Tag: the inside game

Rallies of serious electoral consequence aren’t usually held deep in a farm on Butter Road at 10 a.m. on a weekday. But last Thursday morning, in Lititz, Pennsylvania, a few hundred mostly older white voters gathered outside a barn covered in solar panels, clutching “Eagles Fans for Harris” signs, and swaying as they heard a parade of local Republicans reveal their support for Kamala Harris and their revulsion with Donald Trump. Jim Greenwood, who’d been recruited to run for Congress by Newt Gingrich three decades ago, diagnosed Trump with malignant narcissism and reassured anyone who worried that Harris was too liberal that Congress would have plenty of Republicans so she’d have to reach across the aisle. Speaker after speaker, including Georgia’s former Republican lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan, brought up John Kelly’s warning that his former boss is a fascist. Men in t-shirts identifying themselves as veterans nodded quietly next to guys in Teamsters hoodies and a grave-looking woman holding a “Republicans for Harris” sign as Georgia senator Raphael Warnock, the first Democrat to speak, declared the election would be a “moral moment in America” and a test of the country’s character. The crowd of a few hundred nodded and applauded politely, and lit up a bit as Warnock spoke.

But these voters were clearly waiting for the keynote speaker.

When Josh Shapiro stepped forward to the lectern, he seemed unsurprised by the volume of cheers, like he was used to it. Pennsylvania’s governor, dressed in a dark suit with no tie and black leather dress sneakers, thanked Duncan and Warnock for coming to conservative Lancaster County, talked up Harris’s economic agenda, and quickly pivoted to Trump. The ex-president, he argued, didn’t even have the baseline “level of respect that we try and teach our kids every day,” he said. “Donald Trump is constantly trying to create ‘others’ in our society, trying to separate people out.”

He celebrated the country’s and state’s recent economic gains, then built towards a patriotic crescendo, nearly yelling: “This is a great nation, and we should have leaders that want to lift us up, not tear us down! I’m proud to be an American and I want a president who’s proud of his nation!” He was clearly playing for the cameras at the back of the crowd, abutting a sprawling pasture, not far from a leftover cow pie. It was obvious that the voters who’d traveled to the out-of-the-way event on a working morning were likely already converted to the Harris cause, but his real audience was current and former Republicans who might be watching on the local news and may prove critical to delivering the state to Harris.

The final campaign stretch is proving to be a practically sleepless one for Shapiro, who was scheduled to criss-cross the state for in-person events and interviews for the remainder of the election. By the end of the week, he was slated for his 60th appearance for Harris since she became their party’s nominee three months ago, the vast majority of them in Pennsylvania, where he is unquestionably her top surrogate after falling just short of being selected as her running mate. It’s a strange position for Shapiro, who is still celebrated by Democrats for his blowout win in the governor’s race two years ago, but who is now a prominent face of a campaign that will likely be won or lost not on the airwaves, but with door-knocking and voter mobilization — operations over which he has no significant influence.

That morning, a poll conducted by Franklin and Marshall College, just 25 minutes away from the farm, also in Lancaster County, was the latest to call the Trump-Harris race an effective tie. For days I’d been hearing Democrats sigh that they wouldn’t be surprised if the state’s final margin ended up in the area of 20,000 votes, a quarter the size of Joe Biden’s historically tight win four years earlier. Yet those same Democrats all had the same reason for cautious confidence: the campaign’s 2 million door-knocks, its 50 offices and more than 475 staffers in Pennsylvania, compared to the mysterious absence of Trump’s ground game, which appears to have been largely outsourced to Elon Musk’s super PAC.

“Why am I optimistic, and why am I not worried about polls that show it to be a statistical dead heat? I think the groundwork has been laid more effectively by Kamala Harris,” Shapiro, 51, told me a few minutes after he left the stage in Lititz. “I think the Harris ground game is far more effective than Donald Trump in driving up the turnout, and I really do think at the end of the day, for those voters who are going to walk into the polls on November 5, they do not want to go back to the chaos of Donald Trump. All of those things combined are going to lead to a Harris victory.”

