Politics
Little debate that Pennsylvania is key as Harris and Trump prep for Philly showdown
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — When Donald Trump and Kamala Harris meet onstage Tuesday night in Philadelphia, they’ll both know there’s little debate that Pennsylvania is critical to their chances of winning the presidency. The most populous presidential swing state has sided with the winner of the past two elections, each time by just tens of
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — When Donald Trump and Kamala Harris meet onstage Tuesday night in Philadelphia, they’ll both know there’s little debate that Pennsylvania is critical to their chances of winning the presidency.
The most populous presidential swing state has sided with the winner of the past two elections, each time by just tens of thousands of votes. Polling this year suggests Pennsylvania will be close once more in November.
A loss in the state will make it difficult to make up the electoral votes elsewhere to win the presidency. Trump and Harris have been frequent visitors in recent days — Harris plans to return on Friday — and the former president was speaking in Butler County on July 14 when he was the target of an assassination attempt.
The stakes may be especially high for Harris: No Democrat has won the White House without Pennsylvania since 1948.
Pennsylvanians broke a string of six Democratic victories in the state when they helped propel Trump to victory in 2016, then backed native son Joe Biden in the 2020 race against Trump.
“They say that ‘If you win Pennsylvania, you’re going to win the whole thing,’” Trump told a crowd in Wilkes-Barre’s Mohegan Arena in August.
Republicans are looking to blunt Trump’s unpopularity in Pennsylvania’s growing and increasingly liberal suburbs by criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of the economy. They hope to counter the Democrats’ massive advantage in early voting by encouraging their base to vote by mail.
Harris is looking to reassemble the coalition behind Biden’s winning campaign, including college students, Black voters and women animated by protecting abortion rights.
Democrats also say it will be critical for Harris to win big in Philadelphia — the state’s largest city, where Black residents are the largest group by race — and its suburbs, while paring Trump’s large margins among white voters across wide swaths of rural and small-town Pennsylvania.
The debate is set for the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The city is a Democratic stronghold where Trump in 2020 notoriously said “ bad things happen,” one of his baseless broadsides suggesting that Democrats could only win Pennsylvania by cheating.
Biden flipped Pennsylvania in 2020 not just by winning big in Philadelphia, but by running up bigger margins in the heavily populated suburbs around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. He also got a boost in northeastern Pennsylvania in the counties around Scranton, where he grew up.
Ed Rendell, a former two-term Democratic governor who was hugely popular in Philadelphia and its suburbs, says Harris can do better than Biden in the suburbs.
“There’s plenty of votes to get, a Democrat can get a greater margin in those counties,” Rendell said.
Lawrence Tabas, chair of Pennsylvania’s Republican Party, said Trump can make gains there, too. The GOP’s polling and outreach shows that the effect of inflation on the economy is a priority for those suburbanites, he said, and that the issue works in the party’s favor.
“A lot of people are really now starting to say, ‘Look, personalities aside, they are what they are, but we really need the American economy to become strong again,’” Tabas said.
Rendell dismisses that claim. He said Trump is veering off script and saying bizarre things that will ensure he gets a smaller share of independents and Republicans in the suburbs than he did in 2020.
“He’s gotten so weird that he’ll lose a lot of votes,” Rendell said.
Harris has championed various steps to fight inflation, including capping the cost of prescription drugs, helping families afford child care, lowering the cost of groceries and offering incentives to encourage home ownership.
Pennsylvania’s relatively stagnant economy usually lags the national economy, but its unemployment rate in July was nearly a full percentage point lower. The state’s private sector wage growth, however, has slightly lagged behind the nation’s since Biden took office in 2021, according to federal data.
Meanwhile, Democrats are hoping the enthusiasm since Biden withdrew from the race and Harris stepped in will carry through Election Day in November.
For one, they hope she will do better with women and Black voters, as the first female presidential nominee of Black heritage. Rendell said he is more optimistic about Harris’ chances to win Pennsylvania than he was with Biden in the race.
“I think we’re the favorite now,” Rendell said.
The debate takes place before voting starts — in Pennsylvania and everywhere else.
A national Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey conducted in July showed that about 8 in 10 Democrats said they would be satisfied with Harris as the party’s nominee compared with 4 in 10 Democrats in March saying they would be satisfied with Biden as the candidate.
There is some optimism among Pennsylvania Democrats even in Republican-leaning counties, including a number of whiter, less affluent counties near Pittsburgh and Scranton that once voted for Democrats consistently.
In Washington County, just outside Pittsburgh in the heart of the state’s natural gas-producing region, Larry Maggi, a Democratic county commissioner, thinks she will outrun Biden there.
Maggi is seeing more lawn signs for Harris than he ever saw for Biden, as well as more volunteers, many of whom are young women concerned about protecting abortion rights.
“I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I’m seeing people I’ve never seen,” Maggi said.
