The keystone swing state back in play in the US election
Anyone who believes that Donald Trump’s near assassination won’t influence voters clearly haven’t spoken to the people of Pennsylvania.
A transformed and deeply unpredictable American election campaign has started after weeks of rolling shocks, with the near assassination of Donald Trump, Joe Biden quitting the race and the anointing of a younger contender in Kamala Harris.
Across the US, voters are struggling to keep up with the dizzying events. In the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania, those who have moved fast have “Harris 2024” signs on their front lawn, but most still have “Biden Harris 2024” because the merchandise cannot keep up with the drama in Washington.
Biden’s decision to quit the presidential race to be replaced by his Vice-President, Harris, has not only transformed the election, it also has utterly re-energised both ordinary Democrats and Trump’s MAGA Republicans, fuelling deeper divisions between their competing visions for America.
This new campaign has quickly become an ugly slugfest of name-calling, with Trump savaging Harris as a “radical left lunatic” who is “dumb as a rock” and unfit to serve, while Harris has slammed Trump as a fraud, a liar, a cheater, a predator and an abuser of women.
This extraordinary degradation of the contest and the candidates on both sides is a Trump-era phenomenon – a stark comparison to the civility of the 2008 Barack Obama-John McCain and 2012 Obama-Mitt Romney contests. But the utter disdain that Trump and Harris have for each other is translating on the ground to similar passion, hostility and division among voters.
On a road trip through Pennsylvania, a bellwether state that has been won by 10 of the past 12 presidential election winners, Inquirer has encountered numerous voters who say they believe the Trump-Harris election is a pivotal turning point for the country. They don’t see this contest – between starkly different candidates – as an ordinary presidential election. Rather, they see it as a referendum on the future of America.
“It would be a catastrophe if she (Harris) was running this country,” John Finnegan tells Inquirer as he buys books for his three-year-old grandson Steven in Doylestown, north of Philadelphia.
“She will be worse than Biden was, she has already been classified the most liberal senator that ever was,” says Finnegan, who runs a trucking company.
“She is the border tsar and the borders are wide open. I mean, Stevie Wonder can see that the borders are purposely left open for the purpose of soliciting illegal (Democrat) votes because they’ve lost the black and Hispanic vote, so how do they fill that gap?
“The powers that be in the woke squad that’s behind this whole Democrat party right now, it’s so far left, is something I have never seen in my lifetime, and I am 67 years old.”
Finnegan says the contrast with Trump’s presidency is striking. “Four years ago we had low interest rates, we were able to afford housing, crime was down, the borders were secure, you could go on and on. Trump supported a strong military. The police are at the lowest morale I’ve ever seen and I have a lot of family members who are in the police department.
“The sanctuary cities are atrocious. You have illegal migrants staying in the hotels while veterans are sleeping in the street. Under Trump this is not going to happen.”
For many Republicans such as Finnegan, Harris is their worst nightmare.
They see her as a creature of the Democrat left who will be more interested in climate change, identity politics and race and gender issues than the bread-and-butter needs of working families.
By contrast, Democrats have a spring in their step since Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee. Liberal America, backed by a flood of donors, has moved quickly as one to embrace her candidacy. Even the warring factions of the Democratic Party, the left and right, have united solidly behind Harris. You can almost hear their collective sigh of relief that Biden is gone.
Suddenly Democrat voters feel that Harris gives them a chance of an election win against Trump when they had all but abandoned hope for victory with Biden as their candidate.
“If you asked me who would win (a few) weeks ago I would say it was going to be Trump, but with Kamala I think everyone came together, it didn’t splinter the Democrat party, and I think now she has a great chance to win,” risk management worker Stacey Molenari, 58, tells Inquirer as she sits on the front porch of her home in Bucks County.
“It’s better to have a younger person and we are excited about Kamala. Her background as a prosecutor, I like that, and being a woman and being successful means a lot to me. I think she is very well spoken, very intelligent.”
Molenari, a swinging voter who “mostly” votes Democrat, believes Harris will be a much more challenging candidate for Trump than Biden was.