Shapiro has been at the center of the Democrats’ push from the start, but especially since Harris, who is far less familiar to Pennsylvanians, took over the ticket from Biden, a native son who represented neighboring Delaware in the Senate for decades. Shapiro’s blitz on TV and on the campaign trail was to support her candidacy, but also to pursue his own ambition to become her running mate, though he has kept at it even after Harris picked Tim Walz. Notably, he introduced Harris in Philadelphia when she introduced Walz as her veep candidate, and other tentpole moments followed: He was ubiquitous at her convention in Chicago the next month and was the first person in the spin room to declare victory for her after her debate with Trump in September. More recently, he addressed Harris’s top donors at their final retreat in Philly and joined governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tony Evers of Wisconsin on a bus tour through their states. But most of his campaign work has been less splashy. In addition to barnstorming, he has done more than 30 television, radio, and podcast interviews, including on local stations that have been featuring him for years but draw no national attention.

Harris’s Pennsylvania operation has been happy to rely on him to do public messaging, for obvious reasons. Most Democratic research shows that Shapiro is by far the most popular political figure they have in the state, and at least some suburban voters have been selecting his name on their ballots since he first won a seat in the statehouse 20 years ago. And the internal data also show that many voters perceive Shapiro as a moderate. His 15-point win in 2022’s governor’s race came partially thanks to Republicans who couldn’t stomach his far-right conspiracist opponent, Doug Mastriano. So Shapiro has married events like the one in Lancaster County with appearances on Fox News and the conservative WSBA radio in York.

Shapiro has been accused of copying Barack Obama’s speaking style, and he can sometimes come across like a walking Pennsylvania tourism ad. (At one point on Thursday, as we talked about what distinguishes his state’s voters, he started a sentence with, “This is an incredible, beautiful, wonderful tapestry of America right here in Pennsylvania.”) But in Lititz, his audience was rapt.

“This is a familiar-looking coalition for me. A bunch of Democrats — we got some Democrats in the house — and a bunch of like-minded Republicans and independents who are here as well. You all helped power me forward to give me the opportunity to serve as the 48th governor of this great commonwealth,” he told the crowd from the stage. Now, he continued, “this coalition is being called upon to again do the hard work of winning an election, yes, of helping us get stuff done in this country, yes, but of also saving the nation.”

Still, a few minutes later, off-stage, Shapiro cautioned against directly comparing this race to his last one. For one thing, it might raise expectations unduly in a contest likely to be decided by just a point or less. More specifically, Harris and Trump are known quantities in a race with a much higher likely turnout, and Shapiro is far from the point this time. If anything, some Pennsylvania Democrats say, he is risking his own standing by campaigning so aggressively for Harris given that he won more votes than Biden did when they were both on the ballot in 2020, with Shapiro up for re-election as attorney general. “It would be kind of easy to sit back, not really take a side, and preserve all his gains with Republicans and independents,” says Conor Lamb, the former Pittsburgh-area congressman.

But some longtime Democratic officeholders who’ve watched Shapiro’s rise aren’t so sure. In their eyes, he is a hyper-ambitious political operator who is probably happy to help, but who is also well aware that he could rise to the top of Democrats’ 2028 presidential lists if Harris loses but he maintains visibility in the most hotly contested battleground. This group has long been skeptical of Shapiro, who has occasionally clashed with colleagues in Pennsylvania, including Senator John Fetterman, who himself has appeared repeatedly for Harris within the state — but not alongside Shapiro. To this crowd, it’s gospel that Harris chose Walz over Shapiro not because of personal chemistry with the Minnesota governor or, as the rumor went, because of fear of backlash over Shapiro’s past positions on Israel and his Jewish faith. Rather, they thought he was ruled out because of her discomfort with Shapiro’s apparent ambitions to be president himself one day. Yet Shapiro and Harris have in fact kept in touch since she chose Walz.

There’s little doubt among top Democrats in Pennsylvania that Shapiro does have a unique connection to the state’s voters, but they also believe that it would be stupid to rely on him too much. “I always try to caution people to remember that though he won by a lot, it’s unfair to assign him a burden to try to deliver something outsized,” says Lamb. It’s lost on none of these people that for all his popularity, when he won two years ago Shapiro still received fewer votes than Trump had when he lost Pennsylvania in 2020.

Despite Shapiro’s political stature, he has had relatively little to do with the day-to-day direction of Harris’s statewide campaign. Unlike in states such as North Carolina, where Harris’s campaign is mostly run by advisors to Democratic governor Roy Cooper, the governor’s inner orbit and the Harris campaign’s state leadership have little overlap. (Many of her Pennsylvania campaign aides have worked in recent cycles for other statewide leaders, like Fetterman.) As a result, he has stayed out of a recent spat that has shadowed the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania.

