PENNSYLVANIA — Before November, both political parties made a similar bet: that they could boost their chances of winning a swing state by invoking crime in places they don’t normally compete.
For Republicans, that means bucking the 2020 trend that their candidates led by Donald Trump tapped into, particularly among working-class voters of color in urban centers. For Democrats, it looks like maintaining GOP margins of victory in rural areas and accelerating changes in the suburbs.
With only a few weeks until Election Day, the key to executing these strategies may be each party’s on-the-ground campaign to make the case to new, undecided, or disaffected voters. To get a better picture of what it looks like, Teamed up with Today, explained Produced by Miles Bryan Republicans are testing ground games and pitches to win over black and Latino voters in Philadelphia, and that Democrats are using to turn less inclined or undecided Democratic and independent voters in rural and suburban areas like Lancaster County.
The party best able to do so could win the biggest prize in 2024: Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes and the presidency.
Republicans have a clear message, but a shambolic operation
In early September, Miles and I drove up to North Philadelphia. We got a word that “Black Voters for Trump.” bus travel A few stops will be made in the city as part of the five-state tour swing To inspire and mobilize black Republican voters. The first stop of the day will be at a cheesesteak takeout in Nicetown, a predominantly black neighborhood.
Organized by the Black Conservative Federation, one of the main Republican-aligned groups campaigning with black voters for Trump, the tour was intended to drill down on central kitchen-table pitches that Republicans are using to take advantage of electoral voting trends and political surveys: namely, blacks. The Democrats’ grip on the electorate appears to be weakening.
National election still display Democrats have won the majority of this segment of the electorate, but since 2020, Trump has increased his level of support. The youngest division This electorate, and although Vice President Kamala Harris seems to have reintegrate Compared to President Joe Biden’s now-defunct re-election campaign, the support of black voters, he still is His 2020 margin does not hurt.
In Nicetown, Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, one of Trump’s main black surrogates, told us he thinks the discontent is being driven by economic nostalgia and frustration with immigration and crime.
“Black people are sick and tired of being sick and tired of it,” Donalds said. “I’ve been in North Carolina, I’ve been in Wisconsin, I’ve been in California, here in Philadelphia, obviously in Florida, Texas — it doesn’t matter. The story remains the same.”
Many black and Latino voters, he said, don’t trust Democrats to manage the nation’s economy, lower prices or improve everyday life — and when they compare their finances today to life before the pandemic, they can’t help but want a change. The pitch I explained earlier for Vox, and it sounds like a compelling message — but it’s hard to convince people if no one shows up.
When the tour bus pulled up in front of Max’s Steaks, it arrived to a nearly empty scene. There was no crowd, just a few local reporters and a solitary Trump sign, sitting on a chair near the store’s entrance. Dozens of passersby waved at BCF staff and volunteers who began talking to customers, but eventually Donalds and other surrogates met some receptive ears, such as Sharita White, a black woman who lives in Kensington — a Rough parts of Philadelphia Hit hard by the heroin addiction and fentanyl crisis.
“I’m in a neighborhood I don’t want to be in, but if Trump gets in his chair, that might change. I might [be able to] Move,” White told us. “I have to live. And these streets in Philadelphia, it looks like they’re turning into New York now. Everything is high here. People are not able to give a single water. I don’t know much about politics, but all I know is, my income has changed. And if I need to put that guy in the chair to fix my income, I’m totally disappointed.”
White is the type of voter Trump and Republicans hope will turn out in big cities like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Phoenix, Detroit and Milwaukee, which Democrats need big leads to win in swing states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona. Michigan, and Wisconsin. In Philadelphia, at least, there are signs of this more diverse working-class neighborhood Becoming more competitive. But receptive voters aren’t worth much if you don’t have a way to activate them on election day.
We noticed that no one pulled White’s information or checked his registration status, or logged in to try to follow up with him and vote for him. The same dynamic unfolds at the tour’s second stop, a soul food restaurant in the middle-class Germantown neighborhood.
The organizational work required to create this disconnect between potential voters and turn them out is an iterative one the problem With the GOP’s ground game. Grassroots and local work is being conducted primarily outside party And PACs Like the Black Conservative Federation, not the Republican Party. These teams are hiring canvassers, doorkeepers and workers who registration People vote at Trump rallies, but in many cases the rally attendees are from out of state. this dependency There are outgroups Raise the flag in long time Republican operatives, who warn that outreach and resource allocation by outside groups can be inefficient, and that local volunteers and longtime staff often know their neighborhoods and how to persuade voters better than paid staff.