“I think he (Trump) sees a more difficult challenge now. They had campaigned on Biden’s age and now we have a woman, a black woman who has a Jewish husband, (so) I think his digs (at her) are not going to play very well.”
Some rusted-on Trump voters interviewed by Inquirer say they believe Trump will easily defeat Harris but many say the change of candidates has rattled their confidence about a Trump victory.
“It worries me, I think it’s going to be a lot closer,” electrical engineer Tim Lennon, 49, says as he stands near his Trump sign in Montgomery County in southeastern Pennsylvania.
“I would say it is 60-40 for Trump now, but if it were Biden I think it would have been a sound defeat (for Biden). There are people out there I think who will vote for her just because she is a woman (And) being younger could make a difference, it could invigorate people. A lot of people were running away from Biden to Trump and they may come back now that Kamala is the candidate.”
The key to winning Pennsylvania, where three-quarters of the population is white, is to appeal to working-class voters in the suburbs. The big cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are solidly Democrat while rural and regional parts of the state are solidly pro-Trump, but the suburbs across the state remain a battleground.
In 2016, suburban men and women propelled Trump to a narrow 48.2 per cent to 47.5 per cent victory over Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, while in 2020 Biden reversed that for a narrow 50 per cent to 48.8 per cent win over Trump.
No one knows how some of the dramatic events of recent weeks will play out in the state.
The attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, on the outskirts of Pittsburgh in the western part of the state, may rally more Pennsylvanian conservatives to vote. Meanwhile in the northeast, Biden always boasted about his upbringing in the working-class Pennsylvania town of Scranton, but now that he is not on the ticket will this help Trump win that region?
Pennsylvania is also America’s second largest natural gas-producing state after Texas and Republicans are attacking Harris’s endorsement of a fracking ban during her failed 2019 presidential bid. Harris later walked back her position on fracking and no longer supports a ban, so it is unclear if this will be a factor in the state in November. But conservatives say her 2019 position reveals her broader liberal instincts.
Polls show Trump’s approval ratings jumped after the assassination attempt and the lovefest of the Republican National Convention days later. Harris’s polls also have jumped as she enjoys a honeymoon period with voters, but we won’t get a clearer picture of the race until the polls start to settle in a few weeks.
An Emerson College Polling/The Hill survey in Pennsylvania conducted after Harris replaced Biden as the candidate showed Trump leading in the state by 48 per cent to 46 per cent. But a Susquehanna Polling and Research survey released this week shows Harris’s popularity is rising, finding that she now leads Trump in Pennsylvania by four points, 47 per cent to 43 per cent.
Those who believe that Trump’s near assassination will not influence voters should talk with Dan Borochaner, 28, a computer science student from Bucks County. Borochaner tells Inquirer he will vote for the first time in his life because he was so outraged by the attempt on Trump’s life.
“I’m going to vote for Trump this year because the assassination attempt was just too much,” he says. “I believe in freedom of speech and the right to bear arms and I think Kamala Harris wants to take that away, so I am all for Trump. As far as I am concerned Kamala is a fake, she is only there as a diversity hire to make it seem as if (Democrats) were inclusive of everybody.”
At this early stage, voters are judging Harris without yet knowing her policies.
In her public comments so far she has pitched herself as a progressive candidate and a champion of the middle class who will protect families, healthcare, social security and universal freedoms, including democracy and abortion rights. But she has not yet explained how she will achieve her agenda.
To some voters, it does not matter, so long as she defeats Trump.
“The biggest thing for me is that we don’t elect Donald Trump,” Blair Elliot, 57, the owner of Siren Records in Doylestown, tells Inquirer. “Everything else can work itself out but Donald Trump is very scary.”
Elliot says he would have voted for Biden, and while he was initially “nervous” about the switch to Harris he now believes it’s “a good thing because it has energised the whole process and people are thinking there is some hope here”.
“I just sense the energy changed overnight.” he says. “Kamala can pick and choose what policies she is interested in. She doesn’t have to take on all the baggage of Biden. I think it’s just a fresh start.
