter making fun of people like Steffee.
No matter who wins the election, the press will continue to not understand people who live and work and pray like Steffee. They'll parachute in every four years and spin yarns about their trip to a local diner, talk in hushed tones about how many guns these people own and the faith they practice, and once again never fully understand who they are and what matters to them.
It is a problem with the national news because they don't know anyone like Steffee or know anyone who's lived in a place like Homer City or been hunting with their fathers, sons, or daughters. The big mistake they will make, though, is that they think voters like Steffee will go away, that their issues will go away, and their concerns will go away.
They won't. The wave elections will continue because politicians and the press only highlight voters like Steffee for copy, especially if their vote has moved in a direction they approve of or understand, and they rarely listen to the validity of their point of view.
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Salena Zito is a CNN political analyst, and a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. She reaches the Everyman and Everywoman through shoe-leather journalism, traveling from Main Street to the beltway and all places in between.