Jimmy Zumba, a conservative Latino activist, was volunteering for the Trump campaign in Reading, Pa., in October when he saw them, spreading out by the dozens in the neighborhoods around the city. They were canvassers for the Harris campaign, and there seemed to be legions of them. “It was an army, I tell you,” he said.
In the months leading up to last Tuesday’s election, both campaigns went all in on Pennsylvania, long assumed to be the tipping-point state in a close race. They poured money into the state, saturating the airwaves with ads and staging rallies or appearances in virtually every corner of the commonwealth. But what was supposed to be a key Democratic advantage, particularly in an election that many thought would be decided by a percentage point or perhaps even less, was the ground game.
“They had more money and more resources and more people,” Mr. Zumba said. “To be honest, I was pretty concerned.”
Vice President Kamala Harris did win Reading, a Latino-majority city in the heart of Trump-supporting Berks County, but she took in several thousand fewer votes than Joe Biden had four years earlier when he carried the city — along with the state, and the election.
Ultimately, the movements that decided the election were less tactical than tectonic: a broad dissatisfaction with the state of the economy and a deep unease over immigration and border security. Ms. Harris lost ground compared with Mr. Biden in 2020 in nearly every part of the state — in deeply red and deeply blue counties, in Latino-majority cities, in Pittsburgh, in Philadelphia and even in the suburban counties in the state’s southeastern corner that were supposed to form a Democratic firewall.
The results in rural counties were in some ways even grimmer for Democrats. After years of precipitous decline, many Democrats thought the party must have reached electoral rock bottom in those places. The Harris campaign emphasized narrowing its margins of defeat even in the reddest counties, if only by a point or two. Campaign offices were opened in small towns where they had never been before, and volunteers poured in by the busload. As it turned out, the bottom for Democrats in rural Pennsylvania fell even further.
All of this does not mean that the Harris-Walz ground game did not work; it may have worked exceptionally well under the circumstances.
The 2024 presidential race was notably closer in Pennsylvania and in other swing states than it was in neighboring states where there was no active campaigning. While Mr. Trump improved on his 2020 performance by more than 10 percentage points in New York and New Jersey, he moved the needle in Pennsylvania by only a little over three points.
“The difference between the swing states and the rest of the country suggests that the Harris campaign benefited from kind of optimal campaign effects,” said Lara Putnam, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied the Democratic grass-roots organizing that proliferated in Pennsylvania after the 2016 election. “That was still not enough to counteract the broader factors.”
Campaign veterans generally believe that good field programs can push up vote totals by a percentage point or two, which can be decisive in a tight race. Even the best field operation, though, is not expected to hold off an electoral wave.
Professor Putnam said that academic research on the value of campaign field operations was still unsettled but that they were clearly most effective in lower-level races, like elections for school boards or state legislatures. She pointed out that while Republicans had a big night in statewide races in Pennsylvania last Tuesday, the Democrats held their slim majority in the state House of Representatives, a sign that ground-game campaigns had succeeded at the district level even in a deeply unfavorable political environment.
Still, on the eve of last Tuesday’s vote, when the presidential race appeared to be a dead heat, the asymmetry in the two sides’ ground games was making some Republican officials in Pennsylvania nervous.
“The Democrats have always had a better get-out-the-vote infrastructure than the Republicans,” Sam DeMarco, chairman of the Republican Party in Allegheny County, said on the weekend before Election Day. That edge was even more pronounced this time, he said. “I mean, she raised a billion bucks, right?”
Even so, he and other Republicans insisted that the political fundamentals were on their side, arguing that discontent with the status quo and the enthusiasm for Donald Trump would outweigh the expansive Democratic ground game. This theory appears to have been correct: Repeatedly showing up at people’s doors and pressing them to vote does work on the margins, said Albert Eisenberg, a Republican strategist in Philadelphia, but it was not enough to overcome a broad and deep dissatisfaction in the electorate.
“You can only do knock-and-drag if you have a message that people like,” he said.
Republicans did not cede the field altogether. In the year leading up the election, they cut the Democrats’ statewide registration advantage by more than half, largely through the efforts of party activists and local party officials. In Bucks County, in the Philadelphia suburbs, that effort began in February and reached a milestone in July when Republicans took the lead in county registrations for the first time in more than 15 years. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Bucks since 1988.
There were also broadly successful efforts to encourage Republicans to vote early and to reach voters who might approve of Mr. Trump but did not usually go to the polls, some of which were financed by Elon Musk.
For all that, though, people in both parties agreed that on-the-ground organizing in the state was, for the most part, lopsided in the Democrats’ favor.
“The Republicans, they really didn’t have a ground game,” said Tom O’Brien, the chair of the Democratic Party in Lancaster County.
Hundreds of Democratic volunteers knocked on thousands of doors in the county, meticulously checking lists and revisiting the homes of those who had not yet voted. On the eve of Election Day, weary but anxious volunteers in Lancaster County said what Democrats said in other parts of Pennsylvania: They had done everything that they could do.
All of that work did have a demonstrable effect. In contrast to many other counties in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, the Harris campaign’s performance Lancaster County was not significantly worse than the Biden campaign’s in 2020 — Trump won there once again by around 16 points.
But it also illustrated that there are limits to what even the most ambitious canvassing operation can accomplish.
“Maybe there’s something to learn from that,” Mr. O’Brien said. “You’re still going to have a ground game. But I’m not sure it has to be knocking on doors eight or nine times.”
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