Why Republicans Wait to the Last Minute to Get Pennsylvania
By now, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have begun their final swings through the states that will decide the presidential election next Tuesday. Of the seven major swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — Pennsylvania is the biggest prize of all, with 19 electoral votes, and both the Harris and Trump campaigns are targeting it heavily.
“Pennsylvania is the epicenter of the electoral college,” says Tiffany Carlock, an activist and organizer who has worked in Pennsylvania several times. “You don’t win the election without winning it. It’s not impossible, but we know based on history that if you win it, the likelihood of you winning the election is pretty damn high.”
Pennsylvania’s centrality in presidential politics is nothing new. The state¹ is for Democrats what Ohio is for the Republicans — with the exception of Harry Truman, every Democrat who has won the presidency since the end of World War II has carried Pennsylvania, as well as three who have lost it (Hubert Humphrey, Al Gore, and John Kerry.) This is in large part because of the support of Black voters in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (Allegheny County), the liberal suburbs surrounding those counties, and the manufacturing towns with a strong union presence in what’s known as the “T,” the area of the state sometimes derisively referred to as “Pennsyltucky.”
Republicans have tried in vain to capture the state since then, but until 2016, Pennsylvania has only gone their way in landslides — Eisenhower both times, Nixon in ’72, Reagan in ’80 and ’84, and George H. W. Bush in ’88.
Following George W. Bush’s consecutive losses in the state, Republicans developed a new strategy for Pennsylvania — wait until the very last minute and make it Ground Zero for their presidential ambitions. This strategy failed John McCain and Mitt Romney, and it appeared to be failing Donald Trump at first — until he snatched the state from Hillary Clinton and with it, the presidency. Why this happened has as much to do with the blue-to-red shift of those rural counties as it does the effectiveness — or lack thereof — of the two parties’ strategies.
In the final month leading up to the 2008 election, John McCain’s presidential campaign made a blitzkrieg through Pennsylvania, where he and running mate Sarah Palin made 29 stops, including one rally together.
This strategy was borne out of necessity: the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15 and the economic crash that followed tied his hands behind his back. The knots got tighter at the beginning of October, when the campaign conceded Michigan to Barack Obama by pulling their ads. The only way forward was through Pennsylvania.
“There are three and only three possible conditions in which a swing state exists at the end of a presidential campaign,” says former John McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt. “The field is either narrowing, static, or expanding for you. The decisions to travel are always a function of that. So if you’re the campaign that has seven formulas to get to 270 electoral votes versus the campaign that has only one formula, and that formula makes it clear that Pennsylvania is a required state, then what you wind up doing on a presidential race is effectively running a governor’s campaign.”
Even then, Schmidt did not have confidence in the strategy. “I knew from September 15 on that we didn’t have a pathway to victory,” said Schmidt. “All of that campaigning was a function of the fact that even though the situation in Pennsylvania wasn’t great, it was even worse in Michigan.”
But, Schmidt continues, focusing on Pennsylvania could help down-ballot candidates amidst a tough fight. “If you are the candidate,” Schmidt says, “then you have to run through the T because your failure to do so may cost some congressional, Senate, or governor candidates a faction of a percent that determines victory.”
Geographically, the T (a.k.a. Pennsyltucky) stretches from the bottom of the Mason-Dixon Line up to the top of the state and to the northwest and northeast corners, shaped like a T if you carve out the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia metro areas. The T encompasses blue counties such as Lehigh and Lackawanna, and red counties like Adams, home to Gettysburg. It’s also home to manufacturing towns like Scranton, Allentown, and Pottsville, steel-and-coal towns that have seen jobs move overseas over the past several decades.
The T and Philadelphia regions are virtually tied for a plurality of the state’s votes: in 2008, 41% of the state’s vote came from Philadelphia and 39% from the T; in 2020, they were each at roughly 40%. Typically, Republicans run stronger in the T than they do in Philadelphia given that the T counties are Whiter, and Philadelphia’s base of Black voters come out strong for Democrats. (The Pittsburgh metro has trended redder in recent years, though Allegheny County remains a Democratic stronghold.)
Still, running up the margins in the T can present a challenge for Democrats. “If you asked the people at the last Democratic National Convention if any of them knew that most schools in Pennsylvania are closed the first day of hunting season, what do you think would be the reaction on their faces?” he asked. “Do you think anyone in that room has any frame of reference to relate to that culturally?”