Philadelphia is the heart of the party’s vote in the state, and one place where Harris will need blockbuster turnout. Some operatives close to the mayor, Cherelle Parker, have groused about Nikki Lu, Harris’s state director who comes from Pittsburgh, specifically blaming her for organizational shortcomings like insufficient yard sign distribution and campaign literature not being translated into the right language. In recent days, some Democrats critical of Lu have been whispering about how not long ago a bus of Chinese Americans fluent in various native languages arrived from New York to canvas Philly’s Chinatown — only to be dispatched to largely Black neighborhoods on the north side of the city.

To hear people close to the Harris operation tell it, these complaints are overblown — and more about specific Philadelphia operatives wanting jobs and credit than any fundamental strategy or expertise problem. (The doors of Chinatown did not need another round of knocking, some Democrats told me this week, so the entire bus saga had been exaggerated in importance.) More than one local Democrat pointed out that many of the complaints — published most prominently in Politico and the Inquirer, but also in the Wall Street Journal — appeared to come from allies of Mayor Parker, and that two of Harris’s in-state leaders managed mayoral campaigns against her last year. Parker herself has appeared with Harris as recently as this week and Harris is slated to spend Sunday campaigning across Philadelphia yet again. Still, Harris supporters have remained concerned about turnout in Philadelphia and this fall Lu’s team brought in a handful of longtime Philly-based strategists, and in recent weeks Paulette Aniskoff, an Obama confidant who ran the state’s field program for him in 2008, joined up to help manage the get-out-the-vote push.

Many Democrats have largely chalked the Philly issues up to what they call organized chaos. “Let’s not forget that in a relatively short period of time we’ve had to coordinate the Biden-Harris team, the Harris-Walz team, the Philadelphia Democratic City Committee, the Pennsylvania State Committee, and a number of former President Obama’s highly successful top team members,” says former mayor Michael Nutter.  “On the best day, coordination is always a challenge. But at the end of the day, we always get our shit together.”

Still, the example of 2016 — when Hillary Clinton became the first Democratic nominee to lose the state since 1988 — is never far from anyone’s mind, and everyone on the ground working for Harris believes, as Nutter put it, “the candidate who wins Pennsylvania becomes the next President of the United States of America.” This is not technically true, but it is basic electoral math. The state’s 19 electoral votes are the most of any of the seven battlegrounds, and both parties see their candidate’s likeliest path to victory running through the commonwealth. This has been the case for well over a year, but this fall, the race has become completely unavoidable there: Every suburban street is lined with yard signs and every highway with political billboards, every screen is inundated with campaign ads proclaiming Trump unfit for office, Harris a California extremist, and both candidates the savior of the American economy and your children’s future. When Obama was ready to return to the campaign trail this month, the Harris campaign made sure his first stop was Pittsburgh.

But there is no single closing message about Trump for Pennsylvania’s Democrats, perhaps because there can’t be when they’re trying to appeal to so many different kinds of voters who have so many different kinds of thoughts on the ex-president. A simple drive through the state reveals the diversity of messages. In Philadelphia, Richard Hooker Jr., the leader of the city’s Teamsters, considers Trump “a wild man trying to be a dictator.” But when it comes to turning out union members and mobilizing their families and friends in coordination with local Democrats, the labor activist, a UPS package handler and the first Black leader of his local, takes a different tack, telling them that Trump “is the ultimate employer, and he is very anti-worker.” He argues that “Your employer does not want you to have a pension, does not want you to have the right to strike, does not want you to have union wages, does not want you to have a contract. And neither does Trump.”

Shapiro suggested to me that he had yet another preferred approach. His own focus in the final days would be on genuinely undecided voters who are just now beginning to pay attention to the election in the first place. “We live and breathe this stuff, but a lot of folks are just tuning in and they want to know what she’s really like, what she’s really gonna do,” he said in Lititz. For these voters, Shapiro continued, the case against Trump has little to do with fascism. “I think if you’re undecided right now, you care about the future of this country, but you also care about what’s happening in your home, at your job, with your kids, and I want to make sure that there is a clear understanding with those folks about the clear contrast that exists between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump when it comes to those economic issues.”

