Democrats Charge into Battleground Pennsylvania as Trump Team Embraces More Targeted Approach

Philadelphia – Minnesota governor Tim Walz kicked off his onstage remarks in Philadelphia on Tuesday evening with a sly crack at the current guy in the White House. 

“Thank you for bringing back the joy!” Walz said to his new running mate in a speech that burnished his own Midwestern roots, hit Trump and Vance on policy and personality, and made clear he’s in it to win Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes. By “bringing back the joy,” Walz means giving voters who were apathetic about 81-year-old Joe Biden a reason to actually turn out on Election Day. “We’ll sleep when we’re dead!”

The hope for Pennsylvania Democrats is that Walz’s Midwestern roots and relatable background as a football coach, social-studies teacher, and military veteran will help neutralize Harris’s West Coast liberalism in this Rust Belt state that’s likely to be decided by just tens of thousands of votes. As Chester County Democratic Party chairwoman Charlotte Valyo put it, he’s “everybody’s dad, coach, teacher, governor.”

The hope for Republicans is that they can break through the media noise and define Walz as an ultra-progressive chief executive who, like “San Francisco” Harris, is “dangerously liberal” and out of touch with middle-of-the-road Americans. They also hope to neutralize his military bona fides by pointing out that he left the National Guard shortly before his unit deployed to Iraq, drawing the (on the record) ire of his fellow Minnesota guardsmen in a 2018 Facebook post.

Overall, Republicans believe they’ll have an easier time defining Walz in the Keystone State than they would have had Harris defied her left flank and tapped Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate. While pundits insist that Harris will benefit from Walz’s Midwestern moderate vibes, unlike Shapiro, Walz governed as a down-the-line progressive once he moved into the governor’s mansion in Minnesota. 

“Governor Shapiro has his detractors in the Democratic Party, and unfortunately their grievance is loud and clear. And instead of looking at the good things Governor Shapiro has done, they tend to focus on negative things,” said John Merchlinsky, the Democratic chairman in “crimson red” Northumberland County. 

The ground game is on. Harris entering the race has “given us a shot in the arm,” says Chad Baker, chairman of York County Democrats. Before Harris kicked off her campaign, the York County Democrats would get one or two volunteers a week joining their cause. But in the two weeks since she launched her presidential bid, the county committee has signed up 80 new volunteers.

Immediately after Harris was crowned as Joe Biden’s successor, she inherited his cash, campaign infrastructure, and ground game. “Team Harris-Walz and Pennsylvania Democrats have nearly 300 coordinated staffers across 36 offices” across the commonwealth, Dan Kanninen, battleground states director for the Democratic presidential ticket, wrote in a Tuesday memo shared with press.

“I’ve been involved with Democratic politics for over 20 years,” Baker said in an interview with National Review of his work in red-leaning York County, which has one and a half registered Republicans for every one registered Democrat. “One of the best ground games I’ve ever seen was the Obama campaign in 2008. This is absolutely in comparison to that. Just how early they’re out there, how organized they’ve been, and just how many volunteers they’re engaging and getting out to talk about their candidates.”

Whether or not you buy into the Obama-level hype, the post-Biden drop-out enthusiasm on the ground from Democrats is real. They’re fundraising like crazy, and the crowds are enormous. And even though Harris carries the baggage of her 2020 primary run and the current administration, she’s not Joe Biden.

“There’s been a tremendous sea change in the energy and the excitement around Vice President Harris being on the ticket,” says Sam Hens-Greco, chairman of the Allegheny Democrats. He says the county has seen a huge increase in people volunteering to phone bank, knock on doors, and put up signs since she emerged as the new nominee.

While local Democratic events typically draw more county committee members than local grassroots Democrats, that has shifted since Harris entered the race, Hens-Greco said. He’s since been to several standing-room-only events in which the majority of the crowd was made up of regular voters.

For most local Democratic organizers, the strategy is simple. “We’re just going to do the same thing that we do every presidential election,” said Merchlinsky, the Northumberland Democratic chair. “We’re going to have boots on the ground, we’re going to door knock, we’re going to phone bank, we’re going to reach out to people who we think would vote for Vice President Harris and Governor Walz. And that’s pretty much what gets it done.”

As Democrats lean in on a traditional get-out-the-vote operation that has long excelled in early and mail-in voting, Republicans are transitioning to a post-Biden race with a new Democratic ticket that is benefitting from pre-convention momentum and a friendly press. 

Earlier in the cycle, the Trump team was getting (mostly anonymous) flak in the press from some battleground-state Republicans for not having rolled out a cohesive and coordinated ground game complete with lots of on-the-ground staff. Some chairmen were open about this fact in interviews, including in Pennsylvania. “We don’t have an official ground game, as of yet. We have the motivation and the grassroots passion for a ground game,” Lehigh County GOP chairman Joe Vichot told Spectrum News in April.

