Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on September 13. | Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
PENNSYLVANIA — Ahead of November, both political parties have made a similar bet: that they can boost their odds of winning key swing states by going on offense in places they don’t normally compete.
For Republicans, that means building on the 2020 trends that saw their candidates, led by Donald Trump, make inroads among a swath of working-class voters of color, especially in urban centers. For Democrats, that looks like holding down GOP margins of victory in rural regions and accelerating changes in suburbs.
With just a few weeks left until Election Day, the key to making these strategies work may be the ground operations each side has built up to make the case to new, undecided, or persuadable voters. To get a better picture of what this looks like, I teamed up with Today, Explained producer Miles Bryan to examine the ground game and the pitches Republicans are using to win over Black and Latino voters in Philadelphia, and that Democrats are using to turn out low-propensity or undecided Democratic and independent voters in rural and suburban areas like Lancaster County.
The side best able to do this may end up reaping the biggest prize of 2024: Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes and the presidency.
Republicans have a clear message, but a shambolic operationEarly in September, Miles and I drove up to North Philadelphia. We had received word that a “Black Voters for Trump” bus tour would be making a few stops in the city as part of a five-state swing to motivate and mobilize Black Republican voters. The first stop of the day would be at a cheesesteak takeout in Nicetown, a predominantly Black neighborhood.
Organized by the Black Conservative Federation, one of the main Republican-aligned groups campaigning with Black voters on Trump’s behalf, the tour was meant to drill down on the central kitchen-table pitches Republicans have been using to take advantage of trends in election polling and political surveys: namely, that Democrats’ hold on Black voters seems to be weakening.
National polls still show Democrats winning the lion’s share of this segment of the electorate, but also find Trump increasing his level of support from 2020. Black Republican party identification has also been increasing among the youngest segment of this electorate, and though Vice President Kamala Harris appears to have reconsolidated support from Black voters compared to President Joe Biden’s now-defunct reelection campaign, she’s still not hitting his 2020 margins.
In Nicetown, Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, one of Trump’s key Black surrogates, told us he thinks this disaffection is being driven by economic nostalgia and frustration with immigration and crime.
“Black people are sick and tired of being sick and tired, man,” Donalds said. “I’ve been in North Carolina, been in Wisconsin, been in California, here in Philadelphia, obviously in Florida, Texas — it doesn’t matter. The story remains the same.”
Plenty of Black and Latino voters, he said, don’t trust Democrats to handle the nation’s economy, to lower prices, or to improve daily life — and when they compare their finances today to life before the pandemic, they can’t help but wish for a change. It’s a pitch I’ve explained previously for Vox, and it sounds like a compelling message — but it’s hard to persuade people if no one shows up.
When the tour bus pulled up in front of Max’s Steaks, it arrived at a nearly empty scene. There were no crowds, a few local reporters, and just a solitary Trump sign, nestled on a chair near the shop’s entrance. Plenty of passersby heckled the BCF staffers and volunteers that began to talk to customers, but eventually Donalds and other surrogates did meet some receptive ears, like Sharita White, a Black woman living in Kensington — a rougher part of Philadelphia hit hard by heroin addiction and the fentanyl crisis.
“I’m in a neighborhood that I don’t want to be in, but if Trump gets in his chair that can change. I might [be able to] move,” White told us. “I need to survive. And these streets of Philadelphia, it seems like they’re turning into New York now. Everything is high here. People can’t even afford a water. I don’t know too much about politics, but the only thing I know, my income’s changed. And if I need that man to get into the chair to fix my income, I’m all down.”
White is the kind of voter Trump and Republicans are hoping will turn out in big cities like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Phoenix, Detroit, and Milwaukee, which net Democrats the big leads they need to win swing states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In Philadelphia, at least, there are signs that these more diverse working-class neighborhoods are becoming more competitive. But receptive voters don’t mean much if you don’t have a way of activating them on Election Day.
We noticed that no one took down White’s information or checked her registration status, or logged her in any system to try to follow up with her and get her to vote. The same dynamic unfolded at the second stop of the tour, a soul food restaurant in the middle-class Germantown neighborhood.
This disconnect between potentially gettable voters and the organizing work needed to turn them out is a recurring problem with the GOP’s ground game. Grassroots and local work is primarily being run by outside groups and PACs like the Black Conservative Federation, not the Republican Party. These groups are hiring canvassers, doorknockers, and staffers who register people to vote at Trump rallies, but in many cases rally attendees are from out of state. This reliance on outside groups has raised flags among longtime Republican operatives, who warn that outreach and resource distribution by outside groups may be inefficient, and that local volunteers and longtime activists often know their neighborhoods and how to persuade voters better than paid staff do.