Democrats’ renewed ground game aims for lower rates
The Democrats’ 2024 ground game stands in stark contrast to the GOP’s shortcomings and could allow them to reverse a trend that has kept the party locked in close contests cycle after cycle.
In particular, Democratic support in rural communities has collapsed in recent decades, allowing Republicans in some cases to overcome large Democratic leads in cities and their surrounding suburbs.
In 1996, for example, Bill Clinton won 1,100 rural counties. By 2008, Barack Obama had won 455. And in 2020, Joe Biden won just 194, leaving a rural Republican party within striking distance of Donald Trump once again.
So before 2024, Democrats set out to stop this bleeding. Biden and his cabinet have spent a lot 2022, 2023and quickly 2024 Visiting rural communities to talk about massive investment through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. While he was still the Democratic nominee, Biden and his campaign set up field offices, organized and Inspection Rural counties that Trump won, and when it came time for Harris to take the reins in late July, the party built massive ground operations in rural areas that they had less to lose.
That dynamic holds true in North Carolina, where Harris’ campaign is based Invested a lotAnd one in Georgia, where Harris went Rural bus tour Shortly after becoming the Democratic nominee. And it’s true Rural PennsylvaniaSome of which are Harris and Walz Travel this week. The Biden and Harris campaigns have opened 50 integrated Democratic campaign offices across the state and deployed 350 staffers — including 16 offices in rural counties that Trump won by double digits in 2020.
Miles and I drove to Lancaster County in southern Pennsylvania to visit the county Democratic headquarters in Lancaster City and see this operation in action.
The county has historically been a Republican stronghold, but that’s changing quickly, Stella Sexton, vice chair of the Lancaster County Democrats, told us.
“People move here for jobs for a variety of reasons,” he said. “But the other part of the story, and I think that gets overlooked, is that our college-educated population is growing and it’s not just younger people going on with college degrees. It is also retired.”
Trump won the county by more than 44,000 votes in 2020, but in the 2022 midterms, Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat then running for his first term, came close to flipping the county, losing by just 4,000 votes.
“The bottom line is because the Harris campaign — the Biden and now the Harris campaign — made this investment here because we’re not going to flip it this cycle. It may take another cycle to flip the county outright, but … the margin they can get here is critical to winning state,” Sexton said.
And key to this margin-narrowing strategy are the field operations Democrats have built, both to energize rural Democrats who may have been left alone or forgotten by past campaigns, and to reach out to disaffected or undecided voters.
“There have always been Democrats in the neighborhood, but I don’t know that Democrats in our suburban or rural areas ever realized they had another Democrat as a neighbor,” Sexton said. “What I’m noticing is that people aren’t embarrassed or hiding. People are proud to be Democrats and they’re proud to represent that to their neighbors.”
According to Sexton, that vibe was there before Biden dropped out, but it has accelerated since Harris was nominated. Since then, more volunteers have started getting involved in the campaign. The switch “created excitement and urgency among people who might have sat back and waited until October to get involved,” Sexton said.
We joined a canvasser that went to various suburban and working-class neighborhoods to see the Democratic pitch in action. The Democrats we encountered were excited about Harris, anxious about Election Day and happy to be reminded to vote. But undecided voters and independents were still not convinced. One, a middle-aged union electrician named Ziggy, told us he didn’t have strong feelings about Harris, but was still upset that both sides kept “someone over retirement age” and showed “signs of slipping.”
We watched as the Democratic canvasser, a nurse named Laura, cycled through several policy issues and topics to see if she could find a way to persuade Ziggy. Speaking on Jan. 6, family-friendly policies like the child tax credit and climate change didn’t materialize, but when they got to reproductive rights and banning abortion, Ziggy seemed ready to listen — especially to others about how some anti-abortion policies might be. Impact care for pregnancy-related medical problems.
At the end of the conversation, she was undecided about Harris, but didn’t seem to endorse Trump, Laura told us. “And we are will be Go back to him,” he said, while identifying him on the party’s vote-canvassing app.
The whole exchange revealed the renewed hope that Democrats feel about running in places that are usually red, and the advantage of having a highly organized in-house operation to find your own voters and sway undecided voters. Harris’s favorable rating of Democratic organizational efforts, a significant cash benefit and improvement Economic pulse nationally.
Despite this edge, Pennsylvania remains a dead heat Voting average And election forecast. The presidential election could come down to a few thousand votes in the state. And if that happens, the difference could be the tactics each campaign is now pursuing.
Miles Bryan contributed reporting to this article.