Democrats also hope there is a growing number of voters like Roy Robbins, a retired FBI agent and registered independent, who regrets voting for Trump in 2016. Robbins did so, he said, because he thought a businessperson could break congressional deadlock.
“He’s a liar,” Robbins said. “I think he’s totally devoid of any morals whatsoever. And you can quote me: I think he’s a despicable human being even though I voted for him.”
But Republicans have reason to be optimistic, too.
In the nation’s No. 2 gas-producing state, even Democrats acknowledge that Harris’ prior support for a fracking ban in her run for the 2020 nomination could prove costly. In this campaign, the vice president said the nation can achieve its clean energy goals without a ban, though Trump insists she will reverse course again.
Meanwhile, the Democratic advantage in the state’s voter registration rolls has steadily shrunk since 2008, from 1.2 million to about 350,000 now.
Republicans credit their outreach to younger voters, as well as Black, Asian and Hispanic voters.
“A lot of them tell us it’s the economy,” Tabas said. “And in Philly, it’s also the crime and safety in the neighborhoods and communities.”
Those gains have yet to translate into GOP wins as Democrats have beaten Republicans by more than 2-to-1 in statewide contests the past decade.
Daniel Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, chalks up the narrowing registration gap, in part, to “Reagan Democrats” who have long voted for Republicans, but did not change their registration right away.
One of those voters is Larry Mitko, a longtime Democrat-turned-Republican who lives in a Pittsburgh suburb.
Mitko, 74, voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, and was leaning toward voting for Trump in 2024 because of inflation and Biden’s handling of the economy before Biden exited the race.
That is when Mitko became sure he would vote for Trump.
“I don’t like the fact of how they lied to us telling us, ‘He’s OK, he’s OK,’ and he can’t walk up the steps, he can’t finish a sentence without forgetting what he’s talking about,” Mitko said of Biden.
Harris’ late entry into the race could mean that many voters are still learning about her, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania professor of communication who researches presidential debates.
More voters than usual may not be locked into a decision even as voting looms, Jamieson said, so this debate could make a difference.
___
This story first moved Sept. 8, 2024. It was corrected Sept. 8, 2024, to show the name of a prospective voter is Roy Robbins, not Ray.
___
Follow Marc Levy at twitter.com/timelywriter. Follow the AP’s coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.
Politics
Trump wants the Postal Service to radically overhaul mail voting. But ballots are already going out.
President Donald Trump’s controversial demands for the Postal Service to overhaul and monitor millions of mail ballots hit another snag on Friday, when North Carolina became the first state in the nation to start sending out ballots for the November election.
In March, Trump signed the initial executive order, which aimed to crack down on mail-in voting — which he regularly alleges without evidence is a vector for widespread voter fraud — and assert an unprecedented amount of federal control over the upcoming elections.
Under this order and the subsequent rule drafted by the U.S. Postal Service, the USPS would refuse to deliver ballots to states that failed to provide lists of eligible mail voters or did not adhere to an approved envelope design style.
Since then, the order has faced legal challenges, and it remains paused by a federal judge’s orders. But the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow the new rule to proceed — something current and former election officials from both parties say would be both a legal nightmare that oversteps the federal government’s traditional role in elections and a logistical one that is happening far too close to the November election to implement even if they agreed with it.
“Why the hell are you rocking the boat this late in the game?” said Stephen Richer, a former Republican recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, who has clashed with Trump allies for defending the security of the 2020 election.
Still, election officials are trying to project a sense of normalcy for voters, particularly in North Carolina, which serves as a test of whether established local election systems can operate normally amid intensifying federal scrutiny.
“I want to emphasize this point because there has been a lot of outside noise: Our county workers are ready,” Sam Hayes, a longtime Republican lawyer in the state and now executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said in a Thursday afternoon press conference.
He added, “All we can do is what we’re doing. … It is business as usual as far as I’m concerned.”
Despite the legal challenges, the Trump administration has continued to press the courts to let it proceed. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to lift an order from a Massachusetts judge which temporarily prevents the USPS from enforcing their rule. It is the second time the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to step in, after winning an earlier victory in which the high court dismissed an earlier hold on the rule as premature.
“The uncertainty is coming from a single activist judge who continues to try and obstruct President Trump from implementing commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans vote in American elections,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement. “These safeguards for mail ballots were proposed months ago giving election officials ample time to prepare for the 2026 election.”
The USPS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Election officials said that if the rule goes into effect this close to November, it would cause chaos and place added strain on the USPS and election officials. And an anonymous federal whistleblower said in a report circulated earlier this week by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) that the USPS was moving forward in a “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process” to try to implement the new system ahead of the midterms.
In the coming weeks, states across the country will follow North Carolina’s lead. Nine other states will begin mailing ballots in the next two weeks, according to a tracker from the National Conference of State Legislatures — with the biggest day for mailing coming 45 days before the election in mid-September.
