One day last month I stepped out of my car in Riegelsville, Pa., and on to a sidewalk in front of the town’s post office, where residents come to pick up their mail and often spend a few minutes talking with neighbors. The first person I encountered was a young man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a pizzeria around the corner. He looked my way and said: “Hi! How are you doing today?”
Riegelsville is, first of all, tiny: a hamlet on the western bank of the Delaware River with roughly 800 inhabitants, many of whom live in three-bedroom houses set on small lots. It has one stoplight, a sit-down restaurant, three churches, an American Legion post, a general store and that pizzeria.
The problem of social isolation in America does not seem to apply here. People know one another and talk across backyards. When Hurricane Sandy knocked out the town’s electricity for about a week in 2012, residents gathered at the firehouse, which was powered by a generator, and cooked their meals communally. “It’s a Hallmark town,” the mayor, Viana Boenzli, told me. “We don’t even have a police department. We call the state police if there’s a problem, but there almost never is.”
In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump won 276 votes in Riegelsville to Joe Biden’s 274. Those are not enough votes to have made a big impact on who won Pennsylvania — nor are Riegelsville’s votes likely to swing who will win the state this November. But Bucks is the only one of Philadelphia’s four collar counties that has not swung strongly to the Democrats. It is, therefore, a nearly dead-even town, in a closely divided county, in the biggest and most important of the electorally deadlocked battleground states.
I have been interviewing voters in Pennsylvania for The Times since 2008 — and often in Bucks County, where I grew up. I find it a useful lens out into America through a place that has a reputation for civilized, or even genteel, politics.
