There is a county in Pennsylvania that chooses presidents. This is how the fight between Harris and Trump is going

In one of the most competitive counties in Pennsylvania, which is known as the “Battleground State,” the campaign headquarters for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are located in a small room in an office building in a strip mall that was rented by the Republican Party of Erie County.

The two-person staff runs the volunteer network the campaign calls Trump Force 47 a few times a week. Other than that, the office is pretty quiet.

An office a few miles away in downtown Erie is busy with paid staff and volunteers working on Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign. They make calls, press new campaign buttons, set up watch parties and phone banks, and more. There is a chalkboard that keeps track of how many homes have been visited so far. The goal is 20,000, which is about one in five families in the county.

With only four weeks until the Nov. 5 presidential election, the fight for Erie County—a historically must-win county in a must-win state—shows how important it is to find and contact individual voters in a campaign that is still very close, according to staff and volunteers for both campaigns.

While the Harris campaign uses its large cash advantage and newfound enthusiasm to build a huge ground-game operation to get supporters involved and find new voters, the Trump campaign is focusing on people who don’t vote very often and betting on a drive to register voters that has cut into the Democrats’ traditional advantage.

Federal financial records show that Harris and the Democrats raised $361 million in August, while Trump and the Republicans only raised $130 million. In the same month, Harris spent almost three times as much as her opponent.

About 40 supporters, campaign staff, volunteers, and voters were interviewed by Reuters. They said that Harris’s edge on the ground could test whether traditional campaigns are still useful in a world of social media ad wars, viral moments, and influencers.

He said, “Trump and his team seem to be betting on the strength of his personal pull.” Chris Borick is a researcher and political science professor at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania.

“Harris and the Democrats are investing deeply in a more traditional ground game here and thus this election will be a test of dramatically different strategies.”

Volunteers and voters also said that things are getting more heated as campaigns spend millions of dollars on divisive TV and digital ads, as well as on robot calls, text messages, and knocking on doors.

She recently moved to the state from Colorado and hasn’t voted in a presidential election yet, so campaigns have been focusing on Erin Miller, 38, a bartender and mother of six. “I’ve been pretty bombarded with mail, phone calls, and texts,” she said.

When it comes to states that will decide the election, Pennsylvania has the most to gain with 19 electoral votes.

With 177,000 registered voters, Erie County is a blue-collar area that has voted for the winning presidential candidate in each of the last four elections.

In 2020, Biden won Erie County by less than 1,500 votes, or 1.03 percentage points. This was an even smaller gap than his 1.2 percentage point win in Pennsylvania as a whole. Trump beat Hillary Clinton by less than 2,000 votes in Erie County in 2016.

There are three offices for the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party in Erie County. There are eight paid workers and more than 300 volunteers and donors.

“It’s the part that sounds the alarm. It’s just the fact that this city and state could choose the next president, and they know it,” said Marie Troyer, 60, a retired teacher who got a job with the campaign to answer the phones and manage workers.

TENTS ON THE GROUND

Even though Harris has an edge on the ground, it has been hard for the campaign to get Black voters, who make up about 16% of the city’s population, especially Black men, to vote.

A barber named Howard Pratchett, 48, said he is going to vote for Trump because he is more “real” than Harris. “We don’t care about the rights of LGBT people.” We don’t care about abort rights or anything like that. We don’t care about that. “They don’t give straight Black men who vote anything,” Pratchett said.

Monty Davis, 51, who runs a youth program in his area, said that he likes how President Joe Biden is trying to cut costs and that he plans to vote for Harris. At the same time, he warned that the Black community is not as excited as it was when Obama or Biden was president.

Davis said, “It’s just not that intense.”

Erie County Republican Chairman Tom Eddy says that the two paid Trump campaign workers in Erie are also in charge of two other counties.

Officials in the county said they have fewer volunteers than the Democrats, but neither the Trump team nor the local Republicans would say how many they have.

As in other close states, Trump’s campaign is depending on outside groups with a lot of money, like Elon Musk’s America PAC, and a much smaller network of supporters and volunteers to get people to the polls.

Since Trump became a leader in Republican politics in 2015, Republicans and outside groups have made it much harder for Democrats to get people to register to vote in Erie and throughout Pennsylvania.

In 2015, Democrats had an edge of about 33,000 registered voters in Erie County. However, that advantage has been cut down to 10,000, according to the most recent county election records.

Statewide, Democrats have registered more voters than Republicans by about 338,400. This is less than the huge 892,624 edge Democrats had in 2016, according to data from the state’s voter rolls.

The county’s Democratic leader, Sam Talerico, said that the rise in Republican registrations is bad news.

“It’s bad that those registration numbers are coming together. We don’t like it at all.” “The good news is that I still think we have an edge because independents are voting for us, and that’s making a difference,” he said.

Republicans are also counting on Trump’s regular visits. He has held five rallies in Erie over the course of three campaigns, including two this election cycle. Organizers are using the protests as chances to get people to vote and collect information like cell phone numbers and emails.

Her first trip to Erie will be on October 14. Tim Walz, her running mate, came to see her in September.

Then there’s Trump Force 47, a group of volunteers who call people who don’t usually vote to find out if they plan to vote and who they plan to vote for. For going to more doors, volunteers get prizes like hats and sweaters.

It’s not our goal to convince anyone. “It’s more that the campaign wants people who already want to vote for Trump to go out and do it,” said 39-year-old volunteer Justin Berkheimer, who works at a group home for people with mental problems.

A CAMPAIGN THAT IS HOT

Volunteers say that the heated fight for Erie has led to threats, hostility, and awkward talks in both campaigns.
Six very loyal Trump supporters told Reuters that it makes them feel bad to be seen as public Trump backers.

Local leaders and volunteers say that’s different from 2016, when Erie was full of Trump signs.

Patrick Fuller, 50, works at a credit union and has walked up to more than 2,000 doors to support Trump this election season. He doesn’t wear his red MAGA hat around the house to avoid getting into a fight.

“A lot of people are afraid to get involved, because they are afraid that somebody will swear at them or threaten them,” he said.

Other workers said that people spat on their cars because they had Trump bumper stickers on them.

When Democrats in the county tried to open a satellite office in a part of the county that Trump won with 72% of the vote in 2020, they said they ran into problems.

Volunteer Kelly Chelton, 62, said that a man lunged at her because he didn’t like the big wooden sign that said “Christians Against Trump.”

The other person said, “He came in looking for a fight.” “He asked how do you know that Trump isn’t Christian.” “He was just screaming and yelling,” she said.
Chelton said that the county party later put in video security cams.