A story of deficiency from the Democratic machine in Philadelphia reads like an attempt at extortion.
In Pennsylvania, the consensus among various media dispatches — reports from the ostensibly neutral press, the center-right press, and the far-left press – is that Kamala Harris’s campaign has an organizational leg up on the Republican nominee’s electoral apparatus.
“Operatives in both parties say Republicans are behind Democrats on their voter turnout efforts,” the Dispatch’s Michael Warren, David M. Drucker, and Charles Hilu reported last week. The Harris camp has the edge on the number of volunteers and canvassers in the state, and it has an administrative advantage over the Trump camp insofar as it has not largely outsourced its voter-contact operation to other groups. As of September, the vice president’s campaign had more than 350 full-time staffers in the state to the Trump campaign’s 50, and it had opened more than 50 field offices to its opponent’s two dozen.
While the Trump campaign is ramping up its operation in Pennsylvania, best practice prescribes multiple instances of face-to-face contact with voters to ensure that even unenthusiastic ones are persuaded to cast their ballots. Early and frequent contact also frees up campaign resources heading into the home stretch of the cycle so they can be devoted to turning out unlikely voters rather than driving previously uncontacted base voters to the polls. By almost all accounts, the Harris campaign is better positioned over its rival to transform a close race into a winning race if the margins in the Keystone State are as close as polling suggests they will be on November 5.
I say “almost” to account for Politico’s decision on Wednesday to deliver an elbow drop onto the Harris campaign from the top rope. Reporters Holly Otterbein and Elena Schneider revealed that, contrary to the popular wisdom, the Harris operation in Pennsylvania is “poorly run,” and time is running short to fix the campaign’s fatal errors. What errors? Well, a close read of the piece suggests that the problem with the Harris campaign is that it has devoted too much attention and funding to the voters who might deliver a majority to Harris — voters who fall outside the identity-politics hierarchy to which the progressive Left is partial.
The grievances Harris’s allies marketed to Politico’s reporters read like a turf war between operatives based in Philadelphia — who insist that the Harris operation has given them short shrift — and those in Pittsburgh, which is home to the Democratic campaign’s Pennsylvania manager Nikki Lu. She “lacks deep knowledge of Philadelphia,” the dispatch warns. A failure to run up the score among African-American voters in the City of Brotherly Love could mean the difference between victory and defeat for Kamala Harris.
Politico was privy to similar concerns about the Harris camp’s outreach to Latino voters in the state, and much of the blame for the campaign’s shortcomings was laid at Lu’s feet. In August, the Harris campaign’s Hispanic-coalition manager quit, insisting that she could not do her job because she was barred from accessing “necessary data on Latino demographics” (the Harris camp deemed the claim “untrue”). One Democratic strategist alleged that Lu “empowers a culture” that has left some elected officials “feeling unengaged and disrespected.”
The named sources in this piece, many of whom hail from the progressive activist class in and around Philly, seem to feel similarly jilted. After all, the Harris campaign “is completely flooded with money,” one unnamed Pennsylvania Democratic elected official complained. Presumably, to satisfy her Democratic critics, more of the Harris campaign’s largesse should be directed to not just the pivotal “collar counties” around Philadelphia but also to the city itself.
The Harris campaign hasn’t exactly ignored Philly, but it is devoting considerable resources to drive up turnout among voters from all demographics across the state. As one might expect, many of those resources are being directed to counties with majority-white populations. In September, the Harris campaign boasted that 16 of its 50 in-state field offices were located in rural counties that Trump had won in 2020 by double digits. Some of those counties, such as Lancaster, are home to a disproportionate number of soft Republican voters who turned out in the 2024 GOP primary elections to cast a protest vote for Nikki Haley. The Harris camp seems to regard the risk of potentially activating Trump voters to be worth the reward if their efforts chew into Trump’s statewide vote share.
“If you win five votes, five extra votes in a county that Trump won by double digits, it’s the same as the five votes you win in Philadelphia,” Harris-campaign adviser Brendan McPhillips told CNN earlier this month. You can see why the logic of this approach (and the financial benefits it deprives well-connected types in Philadelphia) would inspire resentment among Democrats in the Acela Corridor.
It was a close race in Pennsylvania in 2020, and it’s set to be a close race this year. But if we compare the crosstab of the latest New York Times/Siena survey of Pennsylvania voters with the 2020 exit polls, Harris’s margins in Philadelphia proper closely mirror Joe Biden’s margin of victory. Where Harris has ground to gain is in the Philly and Pittsburgh suburbs and the central part of the state — territories far from the urban Democratic machine. “The Harris campaign’s path to win Pennsylvania capitalizes on Trump’s unprecedented weakness in the suburbs,” a memo recently produced by the Harris camp read.
Politico concludes its dispatch with some self-reflection from one of Harris’s Democratic critics in Pennsylvania, an elected official who fears the campaign hasn’t done enough to reach out to urban Hispanics. “Everybody’s very nervous,” the official confessed. “And I think that as we get closer, people get more tense. And they’re more vocal.”
Maybe the concerns voiced in Politico‘s latest — all of which seem conspicuously local to Philadelphia — will be proven prescient in November. As Harris’s progressive skeptics correctly note, her “path to victory depends” on “a coalition that relies on a strong performance with voters of color.” But the Harris campaign isn’t prohibitively focused on those voters to the exclusion of the majority demographic in the Keystone State, and time is running out to cash in on the Harris campaign’s manifest apprehension about its prospects.
Maybe that’s why Politico’s story about the deficiencies of the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania reads like an attempt at extortion.