Vice President Kamala Harris brings her presidential campaign to Northeast Pennsylvania for the first time today and to a county that for decades had a lot more Democrats than Republicans.
Former President Donald Trump, a Republican, changed that. He won Luzerne County resoundingly in both his previous campaigns for the White House, though by less in 2020 than four years earlier.
More significantly, Trump spurred a shift in voter registration. In November 2015, five months after Trump entered his first presidential race, Luzerne had about seven Democrats for every four Republicans (about 45,000 more Democrats).
As of Monday, voter registration was almost even with 352 more Democrats than Republicans.
That’s the historic backdrop as Harris arrives for her second local public appearance, a Wilkes University gymnasium in Wilkes-Barre.
The event is also invitation-only and in a smaller venue, the McHale Center, than the Trump’s Aug. 17 visit to the Mohegan Arena at Casey Plaza. Crowd size will likely matter less than Harris just showing up.
Just showing up is the real point.
Harris last visited the region as President Joe Biden’s running mate the day before the 2020 election. An Oakland, California native, she stumped in bitter cold outside the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776 union hall in Jenkins Township.
Trump won Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes against Hillary Clinton, but in this visit, Harris will try to take a step toward repeating Biden’s 2020 victory. Biden won Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes, partly by reducing Trump’s winning margin in almost every county he won against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
For example, Trump won Luzerne by 24,237 votes in 2016, but by 22,056 in 2020. That’s a 2,181-vote and 5-percentage-point smaller win than 2016 in Luzerne. Biden earned 12,000 more votes than Clinton.
“Those voters saw Biden as a little bit more moderate than they currently see her (Harris),” said Berwood Yost, the director of the Center for Opinion Research and the Floyd Institute for Public Policy at Franklin & Marshall College. “So, I think she's going there (Luzerne and similar Trump counties) because she thinks she needs to tamp down the (Trump) margins in … those counties.”
Except for a bus tour through Beaver County in southwestern Pennsylvania just before the Democratic National Convention, Harris has spent most of her time in Pennsylvania’s more populous and strongly Democratic counties or cities.
“It’s Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, it’s the Johnstown-Altoonas, it’s the Greensburgs. That's where she's got to make up votes,” Republican political consultant Vince Galko said. “She's going to do fine in Philadelphia and the suburbs. She'll do fine in the city of Pittsburgh and some of the other cities in the state, but she has to win over these blue-collar Democrats that have that are leaving the Democratic Party in droves right now.”
Statewide, the Democratic voter registration advantage has dropped to about 350,000 voters, about a third of the margin in 2015.
Starting with former Gov. Ed Rendell more than two decades ago, winning Democratic statewide candidates have relied on piling up huge margins in Philadelphia, its four major collar counties and Allegheny County (home to Pittsburgh) as well as places like Lackawanna, still reliably Democratic despite erosion there.
“Well, I think you know that we're, in Pennsylvania, sort of the darling of the ball when it comes to presidential elections,” said J.J. Abbott, a Democratic strategist who works for groups supporting Harris. “We're the largest swing state with the most electoral votes in a state that typically will sway one way or the other, and it's been incredibly close the last two presidential elections.”
Clinton mostly repeated that in 2016 but lost to Trump anyway as he peeled off enough votes in Democratic bastions — Clinton’s Philadelphia winning margin was significantly smaller than Barack Obama’s for example — and dominated Republican ones.
With polls showing the race here extremely tight, Harris can’t let that happen again. Yost said Harris has solidified her base in the larger cities and needs to expand it.
“So, what you've got to really do is get out to those places where there are still some movable voters and try to at least get some of those voters to not overwhelmingly support the Trump ticket,” he said.
Kevin Munoz, Harris’ primary campaign spokesperson, said she must compete everywhere in the Keystone State.
“In our view, because of the historic fundraising that we have seen since the vice president announced her candidacy, we get to have the fortune of competing across every part of the battleground states that are going to decide this election,” he said. “And so that means, of course, will be competing in the core areas like Philadelphia, but we're going to continue to cut our margins in areas that traditionally vote Republican.”
It’s generally agreed Harris can’t win the White House without winning Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes. Democrats have won the state and lost presidential elections (Al Gore, 2000, John Kerry, 2004), but no Democrat has won the presidency without winning Pennsylvania since Harry S. Truman in 1948. Back then, Republicans substantially outnumbered Democrats. Trump’s 2016 victory included Pennsylvania.
“Well, I think you know that we're, in Pennsylvania, sort of the darling of the ball when it comes to presidential elections,” said J.J. Abbott, a Democratic strategist who works for groups supporting Harris. “We're the largest swing state with the most electoral votes in a state that typically will sway one way or the other, and it's been incredibly close the last two presidential elections.”
That’s why both candidates have spent so much time here and they or their surrogates will keep returning.
Before the debate Tuesday in Philadelphia, Harris hunkered down in a Pittsburgh hotel for five days to prepare. Counting the debate prep and the debate as separate stops, Wilkes-Barre will mark her 12th state visit since February.
Trump has visited eight times this year, including the Butler rally where he was almost assassinated and the Mohegan Arena rally that sparked a social media debate about its crowd size.
The candidates and allied groups are also pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into television advertising alone in Pennsylvania.
So far, the candidates and their allies have bought or reserved television airtime worth more than $270 million, the most of any state, according to figures from National Public Radio, WVIA’s parent network. Democratic groups: $149.9 million. Republican groups: $120.6 million.
In the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton television market, it’s Republicans, $23.1 million, Democratic, $16.7 million.
Abbott thinks advertising will only marginally matter because so few voters remain undecided.
“But I think what's kind of the bigger overall effort is how do you kind of drive the narrative,” he said. “I think the phrase I've been using lately is sort of like, it's so much about this election feels, about the vibe, right? How are people feeling about the state of the world? How are they feeling about the future? Which candidate makes them feel kind of optimistic and hopeful for the future?”
For Harris, honing the local vibe happens in person today.
