Harris visits red areas of Pennsylvania, hoping to cut into Trump’s edge

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned through Pennsylvania’s conservative interior Friday, aiming to shave a few percentage points off former President Donald Trump’s winning margins in parts of the state where he remains popular.

At a campaign rally in Wilkes-Barre, the largest city in a county where Trump won 57% of the vote in 2020, Harris said she would remove “unnecessary degree requirements” for some federal jobs, a pitch to Trump’s base of voters without a college education in a part of the state where he expects to perform well.

Harris also emphasized her work in California prosecuting Mexican drug cartels and said as president she would continue to go after them “for pushing poisons like fentanyl on our children.”

The vice president’s Trump-country pitch amounted to a continuation of her attempt to appeal to moderate and right-leaning voters that began at the Democratic National Convention last month and continued during Tuesday’s debate with the former president.

No longer burdened by the apathy among elements of the Democratic base that characterized President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, Harris has begun trying to cut into Trump’s margin among Republicans. In her remarks Friday, she reminded the crowd that she had endorsements from some 200 officials who had worked in recent Republican presidential administrations and campaigns.

But her most direct appeal came on policy.

“For far too long our nation has encouraged only one path to success, a four-year college degree,” Harris said. “Our nation needs to recognize the value of other paths, additional paths such as apprenticeships and technical programs. So as president, I will get rid of the unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs, to increase jobs for folks without a four-year degree, understanding that requiring a certain degree does not necessarily talk about one’s skills. And I will challenge the private sector to do the same.”

The Wilkes-Barre rally followed a stop in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, alongside Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat who for months has urged first Biden’s campaign, and now Harris’, to spend time with Pennsylvania voters outside the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh regions, which are both heavily Democratic.

In Johnstown, which is about 60 miles east of Pittsburgh, Harris told voters at a cafe and bookstore that she was “feeling very good about Pennsylvania because there are a lot of people in Pennsylvania who deserve to be seen and heard.”

In between events, Harris recorded an interview with the ABC affiliate in Philadelphia — the first solo television interview she has sat for since she replaced Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee.

Her campaign has made clear how much it values winning Pennsylvania, which, with 19 electoral votes, is the most valuable battleground state. Harris has spent six of the last seven days making public appearances in Pennsylvania. Her campaign has devoted nearly 25% of its television ad spending through Election Day to Pennsylvania, according to media tracking firm AdImpact. Trump’s likeliest path to victory involves flipping Pennsylvania, which Biden narrowly won in 2020.

Harris campaign aides have said that she must win over some swing voters in red counties, thus lowering her margin of defeat in those areas, in order to claim the state. While Harris was in red territory in Pennsylvania on Friday, Trump held a news conference in deep-blue California, a state he lost in 2020 by more than 5 million votes and was certain to lose again.

“I feel very strongly that you’ve got to earn every vote, and that means spending time with folks in the communities where they live,” Harris said Friday in Johnstown. “That’s why I’m here, and we’re going to be spending a lot more time in Pennsylvania.”

Johnstown is in Cambria County, which is overwhelmingly white and working class. In 2008, Barack Obama barely won there. But by 2020, the political realignment brought about by Trump was complete. He beat Biden with 68% of the vote. Luzerne County, where Wilkes-Barre is, had a similar trend. Obama won the county by 9 percentage points in 2008, but Biden lost Luzerne by 14 points in 2020.

The Harris campaign said Friday that 16 of its 50 offices in Pennsylvania were in rural counties Trump won by double digits in 2020. That on-the-ground presence is meant to limit the damage in parts of the state the vice president is unlikely to win.

Last month, Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, spent a day campaigning in conservative-leaning Beaver County outside Pittsburgh. Walz, a former football coach, represented a rural Minnesota district during his time in Congress, and Democrats believe he can help them with voters outside major cities.

Some Pennsylvania Democrats had hoped that Harris would choose their state’s popular Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate over Walz. Despite not being picked, Shapiro spoke at the Democratic National Convention and has campaigned frequently for Harris.

Shapiro spoke before Harris at the rally in Wilkes-Barre. On Sunday, he will headline the Harris campaign’s bus tour on abortion rights when it stops in Philadelphia.

Fetterman was not among those calling for Shapiro to be selected as Harris’ running mate. He and the governor have clashed over pardons and engaged in what is mostly a one-way feud, with Fetterman trying to shun Shapiro. They have barely appeared at campaign events together for Harris. Fetterman was not in Wilkes-Barre with the vice president.

And when they have, as at a rally in Philadelphia last month where Harris announced her selection of Walz, Fetterman did not stand when Shapiro spoke.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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