His stubbornness paid off, but it did take a while.

The son of a father who worked in the coal mines and a mother who worked in the shoe factory, Kuren worked in the same factory after graduating from Wilkes-Barre Township High School in 1960. He worked there until it shut down.

“I worked there two years, and then there was a plant opening up in Mountain Top area, a plastics plant,” he said. “And one of my friends was a boss there and he got me a job there, and I worked there for 46 years when I retired.”

Kuren said he got tired of watching places closing down, often forcing people, mostly young, to move away.

“Back then, shoe factories, dress factories, and, of course, the coal mines were big here in Luzerne County,” he said. “Yes, we lived paycheck to paycheck, but it was stable, and our lives were good enough.”

At the young age of 19, he and a couple of his friends looked around and saw that voter registration in Luzerne was 5 to 1 Democratic.

“And a couple of us guys, we were all around the same age, 18 to 20 years old, and we didn’t particularly like the way it was going locally, so we started getting involved in Republican politics,” he said.

Kuren said it took several years of taking turns running for local office until one of their friends broke the ice and got elected to the council of Wilkes-Barre Township.

“There’s five councilmen and one mayor of the town,” he said. “It’s a first-class township home rule charter.”

The cycle after that, another of his friends won a second council seat.

“Now, he only spent two years on council, then he ran for mayor and he won as mayor,” Kuren said. “And that’s when I ran for council and now there are four Republicans with one Democrat left, and then the mayor was Republican.”

Today, Kuren himself has been mayor for 25 years. Luzerne County, where Wilkes Barre Township sits, has been forever a Democratic stronghold — Democrats running statewide always won here until 2016, but the signs of change that year were here for those who visited repeatedly.

In 2008, nearly 54% of Luzerne County voted for Barack Obama. Four years later, that number slightly shrunk to just under 52%. Had you only been paying attention to numbers and not visited Luzerne County, you would have never known the change that was coming.

By 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump won a whopping 58.6% of the vote compared to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 38.5%. I can remember reporters scratching their heads when Trump came here to campaign that year. I can remember interviewing voters — Democrats, Republicans, and independents, and people who hadn’t voted in years — telling me why.

Most reporters and strategists, Democrats and Republicans, thought it was a fool’s errand for Trump to campaign here, and the curiosity and attention they paid to it was scant. It was just in the same way that few paid attention to what a group of teenagers were contemplating all those years ago when they decided to take a risk and run for office.

Last weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris made her first visit here as a presidential candidate with an event at Wilkes University. The rally was a private, invitation-only event mostly filled with students from the local universities, so it is hard to gauge her true support among voters.

Two weeks ago, Trump held a rally here that, as always, was massive. Voters attending said repeatedly that they were hopeful he would talk more about issues of the utmost concern to them: the economy and the border. He didn’t. They said that if he didn’t, it wouldn’t change their vote for him, but they worried he might lose the male suburban voters he needs to overcome the female suburban voters he lost.

In 2020, when Joe Biden narrowly defeated Trump, Democrats led Republicans in total voter registration statewide by a staggering 685,000. That Democratic advantage now sits at 347,789 as of early September, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State. One of the reasons that number has so dramatically shifted is that Luzerne County now has only 233 more registered Democrats than Republicans.

To show how staggering that number is, in 2016, the Democrats held a 34,000-person advantage over Republicans. In 2020, that margin had shrunk to just under 20,000.

Luzerne County is just an example of how rightward Pennsylvania has shifted. In 2020, Fayette County had just under 4,000 more registered Democratic voters than Republicans. Today, that number has shifted to a registered voter advantage of 7,000 for Republicans.

The same goes for Bucks County, where Republicans now lead, however narrowly, over Democrats just four years after Democrats held an advantage of over 10,000. There is also Beaver County out west and Cambria and Berks counties out here in the east, where there are just over 6,000 more Republicans than Democrats.

Again, all data are provided by the Pennsylvania Department of State.

If you follow conservative grassroots activist Scott Pressler of Early Vote Action on social media for any amount of time, you can watch in real time his happy-warrior effort to cover every inch of the state’s geography, signing up new Republican voters.

If you are a Republican, to win Pennsylvania, you don’t just need to win Luzerne County, you need to win it significantly. If you are a Democrat, you need to hold the margins as narrowly as possible.

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To understand Pennsylvania, Kuren says it’s complicated and requires effort and curiosity.

“It is a place you don’t look at the noise or numbers and find out what is going on with voters, you look for people looking like we were all those years ago trying to make change,” he said. “It took a while. People came here in 2016 and thought it was overnight. It really wasn’t if you just ask around.”