“It would be so outrageous to try to let this go into effect. It’s hard to even imagine,” said Ben Hovland, a senior fellow for democracy at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress and former Democratic commissioner with the Election Assistance Commission who was fired by Trump in July.
He added, “It would be a break-glass moment for our democracy.”
The rule would require meticulous changes to ballot handling and tracking practices that Hovland said are impossible to implement before Election Day in about two months, effectively disenfranchising millions of voters.
“Ballots are printed. Envelopes are printed. You can go on and on with all the practical reasons that show that implementing something like this at this time is not feasible,” he said.
Richer said he doubted the new rules would bring about more security. Even if the USPS received lists from the states, according to the postal service’s final rule, it would not do any additional vetting of the list, Richer said.
“It’s just that the mail ballots have to be on that list, and I don’t see what added value for election integrity that does,” he said.
He added, “It creates a lot of administrative burden, and I think it creates a lot more opportunity for error.”
While a decision looms in the courts, election officials and experts cast doubt on the likelihood of the rules going into effect before November. A more pressing issue, they said, is the confusion and uncertainty surrounding mail-in ballots, which could subvert and change the behaviors of voters.
“It makes things seem messy or difficult, and it can dissuade people from participating or coming out to vote,” Hovland said. “It certainly also helps establish a pretext to make bad faith claims about election results.”
Hovland said that while none of these claims of voter fraud are backed up with facts, they could cause Americans to lose faith in the voting process.
Still, some current officials contended they were well-prepared for whatever happens — and that they’d be able to communicate effectively with voters who have become increasingly buffeted by dramatic rhetoric about the once-unmentioned nuts and bolts of actually running an election.
“There’s always a lot of noise around elections, that’s not going to change, and it can be hard to differentiate that from what’s actually going on on the ground,” said Jason Tyson, director of external affairs for the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
As Election Day approaches, Tyson and election officials said they urge voters to check their registration status and make a plan to vote.
He added, “I think we’ve got a really well-trained, solid staff who are ready, and who have gone through all of the checks and balances and points of contact that we need to do to get to where we are.”
Missouri’s Supreme Court suspended a congressional map that state Republicans drew last year that would have netted the GOP an additional House seat, likely keeping the seat in Democratic hands this November.
The court ruled unanimously on Thursday that a referendum petition organized by Democrats to put the new congressional maps to a vote was incorrectly deemed insufficient by Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, and ordered that the gerrymandered map be put to a vote in the fall.
Voters will ultimately decide the fate of the new lines in November. But in the meantime, it cannot be in place for the midterms, meaning Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s original Kansas City-based district will likely stay in Democrats’ hands this fall.
Construction crews could begin the excavation process for what will be President Donald Trump’s massive 250-foot-tall arch in as soon as the next two weeks, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced on Thursday.
The monument — which will be erected in a traffic circle at the head of the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac River, coming between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery — has generated controversy as concerns emerged about the design and traffic congestion during construction.
The arch would take two to three years to construct on the proposed schedule, according to documents released in June.
“We are pleased to announce that after a very long wait (over 125 years!), we are preparing to start, over the next two-week period, the excavation work necessary for the Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck,” Burgum said in a social media post.
The 250-foot-tall arch will be among Trump’s most visible projects, as the administration continues its attempts to remake Washington. Critics, however, have voiced fears that the structure may be too large, and overshadow other monuments, like the Lincoln Memorial on the other side of the Potomac River.
The proposed arch will dwarf the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in size. It is unclear at this time how much construction will cost; the National Endowment for the Humanities earmarked $15 million for the monument.
“This will be one the the Great Pieces of American Architecture, honoring the history and significance of Arlington National Cemetery and befitting the most powerful Capital in the World,” Burgum said.
The monument will be constructed on land overseen by the National Park Service, and critics have argued Trump’s latest project requires explicit congressional approval. However, the Interior secretary continues to rebut these claims.
Instead, Burgum echoed previous statements and said historically “Congress and various congressionally chartered commissions decreed that a monumental work should adorn Columbia Island,” the traffic circle where the monument is planned to be constructed.
“Despite Congress’s intent, the site became and remains today a barren traffic circle lacking any monumental treatment and significant historic value,” he said.
-
Politics2 years agoFormer ‘Squad’ members launching ‘Bowman and Bush’ YouTube show
-
Uncategorized2 years ago
Bob Good to step down as Freedom Caucus chair this week
-
Politics2 years agoFormer Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron launches Senate bid
-
The Dictatorship2 years agoLuigi Mangione acknowledges public support in first official statement since arrest
-
The Josh Fourrier Show2 years agoDOOMSDAY: Trump won, now what?
-
The Dictatorship2 years agoPete Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon goes from bad to worse
-
Politics2 years agoBlue Light News’s Editorial Director Ryan Hutchins speaks at Blue Light News’s 2025 Governors Summit
-
The Dictatorship12 months agoMike Johnson sums up the GOP’s arrogant position on military occupation with two words