“Also, I like the fact she has some very liberal points of view and also some more conservative attorney general/prosecutor-type points of view.”
Some, such as first-time voters Sophia Pagano and Grace Shepherd, both 19 and from Bucks County, will vote for Harris because she is a woman and much younger than Biden and Trump.
“I’m very excited to see a new woman in power, definitely new, definitely exciting,” Pagano says.
“I feel like we’ve had a lot elderly people in that office for too long and it’s time for someone younger to take over.” Says Shepherd: “I think it’s something that we, as a country, have been coming towards, having a woman in power. I think she did really good as Vice-President and I think she would be really good as president.”
Pagano says she could never vote for Trump because “he is a criminal, he really would be a dictator if he was in again and I don’t want to see that in the country that I am in”.
Shepherd is more moderate: “I feel like he did well in the business aspect during his leadership, but he definitely divided the country.”
Margot Bradley, a retired midwife, believes Harris will motivate young Americans to vote when they might not have bothered with Biden as the Democratic candidate.
“I hear from my friends that their kids – 25 to 35-year-olds – are actually registering to vote and getting excited,” she says. “It has made a huge difference because we are no longer talking about two old white men.”
Bradley says the biggest issues for her are abortion rights, democracy and the possibility of “correcting” the conservative-majority Supreme Court.
“I think Donald Trump is really a threat to democracy,” she says. “He has absolutely no regard for the fundamentals that make the country safe and a place where I want to live.”
Trump supporters interviewed by Inquirer most commonly name the economy and border security as the most important issues for them while Harris supporters cite abortion, democracy and generational change as their main motivators.
“I’m voting for Trump because I am in construction and under Trump the economy was great,” Dan Blomgren, 62, a father of two, tells Inquirer.
“People had money then. They could afford to buy houses. But now my phone is not ringing. People are worried about the prices of everything, food and gas.
“And what about Kamala Harris and the border? It was an open border. And her record on crime? She was all for letting out murderers and rapists and (members of) Antifa when it was burning down the country. She is just not ready for prime time.”
When asked if she is glad Harris has replaced Biden, Molly Sypek, a mother of four, tells Inquirer: “That’s like asking if I would rather walk through hot coals or shards of glass. Harris had one of the most leftist voting records in the Senate, you know, more green deal junk, they’re not going to let you drive a car with gas, not going to be allowed to have a fire in your house, use a stove.”
“Look at the border. She killed it, didn’t she? How many illegals are here now getting benefits from American taxpayers?”
Sypek says she loves Trump because of his personality and because he created the conservative-majority Supreme Court that overturned Roe v Wade.
“I am a Catholic first and foremost, so abortion has to go. I don’t believe in a woman’s right to choose and I’m a woman and I have four children myself.
“I like Trump’s bombastic personality. (He’s) not like all these stupid politicians. They are so polished. I like that he is just loud himself, I like that he can’t be bought (because) he’s got his own money and I love that the left hates him – that makes me like him even more.”
For Meghan Budden, 43, a mother of two from Bucks County, abortion rights are the most important issue in the election.
She likes that Harris has been active in highlighting that the Republicans’ position on abortion is to the right of mainstream American public opinion, making it a potentially important vote winner for the Democrats.
“Roe v Wade, the right to choose (are the most important),” she says. “To hear these stories of women going to other places to get (abortions) – it’s a scary world.
“The things that Trump stands for, I feel like we are taking so many steps backwards compared with how we’ve been as women fighting for our rights.
“Kamala was a prosecutor, she’s a woman, she’s black. I think there are so many awesome things about her, and she is younger. I think she is definitely a better candidate.”
But can Harris win? It’s the one question that seems to stump most people with whom Inquirer speaks. This new-look presidential race is so full of unknowns, with a younger black progressive woman facing off against the mercurial veteran populist street fighter in Trump.
“Honestly, I’m scared,” Harris supporter Budden says. “I don’t know. I really, really, really hope it’s not Trump, but I am worried about it because people who are into him are into him. He has a strong following. But I do think with Kamala involved we have a better shot at winning.”