Little debate that Pennsylvania is key as Harris and Trump prepare for showdown in Philly

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — When Donald Trump and Kamala Harris meet on stage in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, both know there is little doubt that Pennsylvania is critical to their chances of winning the presidency.

The most populous swing state in presidential elections has sided with the winner in the last two elections, each time by just tens of thousands of votes. Polls this year suggest Pennsylvania will be close again in November.

A loss in that state would make it difficult to secure electoral votes in other states and thus win the presidency. Trump and Harris have been frequent visitors in recent days, and the former president was giving a speech in Butler County on July 14 when he was the target of an assassination attempt.

Harris may have a particularly high stakes: Since 1948, no Democrat has won the White House without Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania residents broke a streak of six Democratic victories in the state when they helped Trump win in 2016 and then supported Native American Joe Biden in the race against Trump in 2020.

“They say, ‘If you win Pennsylvania, you win the whole thing,'” Trump told a crowd at Mohegan Arena in Wilkes-Barre in August.

Republicans want to mitigate Trump’s unpopularity in Pennsylvania’s growing and increasingly liberal suburbs by criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of the economy. They hope to offset Democrats’ massive advantage in early voting by encouraging their electorate to vote by mail.

Harris wants to reunite the coalition behind Biden’s successful campaign, which includes college students, black voters and women who care about protecting abortion rights.

Democrats also say it will be crucial for Harris to secure a clear victory in Philadelphia – the state’s largest city, where African Americans are the largest ethnic group – and its suburbs, while narrowing Trump’s large lead among white voters in much of rural and small-town Pennsylvania.

The debate will take place at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold where Trump notoriously said in 2020, “Bad things happen,” one of his baseless broadsides suggesting that Democrats could only win Pennsylvania through fraud.

Biden turned Pennsylvania around in 2020 not only through his clear victory in Philadelphia, but also through larger majorities in the populous suburbs around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. He also gained momentum in northeastern Pennsylvania, in the counties around Scranton, where he grew up.

Ed Rendell, a former two-term Democratic governor who was extremely popular in Philadelphia and the suburbs, says Harris could be more successful in the suburbs than Biden.

“There are a lot of votes up for grabs, a Democrat can get a bigger lead in these districts,” Rendell said.

Lawrence Tabas, chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, said Trump could make gains there, too. Polls and Republican outreach show that the impact of inflation on the economy is a priority for these suburbanites, he said, and that the issue benefits the party.

“A lot of people are really starting to say, ‘Look, personalities aside, they are what they are, but we absolutely have to get the American economy back on track,'” Tabas said.

Rendell refutes that claim, saying Trump is going off script and saying bizarre things that will cause him to receive a smaller share of independents and Republicans in the suburbs than he did in 2020.

“He has become so strange that he is going to lose a lot of votes,” Rendell said.

Harris supports a variety of measures to combat inflation, including capping prescription drug costs, helping families afford child care, lowering food prices and creating incentives to encourage homeownership.

Pennsylvania’s relatively stagnant economy typically lags the national economy, but July’s unemployment rate was nearly a full percentage point lower. However, the state’s private sector wage growth has lagged slightly behind the nation since Biden took office in 2021, according to federal data.

Meanwhile, Democrats are hoping that the enthusiasm that has prevailed since Biden withdrew from the race and Harris stepped in will continue through Election Day in November.

For one thing, they hope that as the first black presidential candidate, she will do better with women and black voters. Rendell said he is more optimistic about Harris’ chances of winning Pennsylvania than he was about Biden in the race.

“I think we are the favorites now,” Rendell said.

The debate takes place before the election begins – in Pennsylvania and everywhere else.

A national poll conducted in July by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 8 in 10 Democrats said they would be happy with Harris as the party’s nominee. In March, by contrast, only 4 in 10 Democrats said they would be happy with Biden as the nominee.

Even in Pennsylvania’s Republican-leaning counties, there is some optimism among Democrats, including a number of whiter and less affluent counties near Pittsburgh and Scranton that had historically voted Democrat.

Democratic County Commissioner Larry Maggi believes she will outdo Biden in Washington County, just outside Pittsburgh in the heart of the state’s natural gas-producing region.

Maggi sees more signs for Harris on the lawns than he has ever seen for Biden, and also more volunteers, including many young women who care about protecting abortion rights.

“I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I see people I’ve never seen before,” Maggi said.

Democrats are also hoping to attract a growing number of voters like Ray Robbins, a retired FBI agent and registered independent who regrets voting for Trump in 2016. Robbins did so, he said, because he believed a businessman could break the deadlock in Congress.

“He’s a liar,” Robbins said. “I think he has no morals whatsoever. And you can 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 previous support for a fracking ban could prove costly in her race for the 2020 nomination. During that campaign, the vice president said the country could meet its clean energy goals without a ban, but Trump insists she will change course again.

At the same time, the Democrats’ lead in the state’s voter rolls has steadily shrunk since 2008, from 1.2 million to currently around 350,000.

Republicans attribute this to their appeal to younger voters as well as black, Asian and Hispanic voters.

“Many of them tell us it’s because of the economy,” Tabas said. “And in Philly, it’s also because of crime and safety in the neighborhoods and communities.”

These successes have not yet translated into Republican victories, as Democrats have beaten Republicans by more than 2-1 in national elections over the past decade.

Daniel Hopkins, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, attributes the narrowing of the registration gap in part to “Reagan Democrats” who had long voted Republican but did not immediately change their registration.

One of those voters is Larry Mitko, a longtime Democrat turned Republican who lives in a Pittsburgh suburb.

Mitko, 74, voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. Because of inflation and Biden’s handling of the economy, he was leaning toward voting for Trump in 2024 before he dropped out of the race.

At this point, Mitko was sure he would vote for Trump.

“I don’t like that they lied to us by telling us, ‘He’s fine, he’s fine,’ and he can’t even 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 could mean that many voters are still learning about her, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania who studies presidential debates.

Even before the election, more voters than usual may be undecided, Jamieson said, so this debate could make a difference.

Follow Marc Levy on twitter.com/timelywriter.

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