Vice President Mike Pence had a simple message for supporters when he stopped at a campaign office in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. “The road to victory goes straight through Pennsylvania,” he said.
He could have been more specific. It runs through towns such as Murrysville in Westmoreland County, outside Pittsburgh, where, in 2016, voters plumped for candidate Trump by a margin of almost 2 to 1.
This time around, President Trump, his family, and his vice president are peppering the area with appearances in an effort to maintain enthusiasm and ensure the sort of turnout that could help them hold on to Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral college votes.
Last week, Trump addressed hundreds of supporters in a hangar at a nearby airport. He returns on Friday to neighboring Somerset County to mark the anniversary of 9/11 at the national memorial to Flight 93 at Shanksville.
But Democrats sense an opportunity and say Trump is losing support in suburban Pennsylvania and has little option but to run a strategy dependent on turning out the base elsewhere.
Dr. Terry Madonna, director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll in Lancaster, said the state was clearly divided into urban centers voting for the Democratic Party and its version of identity politics and other areas that were trending Republican in a process greatly accelerated by Trump.
“For Trump to win these battleground states, in the Upper Midwest, the Rust Belt states, he needs turnout to be big, and he needs to win these areas by huge percentages,” he said.
In 2016, Trump won Westmoreland County by 116,000 to 60,000 votes. That represented a 30-point win and a chunk of the votes needed to overcome a deficit of more than 770,000 votes in the Democratic strongholds of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and its suburbs.
While those numbers might have been impregnable to previous Republican candidates, Trump’s blue-collar appeal and the enthusiasm he generated had reshaped the state map, according to Bill Stepien, his campaign manager.
“I think, too often, people get caught up in viewing not just the electoral map, but also state-by-state maps and state pathways to victory through a very dated lens, through a Bush lens or a McCain lens or a Romney lens,” he told reporters on a conference call.
In Pennsylvania, that meant massively outperforming Mitt Romney’s 2012 performance in the smallest counties.
“In the 45 smallest counties, Trump nearly doubled what Mitt Romney did,” he said, noting that 486,000 votes are squeezed out of the places the experts didn’t think existed, and Trump “rode those numbers to a 44,000 margin.”
The result is that the campaign’s biggest names have been making a beeline to the west of Pennsylvania.
The president’s son Eric was in the area on Wednesday. He appeared at a Make America Great Again event at the American Legion Post in Washington, Pennsylvania, about 28 miles from the center of Pittsburgh. It is in another county won by his father in 2016 by more than 30 percentage points.
Campaign officials say counties that were once reliable Democratic areas are trending their way and that they know they can bring out more Republican voters this time.
In Westmoreland, for example, the proportion of Democratic support in presidential elections declined from 47% in 2000 to 33% in 2016.
“Part of this, especially by going to places like Westmoreland now, is about making sure that we’re touching these places we know we can get more votes out of than we did in 2016,” said a senior campaign official.
“It’s not the biggest place in the state, it’s not the place where we are going to close the campaign, but we can put some of these places to bed early on.”
But David Bergstein, director of battleground state communications for the Democratic National Committee, disputed the rationale, saying Republicans knew that swing voters in suburban areas were being put off by Trump’s record in government.
“Trump is campaigning from a position of weakness in Pennsylvania,” he said. “What you are seeing across the state, both in the suburbs of Philadelphia but also in other suburban communities like Harrisburg, is that those independent voters who played a really decisive role in battleground state elections are moving further and further away from Trump and the Republican Party.”
Either way, Trump’s success in Pennsylvania will come down to elevating turnout in the counties the campaign won last time around, said Madonna.
“If they can’t do that, I don’t see how they win,” he said.
