Forging America: My Campaign Manager is Roosevelt

Chapter 397: Chapter 186: A Crack in the Iron Curtain

If God were to look down upon the mortal world at this moment and slowly unfurl a map of Pennsylvania, He would find a place that resembled not a solid landmass, but a frozen ocean.

In the west, the Appalachian Mountains were like colossal, surging waves, standing tall at the edge of the continent, carrying the fury of tectonic movements from eons ago.

They were a geographical barrier, and a psychological wall.

In the east, Philadelphia was the gray tidal flat left behind by the receding Atlantic Ocean.

The people there wore exquisite suits and spoke of liberty and the Constitution, as if they were still living in the glory of two centuries past.

Scattered across the vast heartland of the Midwest, the Rust Belt Cities—Erie, Scranton, Johnston—were like black reefs, half-submerged, half-floating.

They appeared and disappeared with the tides of history, their bodies covered in coal dust and rust, silently enduring wave after wave of economic decline.

For decades, this ocean had been red.

It was a deep-sea undercurrent known as "conservatism."

It was cold and unyielding, a defense against the disquieting changes of the outside world.

And Russell Warren was the white whale who had patrolled these waters for thirty years.

This whale was riddled with the broken harpoons of countless past challengers, but they had all failed. He remained immense and fierce.

He wrapped himself in a thick blubber of "God and guns" and shielded himself from everything with a hard shell of "tradition and order."

He laughed at the sailors who tried to hunt him with flimsy promises, just as a great whale would laugh at a fragile canoe.

But today, the sea had a different taste.

Warren hadn’t grown weaker.

In the final week of the campaign, he was still like an angry bull, roaring in every corner of the state.

He went to the coal mines, the churches, and the veterans’ clubs.

He promised the miners a return to traditional dignity and promised the suburban mothers a restoration of the old order.

Ten years ago, this low rumble from the deep sea would have been enough to shatter the hull of any opponent’s ship.

This time, however, Murphy had arrived.

Or more precisely, a steel warship named the "Pittsburgh," which, with suffocating pressure, had shattered the red ice.

Murphy stood at the bow.

But he was not the captain steering this warship, nor did he possess the grim resolve to go down with the white whale.

He was more like a puppet totem tied to the mast, a symbol pushed to the forefront.

The true power driving this ship was the steam engine in the bilge, currently overloading and letting out a deafening roar.

It was the five hundred million US Dollars in bonds ignited by Leo Wallace.

It was the thick black smoke billowing from the stacks of the Erie steel mills.

It was the roar of every truck engine, fully loaded with cement and steel, within the closed-loop supply chain formed by the Rust Belt Cities.

This was a new kind of power.

Warren’s defense, built on cultural identity, seemed so pale and feeble before the roar of the machines.

The rolling tally of the votes was like a rising tide.

A murky torrent mixed with rust, coal dust, motor oil, and sweat.

It surged out of Pittsburgh in the west, flowed along the main arteries of logistics, crested the passes of the Appalachian Mountains, scoured every deep-red valley, and submerged every once-impenetrable Republican Party stronghold.

In Philadelphia, the traditional stronghold of the Democratic Party, voter turnout barely met a passing grade.

The liberal elites, in their exquisite suits and sipping their Evian Water, either abstained out of disgust for Murphy’s "vulgarity" or held their noses and cast their ballots with a look of disdain for the "lesser of two evils."

But in the Rust Belt, the turnout was a vertical line shooting upward.

The old blue-collar workers who hadn’t been to a polling station in years, the truck drivers who couldn’t even tell the difference between the Democratic and Republican Party platforms, the unemployed laborers who had once sworn never to believe a politician’s bullshit again.

They flooded the ballot boxes as if on a pilgrimage.

Warren had fallen.

Just as Ford’s Model T assembly line crushed the livelihoods of carriage drivers, just as Edison’s light bulb eclipsed the whaler’s oil lamp.

A more vibrant form of social organization had been born on the soil of Pennsylvania.

This force was so powerful, so unstoppable.

So much so that it no longer needed the ballot box to prove its legitimacy.

Its very existence was a declaration.

A new era, treading on the corpse of this old-world behemoth, thundered past.

...

「Philadelphia, Independence Square.」

On massive LED screens, herds of red elephants and blue donkeys battled across the vast battlefield of Pennsylvania. Every second, hundreds, even thousands, of ballots were fed into machines, converging into glaring digital curves.

The time was now 11:00 PM.

The polls in Philadelphia and its surrounding suburbs had closed, and a blue wave had swept through the Delaware River Valley.

But everyone knew that was just the appetizer.

The real deciding factor was the west—that silent land.

The ballot data from Pittsburgh, Erie, and Scranton began to pour in.

This blue torrent erupted from Allegany County, surging upstream with unstoppable momentum, washing over the traditional red strongholds.

Westmoreland County, flipped blue.

Washington County, flipped blue.

Beaver County, flipped blue.

The Republican Party strongholds, cultivated for decades, had all defected overnight.