Of the McCain campaign’s 29 stops, almost half of them were T counties, with Palin taking on the majority of T stops while McCain focused on the southwest and southeast Pittsburgh and Philadelphia areas. Given the ramifications of the financial crisis and the populism of the moment, McCain pivoted to a populist economic pitch, using Joe the Plumber (a.k.a. Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher) as an example of the kind of American who would be affected by Obama’s tax policy. McCain also ran a costly ad campaign in Philadelphia, then the fourth-largest TV market in the country due to its overlaps into southern New Jersey and Delaware, spending as much as $1.3 million on advertisements in one week alone.
All this proved an ill fit for a man who up to that point had campaigned largely on his foreign policy experience. “McCain had no interest, and could not connect whatsoever at all, on the economy,” Schmidt said. “On economic issues, the winning coalition after September 15 all broke for Barack Obama.”
Obama, who had the freedom to spend his resources in states like Florida and North Carolina, made fewer appearances in Pennsylvania during the final month. On Election Night, he won decisively in the state, flipping several red counties for the first time in decades. He lost the T by only 4%, carried the Pittsburgh metro by 1%, and the Philadelphia metro by 28%, winning 84% of the vote in Philadelphia County alone.
MSNBC anchor and Pennsylvania native Chris Matthews summed it up best: after the network called the state for Obama, he said, “the McCain campaign’s strategy for victory has crashed.”
Obama barely contested Pennsylvania in 2012, making no appearances in the state in the month leading up to the election (though Joe Biden made one in Penn Valley, located in staunchly blue Montgomery County.) Part of this was because the state did not have a competitive down-ballot election: Democratic Senator Bob Casey Jr. defeated his opponent, Tea Partier Tom Smith, by nine points. Another was that, like in 2008, Obama felt so confident about his chances there that he had the freedom to campaign in states like Ohio, and could send surrogates like Bill Clinton to Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, the Republicans spent the final week of the 2012 campaign targeting Pennsylvania. Although nominee Mitt Romney only made two appearances in the state during that time — one in Morristown, located in Bucks County outside Philadelphia, and another in Pittsburgh on Election Day — Republicans expressed confidence that the state would fall their way.
This struck commentators as a bizarre maneuver, since Obama’s lead in the RCP average at that point in the campaign was 3.8. “What took so long?” Steve Kornacki, then at Salon, asked. “It would have made sense for Romney to target these states…early in the race, to invest in TV ads, devote personal campaign time, and — perhaps most important — to build real campaign infrastructures. Instead, he and his campaign and its super PAC allies are essentially mounting an effort from scratch.”
Post-election analyses later revealed that Romney’s internal polls led the campaign to believe they would win, but the polls themselves were based on flawed data suggesting that the electorate would be older, less Black, and less Latino than it ultimately was.
Looking at the data in Pennsylvania though, Romney improved on McCain’s performance in every county in the state, flipping five blue counties from 2008 red, including Elk County, which every Democrat who won the White House had carried since FDR in 1944. Romney also defeated Obama by 1% in the Pittsburgh metro counties, while improving on McCain’s performance in the T counties by 4%.
Trump did not make the same mistakes in Pennsylvania that Romney did: in the final six weeks of the 2016 campaign, he appeared in the state 10 times, and Pence 14 times, with one joint appearance in King of Prussia, in the Philadelphia suburb of Montgomery County. Half of Trump and Pence’s appearances in the state were in T counties, three of which they flipped — Erie, Northampton, and Luzerne.
Luzerne, a county off of the once coal-and-anthracite giant Scranton, has been subject to much post-2016 scrutiny. Once a bellwether county for the state, Luzerne has seen many jobs move overseas. According to an Economic Innovation Group study, the county’s job growth was “below average” for other “left-behind” counties in 2023, and has fewer jobs now than it did in 2019. Trump won the county again in 2020.
“A lot of areas of Luzerne felt like they’d been left behind,” says Jessica Brittain, a lifelong Pennsylvanian and a political organizer for Action Together NEPA, a progressive organization that mobilizes voters in Luzerne and other counties in the northeast part of the T. “Folks heard something in Trump’s message that spoke to them in 2016.”
