Vice President Kamala Harris‘ campaign laid out what it sees as her path to victory in Pennsylvania in a memo shared exclusively with NBC News ahead of Monday night’s rally in Bellwether Erie County.
The Harris team pointed to polls showing the Democratic nominee having made gains in the battleground state’s suburbs — which it dubbed “our own mini ‘blue wall’” in Pennsylvania — compared to President Joe Biden’s 2020 performance there.
The campaign also emphasizes that a win involves boosting its popularity with educated suburbanites, including those who have voted for Republicans in recent elections. Nearly 160,000 voters in the state cast ballots for former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley in the GOP presidential primary this year — with her numbers proving stronger among suburban voters — even after she already dropped out of the race against former President Donald Trump.
“The Harris campaign’s path to win Pennsylvania capitalizes on Trump’s unprecedented weakness in the suburbs,” the memo, which also highlighted the campaign’s focus on Haley voters, reads. “We have flipped the suburbs from red to blue since Trump won them in 2020, and we have also grown our support with women and tripled our support among white college educated voters in the state.”
The campaign cited September surveys from The Philadelphia Inquirer/New York Times/Siena College and Marist College that both showed Harris up 6 points over Trump in the suburbs — a notable improvement from Trump’s 3-point victory over Biden among suburban Pennsylvanians in 2020, as exit polls showed. (The result in both of the surveys last month fell within the margin of error).
Recent surveys have shown the overall race in Pennsylvania to be within the margin of error for polls, with an October survey from Quinnipiac University showing Harris up 3 points Inquirer/Times/Siena finding Harris up 4 points, and The Wall Street Journal having Trump up 1 point.
It’s the most sought after battleground on the map, offering the most Electoral College votes among the hotly contested states, and the most frequent campaign destination for both Harris and Trump.
Trump’s “weakness in the suburbs means that for him to actually win, he has to double and triple down on his base in the reddest counties in the state,” Brendan McPhillips, a senior adviser to Harris’ Pennsylvania campaign, said. “And so we are going on offense and going to places where he thinks he has a strength and competing.”
The campaign highlighted events that Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have held in red counties like Johnstown, Lancaster and Rochester. It also detailed investments made in red parts of the state to “cut margins and stop Trump’s only hope of victory,” noting that 16 of its 50 statewide campaign offices are in counties Trump won by more than 10 points in 2020.
Recent presidential elections in Pennsylvania have been exceptionally close. Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by just over 1 percentage point. In 2016, Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by an even slimmer margin.
“With most polls showing this to be a margin of error race, we are also going on offense with rural voters to cut into Trump’s margins — a critical advantage as Trump’s team lacks the ground game capacity to conduct persuasion and mobilization campaigns simultaneously,” the Harris campaign memo reads.
McPhillips said that improving on Biden’s margins in those counties by just 1 to 2 points will effectively cut off Trump’s path to flipping the state red.
“We’re eating into his margins in a way that cannot sustain a victory,” he said. “And that is how we’re going to beat him, and it’s how we’re able to play offense on so many fronts.”
The campaign highlighted that as of Sunday it had knocked on more than 1 million doors, including 250,000 this past weekend, across the state since Harris replaced Biden atop the Democratic ticket. It also referenced its 50 offices and 450 on-the-ground staff.
Harris has spent far more time in the western part of the state, including rural areas, than she has in the Philadelphia market, which McPhillips said is in part to help introduce her to voters who may be less familiar with her.
For Trump, this month saw Billionaire mogul Elon Musk ramps up his political engagement in the state through his America PAC, which is working to turn out the vote for Trump.
McPhillips dismissed the potential impact of that effort.
“They can’t scale up to the level that we’re at,” he said. “Even with Elon Musk’s money, you can’t spend enough money to scale up an operation to match ours. It’s too late. You needed to start in March, February, January, and they’ve just been phoning it in for so long. It’s going to be close, for sure. We’ve always been planning for it to be that way. But that planning manifests itself in the fact that we actually had a plan, not a concept of one.”
The Trump campaign said the Harris campaign is papering over a problem it’s facing in Pennsylvania cities — particularly Philadelphia, the most vote-rich locale for Democrats in the state.
“They can point to the suburbs, but they’re losing ground in places like Philadelphia,” a Trump campaign official said. “It’s exactly why (former President Barack) Obama what just pleading to African American men to vote for her. They’ve sounded the alarms, and they know they’re losing.”
The Trump campaign also pointed to Republicans having significantly cut into the Democratic voter registration advantage in the state while flipping Bucks, Luzerne and Beaver counties to a Republican registration edge. It further highlighted reports of working-class voters in Philadelphia embracing Trump.
Kush Desai, the Trump campaign’s Pennsylvania spokesman, highlighted Obama’s visit as a sign the Harris team was scrambling. “An Obama visit isn’t going to convince Pennsylvanians to vote for another four years of open borders, rising prices, and disaster at home and abroad,” Desai said.
In its memo, the Harris campaign said it believes it will be able to “at least match” Biden’s support in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia from his victory in those cities four years ago. It went into greater detail on its efforts to reach Black voters in the state, including the staff it has dedicated to outreach and engagement and its events focused on Black voters.
Last week, Obama offered unscripted remarks during a Pittsburgh campaign stop in which he said his understanding of the race is that “we have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running. … (T)hat seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.”
Seeking to speak directly to Black men, he pushed for undecideds to get behind Harris, saying her record deserves their support.
“This is excellence on display, and it needs to be rewarded,” Obama said.
Speaking with NBC News, Pennsylvania state Sen. Vincent Hughes said he could “understand the frustration” Obama expressed.
“Maybe the tone should have been a little bit different,” he said. “But let’s be really clear about this. Let’s get to the substance of what he said. There’s nothing in Donald Trump’s background, career, anything that should lead any citizen, let alone Black men, to vote for him. He’s not a successful businessman. … He was sued for discrimination in housing.”
Hughes said the Harris campaign is going to hit their targets both with Black men and with voters in Philadelphia, adding that he has seen a flood of campaign activity there recently that has outpaced what Democrats were doing in 2020 during the worst of the Covid pandemic.
“It’s going in the right way for the vice president,” he said. “Look, for a woman and for a Black woman, it’s always harder. It’s not fair, it’s not right, but it’s always harder. Maybe if we break through with this election, we can finally smash that glass ceiling and not make it so hard for the next one.”
