WILKES-BARRE: Republican Donald Trump said Saturday he believes Democrat Kamala Harris will be easier to beat than President Joe Biden, even as some polls showed her ahead in the Nov. 5 presidential race.
Former President Trump held a rally Saturday in Wilkes-Barre in the northeastern part of Pennsylvania, a state that is shaping up to be a turning point in the campaign. Vice President Harris will conduct a bus tour of western Pennsylvania beginning in Pittsburgh on Sunday, ahead of the start of the Democratic National Convention on Monday in Chicago.
“I think it will be easier to beat her than him,” Trump said, referring to her as a “radical” and a “lunatic.”
Pennsylvania was one of three Rust Belt states, along with Wisconsin and Michigan, that helped power Trump's surprise victory in the 2016 election. President Joe Biden, who grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, handed the trio back to Democrats in 2020.
All three states are true bellwethers: the only US states that have voted for the eventual winner of the presidential race in every cycle since 2008.
With 19 electoral votes of the 270 needed to secure the White House, compared to Michigan's 15 and Wisconsin's 10, Pennsylvania could be the biggest prize in this year's election.
A statistical model created by Nate Silver, an election forecaster, estimates that Pennsylvania is more than twice as likely as any other to be the “tipping point” state — the one whose electoral votes lift Harris or Trump to the top.
Harris’ entry into the race after Biden ended his reelection campaign last month has upended the contest, erasing the lead Trump built during the final weeks of Biden’s shaky campaign. Harris leads Trump by more than two percentage points in Pennsylvania, according to the poll-tracking website FiveThirtyEight.
Flooding the airwaves with ads
Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by about 44,000 votes, a margin of less than one percentage point, while Biden won by just over 80,000 votes in 2020, a margin of 1.2%.
Both campaigns have made the state a top priority, flooding the airwaves with ads. Of the more than $110 million spent on advertising in seven battleground states since Biden dropped out in late July, roughly $42 million was spent in Pennsylvania — more than twice as much as in any other state, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing data from the tracking site AdImpact.
Democratic and Republican groups have already booked $114 million in ad time in Pennsylvania from late August through the election, more than double the $55 million booked in Arizona, the next highest total, according to AdImpact.
Harris' campaign said Saturday it planned to spend at least $370 million on digital and television ads nationwide between the Labor Day holiday on Sept. 2 and Election Day.
The battleground states, considered critical to winning the election, also include Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada and Georgia.
According to new polls released Saturday by the New York Times, Harris leads Trump among likely voters in Arizona (50% to 45%) and North Carolina (49% to 47%) and narrows the former president's lead in Nevada (47% to 49%) and Georgia (46% to 50%). A Trump campaign pollster said the poll results underestimated support for the Republican candidate.
Trump and Harris have each visited Pennsylvania more than a half-dozen times this year. Trump was injured during an assassination attempt at his rally near Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13.
Trump has said he will return to Butler in October and also announced he will deliver a speech on the economy at a campaign rally in York, Pennsylvania, on Monday. Trump's running mate, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, will also give a speech in Philadelphia that day.
Trump's trip Saturday to Wilkes-Barre in Luzerne County is aimed at consolidating support among white, non-college-educated voters who carried him to victory in 2016. The working-class county voted Democratic for decades before leaning heavily toward Trump in 2016, mirroring other similar regions across the country.
Trump won Luzerne in 2020 by 14.4 percentage points, a smaller margin than his 19.4-point victory in 2016. With Biden out of the race, Trump likely sees room for gains in this area of the state, said Chris Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College.
“This is the kind of place where Trump has a lot of strengths,” Borick said, referring to the northeastern region of the state. “Marginal gains in a region like this could certainly have some impact on his ability to win back Pennsylvania.”
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will make several stops in Allegheny and Beaver counties on Sunday, the campaign said. The tour is the first time Harris, Walz and their spouses have campaigned together since their first rally as presidential candidates in Philadelphia earlier this month.
Pennsylvania was at the center of Biden’s victorious 2020 strategy in the Rust Belt states: limiting Trump’s margins among white, working-class voters while building majorities among suburban voters and driving higher turnout in urban areas with large Black populations.
Harris' campaign is pursuing a similar “win big, lose small” strategy, targeting big margins in the cities and suburbs of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh while limiting losses in smaller counties like Beaver County, where Trump won 58% of the vote in 2020.