Then, the Trump campaign unveiled “Trump Force 47” — a ground-game effort that is recruiting enthusiastic volunteers who are laser-focused on turning out their neighbors to the polls. The tiered system rewards volunteers with merchandise — hats, badges, T-shirts, and more — based on how many Republican voter contacts they make. (Though it’s an imperfect comparison given Trump’s primary polling lead throughout the Republican primary, the strategy is reminiscent of the GOP nominee’s caucus strategy in Iowa, where volunteer precinct captains helped juice turnout for Trump.)

“They had pockets of organization in the past, but this time around, they’re being very intentional with how they go about recruiting people that are called ‘Trump captains,’” says Roman Kozak, the Beaver County GOP chairman who is also running for a state representative seat. 

“My understanding is, at the end of the day, they’re just trying to get ten to 15 people in their neighborhood to really get on board with the program,” Kozak added. “From what I’m seeing, they’re going after the ‘forgotten men and women of America,’” he said in reference to Ohio senator J. D. Vance’s running-mate acceptance speech in Milwaukee. “This isn’t downtown Philadelphia or even on the outskirts. This is Beaver County, Butler County, Lawrence County, areas that for a long time, politicians have passed over.”

Pennsylvania Republicans working on behalf of the Trump campaign are currently operating out of two dozen offices across the commonwealth, someone familiar with the GOP ticket’s Pennsylvania strategy told NR, though the number of paid staff on the ground remains unclear. According to the Washington Post, the Trump team is also leaning in on a host of outside GOP groups to help canvas and turn out the vote, including Turning Point Action, America First Works, and America PAC.

Another focus for the GOP ticket? A targeted focus on turning out low-propensity voters and convincing voters to vote early and by mail. Even though Trump continues to insist during his rallies that the 2020 election was stolen from him, he’s now urging his supporters to “swamp the vote” and cast votes early and by mail. (He still couches that request in stolen-election rhetoric, telling his supporters at rallies that they need high levels of turnout so the election is “too big to rig.”)

While Democrats have a registration advantage, with nearly 418,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in the state, Republicans have made gains in recent years. In 2016, Trump overcame Democrats’ nearly 900,000 registered-voter advantage to win the state.

Gleason insists there’s a different get-out-the-vote mentality this year. “We went and we banged on doors and we pulled people out on Election Day,” says Rob Gleason, the former chairman of the Pennsylvania GOP. “Now we have six months to get out to vote. And we were behind the Democrats because they did a great job on this the last couple cycles. They got ahead of us on this. I think we learned our lesson.”

Around NR

• Under Tim Walz, Minnesota “went from a pro-choice state to a radically pro-abortion state at the expense of pregnant women,” writes Dan McLaughlin:

Exhibit A: Two bills signed by Walz in 2023. Those bills repealed Minnesota’s prohibition on coercing women into having abortions. They stripped out of the state’s laws the requirement that women give informed consent — indeed, any consent — to an abortion. They guaranteed an unqualified right to abortion up until the moment of birth, and even gutted protections for children born alive after abortion.

• Jeffrey Blehar wonders whether Trump or Harris even want to win the presidential race:

I am left marveling at how, in an election where a clear majority of American voters are practically begging one or the other of the two major parties to offer them even the slightest concession in terms of political moderation, the response of both has been to double down, to first shore up their own base — white working-class men for Trump, progressives for Harris — rather than reach out for a broader coalition.

• Jim Geraghty opines on the madness of “vibe elections,” as pundits claim that Tim Walz has a moderate vibe while J. D. Vance purportedly has a far-right vibe — never mind the actual policy positions that either candidate has taken:

A lot of people learn the hard way that you should not judge people by what they say but based on what they do. It’s just a shame that so many people in the world of politics insist on judging a book by its cover.

• Trump’s attacks on Brian Kemp can only hurt Republicans, Noah Rothman says, after the latest round of insults from the former president toward Georgia’s popular Republican governor: 

Those in the former president’s fan base might approve of such outbursts, but all indications suggest they will not advance his political objectives. In fact, the evidence provided by the collective verdict of Georgia’s voters indicates that this sort of friendly fire actively harms down-ballot Republicans’ prospects.

• Harris and Maryland’s Democratic Senate nominee Angela Alsobrooks both embraced the 2020 anti-policing hysteria, and it could come back to hurt them in November, Audrey Fahlberg reports: 

“Defund the police” adjacent rhetoric never polled well but was embraced at the time by left-wing activists, professors, and some Democratic lawmakers who were eager to enact progressive criminal justice reforms in the wake of the George Floyd protests. Years later, public backlash to a pandemic-era spike in crime and the enacting of progressive public safety reforms in blue cities across the country has elevated public safety as a critical election-year issue.

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