2020
ELECTIONS
‘If Pennsylvania goes, so will go the country’
Trump and Biden are both betting big on Pennsylvania,
spending the final days of their campaigns crisscrossing the state.
By HOLLY
OTTERBEIN and MARC CAPUTO
11/01/2020
05:44 PM EST
Updated:
11/01/2020 06:11 PM EST
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/01/pennsylvania-trump-biden-campaign-433798
PHILADELPHIA
— Pennsylvania has emerged as the keystone state of the entire race for the
White House.
In the last
three days of the presidential election, the campaigns of both Donald Trump and
Joe Biden have made the swing state their home, with Pennsylvania surfacing as
the president’s new top focus, his aides said.
Trump spent
Saturday crisscrossing the state from the Delaware Valley to fracking country
to north central Pennsylvania to stage four rallies. He’ll return for a stop in
the northeast on the eve of the election. Biden sees Pennsylvania as so
important that he is spending the final day of the 2020 campaign here, barnstorming
“all four corners of the state” with his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, and
their spouses, staff said.
“We are the
Keystone State,” said Pennsylvania Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro.
“It’s clear from an Electoral College perspective, if you look at the map from
last cycle, just how pivotal Pennsylvania is. At the end of the day, I think if
Pennsylvania goes, so will go the country.”
Biden is
beating Trump by 4 or 5 percentage points here, according to polling averages —
a decent but not overwhelming lead that is within some surveys' margin of
error. Pennsylvania and its 20 Electoral College votes have more psychological
significance to Biden’s campaign than any other state. Biden’s political
persona is rooted in his childhood in Scranton, his campaign was headquartered
in Philadelphia until the pandemic began, and he has held more events in
Pennsylvania than any other battleground.
Similar to
Pennsylvania for Biden, Florida has been Trump’s obsession since he won it in
an upset in 2016 and subsequently changed his residence to the state. No
Republican in almost a century has won the White House without Florida, which
now has 29 electoral votes.
Most polls
in Florida show Trump losing to Biden, albeit within the margin of error and by
a smaller amount than in Pennsylvania. But Trump’s campaign said it feels
confident in Florida, in great part because GOP turnout of high-propensity
voters has been so high during early voting.
“What we
have left on the table vs. what they have left on the table looks better for
us,” said Marc Reichelderfer, a top GOP consultant in Tallahassee.
If Florida
and the other Sun Belt swing states he won in 2016 are secured, however, Trump
still needs one more big win up north. Pennsylvania looks like the place to do
it, according to the campaign’s polling and public surveys that show it closer
than Wisconsin or Michigan.
Pennsylvania
is also the most likely tipping-point state, and there are more votes left on
the field here: Fewer 2016 voters in Pennsylvania have turned out during early
voting than in the other Rust Belt states.
“Pennsylvania
will determine whether the president wins again,” said former Pennsylvania Rep.
Lou Barletta, a top Trump ally here. “I believe it can be that close.”
Though
Biden’s campaign is bullish about his position here, his staff won’t go as far
as to say that it is a must-win state for the former vice president. His aides
believe that he benefits from an Electoral College map where there are multiple
avenues to victory.
“Going into
these last few days, we still have a number of paths to 270 on election night,”
said Molly Ritner, Biden’s deputy states director. While the campaign doesn’t
believe it needs to, she added, “We can win without Pennsylvania.”
But
Pennsylvania is critical to Biden’s team for another reason. Referring to
Trump, Becca Siegel, Biden’s chief analytics officer, said, “I think that if he
doesn’t win Pennsylvania, that leaves very, very few options for how he wins
this election.”
A key element
of Trump’s strategy in Pennsylvania is to boost turnout in the southwestern
part of the state, home to much of the state’s natural gas industry, where the
president ran up the score four years ago. Biden’s slip-up in the final debate
over fossil fuels left Republicans thinking he looked vulnerable to Trump. On
Saturday, Trump held a massive rally in Butler County that was so packed that
it left some Democrats rattled about the possibility of a 2016 repeat.
“It’s hard
not to look at this crowd that Trump assembled in Butler, PA and not be
completely terrified that he could win again,” tweeted Rebecca Katz, a
progressive strategist who worked for Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman
during his 2018 campaign.
Another
place that Trump’s team is looking to juice turnout is northeastern
Pennsylvania, a predominantly white and working-class area that went from
supporting President Barack Obama twice to Trump in 2016. The region is
currently the campaign’s focus for its ground-game operation in the state,
according to a Trump aide. The president is also holding a rally in the
region’s Luzerne County on Monday.
