HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania — When Donald Trump and Kamala Harris meet onstage in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, they both know there’s little debate: Pennsylvania is critical to their chances of winning the presidency.
The most populous presidential swing state has sided with the winner in the past two elections, each time by tens of thousands of votes. This year’s polls suggest Pennsylvania will again win narrowly in November.
A loss in the state will make it difficult to win the electoral votes elsewhere to win the presidency. Trump and Harris have been visiting frequently in recent days, and the former president spoke in Butler County on July 14 when he was targeted by a attempted murder.
The stakes may be even higher for Harris: No Democrat has won the White House without Pennsylvania since 1948.
Pennsylvanians snapped a streak of six Democratic victories in the state when they helped Trump win in 2016. supported native son Joe Biden in the 2020 race against Trump.
“They say, ‘If you win Pennsylvania, you win the whole thing,’” Trump told a crowd at Mohegan Arena in Wilkes-Barre in August.
Republicans are trying to temper Trump’s unpopularity in Pennsylvania’s growing, increasingly liberal suburbs by criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of the economy. They hope to counter Democrats’ massive advantage in early voting by encouraging their base to vote by mail.
Harris wants to revive the coalition behind Biden’s winning campaign, which includes students, black voters and women who support abortion rights.
Democrats also say it will be critical for Harris to secure a big win in Philadelphia, the state’s largest city, where black residents make up the largest racial group, and in the suburbs, while shrinking Trump’s large margins among white voters in much of rural and small-town Pennsylvania.
The debate will take place at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The city is a Democratic stronghold where Trump infamously said in 2020: ” bad things happenone of his baseless tirades suggesting that the only way the Democrats could win Pennsylvania was by cheating.
Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020 not only by winning big in Philadelphia, but also by winning by larger margins in the densely populated suburbs around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. He also got a boost in northeastern Pennsylvania in the counties around Scranton, where he grew up.
Ed Rendell, a former two-term Democratic governor who was hugely popular in Philadelphia and the suburbs, says Harris could do a better job in the suburbs than Biden.
“There are plenty of votes to be won, a Democrat can get a bigger margin in those counties,” Rendell said.
Lawrence Tabas, chairman of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, said Trump could make gains there too. The GOP’s polling and outreach show that the effect of inflation on the economy is a priority for those suburbanites, he said, and that the issue works to the party’s advantage.
“A lot of people are really starting to say, ‘Look, personalities aside, they are who they are, but we really need the American economy to get strong again,’” Tabas said.
Rendell rejects that claim. He said Trump is going off-script and saying bizarre things that will help him win a smaller share of independents and suburban Republicans than he did in 2020.
“He’s gotten so weird that he’s going to lose a lot of votes,” Rendell said.
Harris has championed several measures to combat inflation, including capping prescription drug costs, helping families afford child care, lowering grocery costs and offering incentives to encourage homeownership.
Pennsylvania’s relatively stagnant economy typically lags the national economy, but its unemployment rate was nearly a full percentage point lower in July. However, the state’s private-sector wage growth has lagged slightly behind the nation’s since Biden took office in 2021, according to federal data.
Meanwhile, Democrats are hoping the enthusiasm since Biden dropped out of the race and Harris took over will last through Election Day in November.
First, they hope she will do better with women and black voters as the first female presidential candidate of black descent. Rendell said he is more optimistic about Harris’ chances of winning Pennsylvania than he was with Biden in the race.
“I think we are the favorites now,” said Rendell.
The debate takes place before voting begins, in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
A nationwide poll conducted in July by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 8 in 10 Democrats said they were satisfied with Harris as their party’s nominee, up from 4 in 10 Democrats in March who said they were satisfied with Biden as the nominee.
There is some optimism among Democrats in Pennsylvania, even in Republican-leaning districts, including some white, less affluent districts near Pittsburgh and Scranton that once voted consistently Democratic.
In Washington County, just outside Pittsburgh in the heart of the state’s natural gas-producing region, Larry Maggi, a Democratic county commissioner, thinks she will overtake Biden there.
Maggi sees more signs in the yard for Harris than ever for Biden. He also sees more volunteers, many of whom are young women concerned about protecting abortion rights.
“I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I see people I’ve never seen before,” Maggi said.
Democrats also hope to find more voters like Ray Robbins, a retired FBI agent and registered independent who regrets voting for Trump in 2016. Robbins said he did so because he thought a businessman could break the gridlock in Congress.
“He’s a liar,” Robbins said. “I think he has no morals whatsoever. And quote me: I think he’s a despicable human being, even though I voted for him.”
But Republicans also have reason to be optimistic.
In the nation’s second-largest gas-producing state, even Democrats acknowledge that Harris’s past support for a fracking ban could prove costly in her race for the 2020 nomination. This campaign, the vice president said the country can achieve its clean-energy goals without a ban, though Trump insists she will reverse course again.
Meanwhile, the Democratic majority on the state’s voter registration rolls has steadily declined since 2008, from 1.2 million to about 350,000 now.
Republicans say their campaign has reached younger voters, as well as black, Asian and Hispanic voters.
“A lot of them tell us it’s the economy,” Tabas said. “And in Philly, it’s also crime and safety in the neighborhoods and communities.”
These gains have yet to translate into victories for Republicans, as Democrats have defeated Republicans by more than 2-1 in state elections over the past decade.
Daniel Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, attributes the closing registration gap in part to “Reagan Democrats” who have long voted Republican but did not immediately change their registration.
One of those voters is Larry Mitko, a Democrat-turned-Republican who lives in a Pittsburgh suburb.
Mitko, 74, voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. He was leaning toward voting for Trump in 2024 because of inflation and Biden’s handling of the economy before Biden withdrew from the race.
Then Mitko knew for sure that he would vote for Trump.
“I don’t like that they lied to us and said, ‘He’s OK, he’s OK,’ and he can’t walk up the stairs, he can’t finish a sentence without forgetting what he’s talking about,” Mitko said of Biden.
Harris’ late entry into the race may mean that many voters are still getting to know her, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies presidential debates.
Jamieson said there may be more voters than usual who have not yet made up their minds, even though the vote is just around the corner, so this debate could make a difference.
___
Follow Marc Levy on twitter.com/timelywriter.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.
