Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign outlined what it considers to be her path to victory in Pennsylvania in a memo shared exclusively with NBC News. The bellwether is Monday night's rally in Erie County.
Harris' team pointed to the polls the Democratic nominee won in the swing state's suburbs — which it called “our own mini 'blue wall'” in Pennsylvania — compared to President Joe Biden's 2020 performance there.
The campaign also emphasized that a victory would involve increasing his popularity among educated suburbanites, many of whom voted Republican in recent elections. About 160,000 voters The state voted for former UN ambassador Nikki Haley in this year's Republican presidential primary – her numbers proved strong among suburban voters – even after she had already dropped out of the race against the former president Donald Trump.
“The Harris campaign’s path to winning Pennsylvania capitalized on Trump’s unprecedented weakness in the suburbs,” says the memo, which also highlights the campaign’s focus on Haley voters. “Since Trump won in 2020, we have flipped the suburbs from red to blue, increased our support among women, and tripled our support among college-educated white voters in the state.”
The campaign cited September polls from the Philadelphia Inquirer/New York Times/Siena College and Marist College that both showed Harris 6 points ahead of Trump in the suburbs — a significant improvement over Trump's 3-point victory over Biden among Pennsylvania suburbanites in 2020. As exit polls show. (Both of last month's survey results are within the margin of error).
Recent polls have shown Pennsylvania's overall race to be within the margin of error for voting, with a vote in October. Quinnipiac Harris University showing 3 points higher, an Inquirer/Times/Siena Harris found 4 points higher and The Wall Street Journal Trump was up 1 point.
This is Most Wanted After Battleground On the map, highly contested states provide the highest number of Electoral College votes and are the most frequent campaign destinations for both Harris and Trump.
Brendan McPhillips, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania, said Trump's “weakness in the city means that for him to actually win, he will have to double and triple his base in the reddest county in the state.” “And then we go on offense and go to a place where he feels like he has strength and competitiveness.”
The campaign highlighted events that Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, held in red counties like Johnstown, Lancaster and Rochester. It detailed investments in red parts of the state to “shrink the margin and thwart Trump’s only hope of victory,” noting that 16 of his 50 campaign offices across the state are in counties where Trump won by more than 10 points in 2020.
The recent presidential election in Pennsylvania was exceptionally close. Biden beat Trump in 2020 by just over 1 percentage point. In 2016, Trump defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by an even smaller margin.
“With most polls showing this as a race for the margin of error, we also remain offensive for cutting into Trump’s margin with rural voters – a critical advantage because the Trump team lacks the game-play to simultaneously persuade and organize a campaign.” Harris read the campaign memo.
McPhillips said just a 1- to 2-point improvement in Biden's margin in this county would effectively cut off Trump's path to turning the state red.
“We are eating into their margins in a way that a victory cannot sustain,” he said. “And that’s how we’re going to beat him, and that’s how we’re going to be able to play offense on so many fronts.”
The campaign highlighted that as of Sunday it had knocked on more than 1 million doors last weekend, including 250,000 across the state, since Harris supplanted Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. It also cited its 50 offices and 450 local employees.
So far, Harris has spent more time in the western part of the state, including rural areas, than in the Philadelphia market, which McPhillips said is to help introduce him to voters who may be less familiar with him.
For Trump, see this month Billionaire tycoon Elon Musk accelerates His political involvement in the state is through his PAC America, which is working to get out the vote for Trump.
McPhillips dismissed the potential impact of this effort.
“They can’t get to the level we’re at,” he said. “Even with Elon Musk's money, it is not possible to spend enough money to scale an operation to the level of ours. It's too late. You have to start in March, February, January, and they've been calling for a long time. It will be close, for sure. We always planned for it to be. But this plan revealed that we actually had a plan, not an idea.”
The Trump campaign said Harris's campaign was facing a problem in Pennsylvania's cities — especially Philadelphia, the state's top Democratic-voting area.
“They may aim for the suburbs, but they are losing ground in places like Philadelphia,” said a Trump campaign official. “That's exactly why (former President Barack) Obama was just pleading with African-American men to vote for him. They sound the alarm and know they are losing.”
Republicans in the Trump campaign also pointed to a significant slowdown in Democratic voter registration gains in the state, while Bucks, Luzerne and Beaver counties moved into Republican registration margins. It's more Highlights from the Report of Labor Voters Embracing Trump in Philadelphia.
Kush Desai, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania, cited Obama's visit as a sign of a change in Harris' team. “A visit from Obama will not convince Pennsylvanians to vote for four more years of open borders, rising prices, and disasters at home and abroad,” Desai said.
In its memo, Harris' campaign said it believes it will be able to “at least match” Biden's support in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia to his victories in those cities four years ago. He went into more detail about the state's efforts to reach Black voters, including the team it dedicated to outreach and engagement and its events focused on Black voters.
Last week, Obama offered impromptu remarks at the hour and Pittsburgh campaign stop where he said his understanding of the race is that “we haven't yet seen the same kind of energy and participation in every part of our neighborhoods and communities that we saw when I was running.” . … (The) issue with the brothers seems clearer.”
Trying to speak directly to black men, he pushed undecided voters to support Harris, saying her record deserved their support.
“This is excellence on display and it needs to be rewarded,” Obama said.
Speaking to NBC News, Pennsylvania State Senator Vincent Hughes said he understands the frustration expressed by Obama.
“Maybe the tone should have been a little different,” he said. “But let’s be very clear about this. Let's look at what he said. There is nothing in the past, in Donald Trump's career, that would lead any citizen, say black men, to vote for him. He is not a successful businessman. … He was sued for housing discrimination.”
Hughes said Harris' campaign continues to achieve its goals with Black men and voters in Philadelphia, adding that he has recently seen a flurry of campaign activity there that surpasses what Democrats were doing in 2020, during the worst of the Covid pandemic.
“This is going in the right direction for the vice president,” he said. “Look, for a woman and a black woman it is always difficult. It's not right, it's not right, but it's always difficult. Maybe if we can get through this election, we can finally break that glass ceiling and not make things so difficult for the next election.”