“It’s
important for either campaign, but especially the Trump campaign because
they've made such incredible inroads in the northeast and the Wyoming Valley in
particular,” said Charlie Gerow, a Pennsylvania-based GOP consultant. “There
are a lot of votes there and a lot of votes to be picked up by Donald Trump,
including first-time voters. A ground game really does make a difference when
you're going to the first-time voters.”
Democrats
know that Trump has a solid base of support in northeastern Pennsylvania, but
they are convinced that Biden will finish more strongly in the area than
Hillary Clinton did in 2016, in part because of his hometown appeal in
Lackawanna County, where Scranton is located. The Biden campaign specifically
said it is doing better with white women and seniors in the northeast, and that
there are not many more potential Trump supporters for him to mine after his
blowout there four years ago.
“Luzerne
County is hard, obviously. It's become very difficult for Democrats to win. But
I think he'll cut the margins from 2016 there substantially,” said Democratic
Sen. Bob Casey, who is close to the Biden campaign. “I think he’ll carry
Lackawanna, and I think he’ll carry it decisively. With Donald Trump, I think
it’s hard to get the margins that Democrats used to get there. But I think
it’ll be above ’16 and below ’12.”
Democrats
are also very confident in Biden’s ability to draw even more voters out of
Philadelphia’s suburbs than Clinton did. The region helped flip several state
legislative and U.S. House seats in 2018, as well as GOP-controlled county
governments a year later.
Trump’s
rallies on Saturday were symbolic of his challenges — and the political divides
— in the state. While Butler County’s event drew thousands of his fans, his
stop in suburban Philly’s Bucks County on Saturday, which appeared to be
invite-only, was much smaller than his typical events.
A Franklin
& Marshall survey released last week also served as a red flag for Trump’s
strategy to find more support in places he won in 2016: It showed Biden not
only outperforming Clinton in counties she carried, but also Trump getting a
slightly smaller share of the vote in counties he took.
Trump’s
campaign believes that its ground-game operation will swamp Biden’s, however.
In an effort to limit the spread of Covid-19, Biden’s team did not knock on
voters’ doors until October, which Trump’s aides believe will make it difficult
for him to turn all of his supporters into voters.
“I don’t
understand why they’re not doing any canvassing or get-out-the-vote. In 2016,
the Clinton people boasted about their ground game,” said Rob Gleason, the
former chairman of Pennsylvania’s Republican Party. “We started working our
ground game a year ahead of time. You can’t just turn this on and off.”
Trump’s
allies also think that he will limit his losses in Philadelphia this year,
particularly among young Black men. While in the city’s suburbs Saturday, Trump
tried to dampen support for Biden among the voting bloc, telling rally-goers,
“For 47 years, Joe Biden betrayed African Americans at every turn. He took your
votes, he took you for granted, and then he shipped away your jobs and flooded
your cities with cheap foreign labor. He devastated Black families with his
1994 crime bill.”
Some Black
leaders and activists in the city have raised alarms about what they said is a
lack of excitement for Biden among young African American men.
“Every day
that I was on the street, at least that first week, a young Black male that
looked to be under 40 or under 45 told me in secret that they were voting for
Trump,” said Nicolas O'Rourke, organizing director for the Working Families
Party in Pennsylvania, which is running a get-out-the-vote operation backing
Biden. “I have seen and heard folks that they just could not get behind any of
them. Many Black men are honestly disgusted by the Republican Party, but also very
much so done and over the Democratic Party and have chosen just to sit out.”
Despite
anxiety among some local Democrats, Biden’s team has expressed confidence in
its ability to turn out voters of color in the city. In a visit last month,
Biden dispatched Obama to Philadelphia in part to speak directly to Black men.
Biden also stumped at a “Souls to the Polls” event Sunday in the city.
Brendan
McPhillips, Biden’s Pennsylvania state director, pointed to the fact that
upward of 90 percent of eligible Philadelphians are registered to vote:
"We haven’t seen numbers like that in decades."
But many
Democrats are also deeply concerned about what they said is Trump’s attempt to
steal the election in Pennsylvania. Democrats expect Trump’s campaign may
challenge mail-in ballots that arrive up to three days after Nov. 3., which the
state Supreme Court said must be counted if they are postmarked by Election Day
or there isn’t a “preponderance of evidence” they were sent afterward, a ruling
that the nation’s highest court left in place for now.
A
Republican official told reporters Friday that “if it’s really close, to be
frank, these ballots are going to become a point of contention.” Biden’s
campaign does not think the late-arriving ballots will tilt the election — or
that such a challenge would be successful.
Shapiro,
the state attorney general, echoed that sentiment.
“Past is
prologue. Every single legal fight Donald Trump has started with us, he’s lost
and we’ve won,” he said. “And if he wants to pick another fight and try and
stop ballots from being counted, then that one, too.”
Anita Kumar
contributed to this report.
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