Brittain says that in retrospect, she saw warning signs that Trump could win. During a trip to the Bloomsburg Fair in Columbia County, “I saw all the Trump merch and people walking around excited about Trump. I remember thinking at the time ‘ugh, gross,’ but then when I really thought about it, it should have been a bigger red flag for me. I get that it’s a Republican county, but this kind of thing was so prevalent, and a lot worse than I thought it was.”
During those last six weeks, Clinton only appeared in Pennsylvania eight times, every time in a county that Democrats have carried in every presidential election since 2004. Her running mate, Tim Kaine, made seven appearances, two of them with Clinton, all in counties she carried. Obama only appeared at the final rally in Philadelphia the night before the election.
“People thought Hillary was a shoo-in to win,” says Carlock, “and I think she may have gotten a little too comfortable,” Carlock says. “Trump had large rallies in Pennsylvania in 2016, and that helped him. He paid attention to the White voters, especially the blue-collar voters, and gave them the attention they were looking for.”
One of Trump’s largest rallies was in Wilkes-Barre, the county seat for Luzerne, on October 10th. In his book The Forgotten, a study of Luzerne, Ben Bradlee Jr. writes that Trump’s October 10th rally in Wilkes-Barre had been packed to the gills. “The crowd was more economically diverse than the one in April,” he writes, “still primarily blue-collar, but with plenty of middle-class and some upper-middle-class residents.”
Joe Biden made an appearance in Wilkes Barre a few days after Trump’s. When Biden saw videos of Trump’s rally, he said to himself “son of a gun, we may lose this election.” Trump won Luzerne by 20 points.
In the end though, it is hard to say whether Trump would have won Pennsylvania, and the election, without the last-minute decision by then-FBI Director James Comey to reopen the investigation into Clinton’s email server, which shifted the focus from him to her.
“In a race defined by negative energy, the race is about is the person who’s losing,” says Schmidt. “The race was about Trump, who was losing until the very end, when James Comey made it about Clinton. That’s why she went down.”
“I think everyone understood the assignment after 2016,” says Brittain.
Since then, Pennsylvania Democrats have taken the lead in fundraising, organizing, and most importantly, winning. In 2020, Biden won the state back from Trump, flipping Erie and Northampton Counties back to the Democrats. In 2022, Josh Shapiro won his election for Governor in a landslide, flipping Luzerne and four other Trump counties blue, and carried Senator John Fetterman into office on his coattails.
Pennsylvania Democrats and progressives have done this through organizations like Brittain’s Action Together NEPA, which consolidated progressive organizers in the northeast to become a 365-day-a-year operation. “We build our network all-year round, every single year, with a bunch of people who live here so that we’re not just swooping in to run a campaign for a couple of months. That did not exist in 2016, and it’s grown consistently in every cycle since then.”
Organizers also say that dissatisfaction with Trump has moved the needle towards Democrats with key constituencies, including independents and White voters. “Trump didn’t have a record to run on in 2016,” says Carlock. “Now he does, so Kamala is doing to him what he did to Hillary, saying, ‘how can you trust him?’”
Although the Trump campaign will host several events in Pennsylvania this week, including two today, apart from his rallies, the campaign has little organizing presence in the state. “No one has become more passionate about Trump in Pennsylvania except for his die-hards,” says journalist Magdi Jacobs, who lives in the Pittsburgh metro area. “Trump could win, but there is no evidence of Trump becoming more popular than in 2020, or 2022, when Shapiro cut into MAGA numbers in every county.”
Jacobs adds that Republicans outreach in the state is not working. “I’ve gotten like, 12 flyers this past week, all paid for by Republicans, and I’m a lifelong Democratic voter” she says. “However, my husband is White working class with a high school diploma, wasn’t a regular voter for many years, and he’s received nothing from them. If the Trump campaign has all this information, why are they targeting me and not someone like my husband, who from a demographic perspective is a possible Trump voter?”
All this gives Carlock a great deal of confidence about Harris’s chances in Pennsylvania. “I think Trump is seeing that Harris is on the ground, there’s a lot of people canvassing, and she’s having a lot of rallies, so he wants to compete,” says Carlock, “but he lacks groundwork and outreach. In Pennsylvania, ground game wins.”
[1] Technically Pennsylvania is a commonwealth, but I’m not that pedantic.