Lancaster County, which is home to Amish country, is a prime example of the kind of Republican-heavy area where Harris has no real expectation of winning, but where she instead wants to minimize her margin of loss. (Trump won it by 20 points when he first ran and 16 points in 2020.) It’s a significant part of any responsible Democratic strategy in a state whose electoral geography has shifted rapidly in recent years. Both campaigns are spending big chunks of time and energy fighting for votes in the historically Democratic area around Pittsburgh that now skews red — an area where organized labor leaders had been close to Biden but where their rank-and-file has been less convinced by Harris. Meanwhile, though he has focused primarily on immigration and inflation, Trump’s campaign against Harris has also zeroed in on her past support for banning fracking, an important part of the state’s economy. (She has backed away from that position.)

Yet with such a tight expected margin, the campaign has spread far beyond traditional lines, both sides figuring that any small slice of voters could make the difference. Each party has courted the growing Puerto Rican vote around the state, including in mid-sized cities like Bethlehem, as Trump seeks to replicate the kind of inroads with Latino voters he’s seen elsewhere in the country. Harris has spent time in rural corners but has trained much of her focus on building her support in suburban areas, especially those where white women play a significant electoral role — even if they have tended to lean more conservative in previous years. Private polling in congressional races shows Harris taking advantage of a bigger than expected gender gap, largely thanks to her focus on abortion.

Democrats have put an extra emphasis on abortion in the counties around Philadelphia that represent a huge portion of the state’s overall vote. Delaware, Bucks, Chester, and Montgomery — Shapiro’s home base — have more than 2.5 million voters. In 2020, Biden overperformed in these counties, which saved him from slippage within Philadelphia. Now, Harris organizers and advertisers have been fanning out across the counties and saturating the local media market with messaging about Trump’s threat to abortion rights.

It’s Philly itself that still concerns some Democrats. Though Harris is still very likely to win it by a huge margin, many local officeholders remain on edge about turnout there being on a long-term downward trajectory, and how Harris will fare among Black men. Still, some strategists believe the agita about Democrats’ local operation are of the quadrennial anxiety variety rather than serious cause for immediate concern, and that a Harris victory would be the result of Philadelphians turning out in large numbers.

A few hours before we spoke, Shapiro had done an interview on a Philadelphia radio show with a large Black audience and showed up at a barbershop with Warnock. Shapiro has also spent time talking to Jewish Democrats about anti-Semitism, and he is a regular presence on Spanish-language radio in the state. “Any time I can have real, meaningful conversations with people who weren’t expecting to see me, who weren’t expecting to have the ear of their governor, you get for-real for-real from that, and that tells me a lot about the direction a campaign is going to go,” Shapiro said. “You get real talk.”

In Lititz, he was single-minded about trying to appeal to Republicans. Relentlessly on-message, he insisted that he’s just a good soldier, if an especially influential one. “I’ve worked hard to create a bipartisan coalition to get stuff done in Pennsylvania. Well, to win elections, and you see part of that coalition here, but also to govern effectively,” he told me. “So anything I can do to be able to say to independents, and in Republicans in particular, ‘Y’all trusted me, you gave me the keys to the office and I’m delivering for you, I believe Kamala Harris can do the same, so give her a shot” — I’m going to continue to do that, all over Pennsylvania.”

Shapiro and I were standing alone in a field with just his press secretary and a photographer. Across the field, a handful of voters were still staring over at us, hoping for selfies with the governor over half an hour after the event had ended. Warnock, who’d been at Shapiro’s side all morning, was already on his way back to Atlanta, where he’d meet up with Harris, Obama, Bruce Springsteen, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, and Tyler Perry for a rally with 20,000 Georgians.

Before she joined Warnock in Georgia, Harris spent the morning in Philadelphia. The next morning, as the Democrats were ironing out plans for Bernie Sanders to visit, Walz was scheduled to touch down in Philly himself. About 24 hours after that, it was the Republican ticket’s turn in the state: J.D. Vance was headed to nearby Harrisburg and Trump to State College. But both campaigns are now trying to be everywhere in the state, all the time. That night, not far from the field where Shapiro and I were standing, the Trump team would host its own Lancaster event — a “Make America Healthy Again” town hall in neighboring Manheim with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Phil.

As I drove away from the farm a few minutes after the event ended, I passed an Amish man driving a horse and buggy along the side of the truck-filled highway. He rolled past one Trump 2024 poster — not far from an array of signs accusing Harris of opening the border — turned his carriage away from a cluster of “Republicans for Harris” yard signs, and waited for a while for the traffic to slow down.