Democrats’ renewed ground game aims to lose by lessDemocrats’ 2024 ground game stands in stark contrast to the GOP’s shortcomings, and could allow them to reverse a trend that has locked the party into close races in cycle after cycle.
Specifically, Democratic support in rural communities has collapsed in recent decades, in some cases allowing Republicans to overcome the big leads Democrats rack up in cities and their surrounding suburbs.
In 1996, for example, Bill Clinton won 1,100 rural counties. By 2008, Barack Obama won 455. And in 2020, Joe Biden won just 194, leading to a rural Republican romp that put Donald Trump within striking distance of victory yet again.
So ahead of 2024, Democrats set out to stem this bleeding. Biden and his cabinet spent much of 2022, 2023, and early 2024 visiting rural communities to talk up the massive investments being made through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. While he was still the presumed Democratic nominee, Biden and his campaign began to set up field offices in, organize, and visit rural counties that Trump had won, and when the time came for Harris to take the reins in late July, the party had built up extensive ground operations in the kinds of rural places they need to lose by less.
That dynamic holds true in North Carolina, where Harris’s campaign has invested heavily, and in Georgia, where Harris went on a rural bus tour shortly after becoming the Democratic nominee. And it’s true in rural Pennsylvania, parts of which Harris and Walz toured this week. The Biden and Harris campaigns have opened 50 coordinated Democratic campaign offices across the state and deployed 350 staffers — including 16 offices in rural counties that Trump won by double digits in 2020.
Miles and I drove out to Lancaster County in southern Pennsylvania to visit the county Democratic headquarters in Lancaster City and see this operation in action.
The county has historically been a Republican stronghold, but that’s quickly changing, Stella Sexton, the vice chair of the Lancaster County Democrats, told us.
“People move here for jobs for a bunch of reasons,” she said. “But the other piece of the story, and one that I think gets overlooked, is that our college-educated population is growing and it’s not just younger folks moving in with college degrees. It’s also retirees.”
Trump won the county in 2020 by more than 44,000 votes, but in the 2022 midterms, Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat then running for his first term, got close to flipping the county, losing by just 4,000 votes.
“The bottom line is the reason the Harris campaign — Biden and now Harris campaign — made this investment here is not necessarily because we’re going to flip it this cycle. It may take one more cycle to outright flip the county, but … the pickup in margin that they can get here is very important to winning the state,” Sexton said.
And the key to this margin-narrowing strategy is the field operation Democrats have built, both to encourage rural Democrats that may feel alone or forgotten by past campaigns and to contact persuadable or undecided voters.
“There were always Democrats around, but I don’t know that in our suburban or rural areas that the Democrats realized there were other Democrats as their neighbors,” Sexton said. “What I’m noticing is that folks aren’t embarrassed or hiding it. People are proud to be Democrats, and they’re proud to represent that to their neighbors.”
That vibe was there earlier on, according to Sexton, even before Biden dropped out, but it’s only accelerated since Harris became the nominee. Since then, more volunteers have begun to get involved in canvassing. The switch created “excitement and urgency among people who might have sat back and waited until October to get involved,” Sexton said.
We joined a canvasser going out to various suburban and working-class neighborhoods to see the Democratic pitch in action. Democrats we encountered were excited about Harris, anxious about Election Day, and happy to be reminded to vote. But undecided voters and independents were still not sure. One, a middle-aged union electrician named Ziggy, told us he didn’t have strong feelings about Harris, but was still upset that both parties had put up “somebody that’s over the retirement age” and showed “signs of slipping.”
We watched as the Democratic canvasser, a nurse named Laura, cycled through a few policy issues and topics to see if she could find a way to persuade Ziggy. Talking about January 6, family-friendly policies like the Child Tax Credit, and climate change didn’t really land, but when they got to reproductive rights and abortion bans, Ziggy seemed ready to listen— particularly about how certain anti-abortion policies could impact care for other pregnancy-related medical issues.
By the end of the conversation, he remained undecided about Harris, but did not seem like he’d back Trump, Laura told us. “And we will circle back to him,” she said, while marking him down in the party’s vote-canvassing app.
The whole exchange demonstrated the newfound hope that Democrats feel about competing in places that usually go red, and the advantage of having a highly organized in-house operation for turning out your own voters and persuading undecided voters. Democratic organizing efforts are also boosted by Harris’s improving favorability ratings, a significant cash advantage, and improving economic vibes nationally.
Despite that edge, Pennsylvania remains a dead heat in polling averages and election forecasts. The presidential election may end up coming down to a few thousand votes in the state. And if that happens, the difference may well be the strategies each campaign is now pursuing.
Miles Bryan contributed reporting to this article.
vox.com