That PA Voter Everyone Is Obsessed With Was My High School Spanish Teacher
To me, she was a great educator. To America, she is a swing-state case study.
Late last week, NBC News aired a segment asking Pennsylvanians how they’ll cast their ballot in the presidential election. Among those interviewed was Patricia Healey, a 71-year-old retired teacher from Scranton who is switching her vote this time around, from Trump to Biden.
This wasn’t Healey’s only brush with national media fame: In September, she was quoted in a piece in the New Yorker about Pennsylvania voters. In the story, Healey explained that she was a lifelong fiscal conservative who, after watching President Trump sell off public lands to oil and gas companies and gut public programs, has thrown her support behind Biden, the self-proclaimed prodigal son of Scranton.
I was spellbound reading the New Yorker piece and watching the NBC segment. Not because Healey offered some kind of hitherto unknown insight into the psyche of the Pennsylvania voter, but because Healey, as it happens, was my high school Spanish teacher. In the two years I took her classes, I always found her to be a kind and patient person. (She also, I learned during my senior year, loved AC/DC and drove a motorcycle.)
