Vice President Kamala Harris is campaigning through Pennsylvania’s conservative interior on Friday, aiming to shave a few percentage points off former President Donald J. Trump’s winning margins in parts of the state where he remains popular.
She stopped first in Johnstown alongside Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat who for months has urged first President Biden’s campaign and now Ms. Harris’s to spend time with Pennsylvania voters outside the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh regions, which are both heavily Democratic.
In Johnstown, Ms. Harris told voters at a cafe and bookstore that she was “feeling very good about Pennsylvania because there are a lot of people in Pennsylvania who deserve to be seen and heard.” She added, “That’s why I’m here in Johnstown.”
Her campaign has made clear how much it values winning Pennsylvania, which with 19 electoral votes is the most valuable battleground state. Ms. Harris has spent six of the last seven days making public appearances in Pennsylvania, and later Friday she is scheduled to make her second of the day, at an evening rally in Wilkes-Barre. Her campaign has devoted nearly 25 percent of its television ad spending through Election Day to Pennsylvania, according to the media-tracking firm AdImpact. Mr. Trump’s likeliest path to victory involves flipping Pennsylvania, which Mr. Biden narrowly won in 2020.
Harris campaign aides have said that she must win over some swing voters in red counties, thus lowering her margin of defeat, in order to claim the state. While Mr. Harris was in red territory in Pennsylvania on Friday, Mr. Trump held a news conference in deep-blue California, a state he lost in 2020 by more than five million votes and was certain to lose again.
“I feel very strongly that you’ve got to earn every vote, and that means spending time with folks in the communities where they live,” Ms. Harris said on Friday in Johnstown. “That’s why I’m here, and we’re going to be spending a lot more time in Pennsylvania.”
Johnstown is in Cambria County, about 60 miles east of Pittsburgh. The county is overwhelmingly white and working-class. In 2008, Barack Obama barely won there. But by 2020, the political realignment brought about by Mr. Trump was complete. He beat Mr. Biden with 68 percent of the vote. Luzerne County, where Wilkes-Barre is, had a similar trend. Mr. Obama won the county by nine percentage points in 2008, but Mr. Biden lost Luzerne by 14 points in 2020.
The Harris campaign said on Friday that 16 of its 50 offices in Pennsylvania were in rural counties Mr. Trump won by double digits in 2020. That on-the-ground presence is meant to limit the damage in parts of the state the vice president is unlikely to win.
Last month, Ms. Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, spent a day campaigning in conservative-leaning Beaver County outside Pittsburgh. Mr. Walz, a former football coach, represented a rural Minnesota district during his time in Congress, and Democrats believe he can help them with voters outside major cities.
Some Pennsylvania Democrats had hoped that Ms. Harris would choose their state’s popular Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate over Mr. Walz. Despite not being picked, Mr. Shapiro spoke at the Democratic National Convention and has campaigned frequently for Ms. Harris.
On Friday, he Mr. Shapiro is scheduled to appear alongside the vice president at her rally in Wilkes-Barre. On Sunday, he will headline the Harris campaign’s bus tour on abortion rights when it stops in Philadelphia.
Mr. Fetterman was not among those calling for Mr. Shapiro to be selected as Ms. Harris’s running mate. He and the governor have clashed over pardons and engaged in what is mostly a one-way feud, with Mr. Fetterman trying to shun Mr. Shapiro. They have barely appeared at campaign events together for Ms. Harris.
And when they have, as at a rally in Philadelphia last month where Ms. Harris announced her selection of Mr. Walz, Mr. Fetterman did not stand when Mr. Shapiro spoke.
The post Harris Visits Red Areas of Pennsylvania, Hoping to Cut Into Trump’s Edge appeared first on New York Times.
