Philadelphia, the capital of Pennsylvania, will be the centre of the American political world on Tuesday. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris will present her number two candidate there in the afternoon in front of 10,000 people in a university basketball hall. What her campaign team hopes will be a highly visual crowd bathed in enthusiasm on television will be the starting signal for an intense five-day tour of the seven main swing states, those that really count in the November elections. At the same time, in another sports centre in the south of the city, the Republican candidate for vice-president, JD Vance, will promote his political platform at a parallel rally.
That Harris has chosen Philadelphia to launch her tour, already her campaign dance partner, and that Vance is there on the same day to give her the reply is, of course, no coincidence. If election campaigns can be compared to wars, what is being fought in Pennsylvania would be the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II: the most fundamental fight of the entire conflict, the most closely fought, the one that neither side can afford to lose. The one that will ultimately tip the result one way or the other.
This is due to the unique electoral system in the United States, in which the winner is not necessarily the presidential candidate who is most popular in the country, but the one who manages to get 270 votes in the electoral college. In this institution, each state has a certain number of votes based on its size and population. These votes are awarded en bloc (with exceptions in Maine and one district in Nebraska) to the candidate who wins there.
Most states traditionally align with one party or the other. Broadly speaking, the coastal states, the northern rust belt, Colorado and New Mexico vote Democratic; the Midwest and the South lean Republican. But neither bloc is enough to add up to 270 electoral votes. So the real deciders are the handful of swing states: this year, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania, the essential loot
Of all of them, Pennsylvania, the most populous, is the one that offers the best reward in votes, 19. An essential prize that both Harris and her Republican rival, Donald Trump, need to win at all costs to get the keys to the White House.
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The Democratic campaign has thrown everything it could into a state that Joe Biden, a native of the state who boasts of his working-class roots in Scranton, an industrial town, won by 80,000 votes in 2020, and which four years earlier had gone to Trump. Harris, her advisers recall, has already visited Pennsylvania several times. Democrats have invested in advertising and mobilizing volunteers.
In her search for a number two, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has been one of the favourites from the start. Because of his communication skills, his telegenic nature, his long record of achievements and a reputation as a moderate that balances the progressive aura of the former senator from California. But also because of his immense popularity in the State, 61% according to some polls, in which 42% of Republican voters approve of him.
Strategists estimate that the former state attorney general could scrape together a not necessarily huge but significant number of votes in his state that would tip Pennsylvania to the Democratic side. And with Pennsylvania, the electoral college.
But while Pennsylvania is the make or break of the electoral contest, both parties also need to target other states in play. Hence the tour by Harris and her number two through Eau Claire (Wisconsin), Detroit (Michigan), Durham (North Carolina), Savannah (Georgia), Phoenix (Arizona) and Las Vegas, Nevada. And Vance is imitating a similar route on the same days. Until Joe Biden’s resignation from re-election two weeks ago, Trump was pulling ahead in the polls in all of them. In some, like Nevada, with a substantial advantage.
Fifteen days after Harris took over from Biden, the tables seem to be turning. The vice president has closed the gap that her Republican rival had created in the polls, which now show a technical tie. Some polls give her an advantage in certain swing states. The most recent, published by the CBS television network on Sunday, gives the Democrat 50% of the vote and the Republican 49%.
According to this analysis, Trump is ahead of his rival in North Carolina, Georgia and Wisconsin; the two are tied in Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania; Harris is ahead in Nevada. This is data that his campaign welcomes with enthusiasm. Two weeks ago, in this same survey, Biden was six percentage points behind his opponent. The former president was winning in every swing state, and was closing in even in traditionally Democratic territories.
The enthusiasm generated by the changeover among Democrats has given Harris additional advantages: the tap of donations has been opened again and has become a gush of more than 300 million dollars last month, giving an advantage of more than 60 million dollars in the availability of cash in the Democratic coffers. An advantage that they plan to use in advertising investments in swing states, among other things. Added to this are the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who have signed up for the campaign: a total of 370,000 new pairs of hands, including 15,500 in Georgia, 21,000 in Arizona, 10,500 in North Carolina.
“In Nevada, Team Harris has 13 offices, while Trump has just one,” Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s director for the swing states, wrote in a memo. “In Pennsylvania, we have 36 coordinated offices, compared to Trump’s three. In Georgia, we have 24 offices, while Team Trump only opened its first office in June.”
In Georgia alone — a state that went for Biden in 2020 by just 12,000 votes, after a large mobilization of its large black community and a very young population that came from other states to take advantage of one of the most dynamic economies in the entire country — Harris’ candidacy has put into play 100,000 votes from people who until now were leaning towards the Republicans or did not plan to vote, according to the digital AxiosThe vice president and Trump both visited Atlanta and held massive rallies there just four days apart last week.
In Arizona, the Democrat has won a number of endorsements from mayors of border towns, including Mesa, a Republican city council. This strengthens her position on one of the areas where the rival party tries to attack her most insistently: immigration policy.
Of the seven swing states, North Carolina may be the most uphill battle for Democrats. It has only gone Democratic twice this century. But like Georgia, its demographic makeup is changing, with an influx of younger people from other states. The fact that the current number two, the very conservative Mark Robinson, is running as the Republican candidate for governor could also open up opportunities for Harris, her strategists say.
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