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Home2024 Election'Fear is gone': Democrats believe they can make progress in rural Pennsylvania

‘Fear is gone’: Democrats believe they can make progress in rural Pennsylvania

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MERCER, Pa. — Mercer County has been solid Trump country for the past two elections

Donald Trump won this area of ​​rural northwestern Pennsylvania by 25 percentage points in 2016 and by 26 points in 2020.

Yet Democrats here believe they have what it takes to close those margins and play a major role in keeping Pennsylvania blue. In conversations with Democratic activists and volunteers, many noted that they have had more support on the ground this time around.

On the one hand, they believe they have made inroads with voters who are now quietly supporting Harris, or with soft Republicans who have reached their end of the road with Trump. On the other hand, they have never had so much luck in the Trump era getting their neighbors to put up yard signs for a Democratic presidential candidate as they did this fall.

“The fear is gone,” Judy Hines, the chair of the Mercer County Democratic Party, told NBC News.

Traveling through rural Pennsylvania, particularly in the northwest, there’s little doubt about Trump’s dominance. Trump signs are everywhere, though there are also a noticeable number of signs for Vice President Kamala Harris. But national and state Democrats have renewed their focus on getting out the vote in these rural areas, particularly in Pennsylvania, amid signs that the former president could undermine the Democratic advantage in Philadelphia.

This strategy has resulted in trips to rural Pennsylvania by both Harris, who stopped in Johnstown in September, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, as well as a series of visits by prominent Democratic surrogates.

“For a long time, national Democrats have just written off and ignored those communities,” said Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro. “They’re showing up, and we appreciate that. And I think those communities, even though we’re a big state, are still shopping areas. And we need to get candidates out there. We need to make sure they have a chance to meet local people, and local people ask them questions, and kind of build relationships.” Chief among the surrogates is Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who has campaigned in 11 red counties in western Pennsylvania alone, including Mercer. Democrats and Republicans in the state have cited Fetterman’s efforts as noteworthy, even as Republicans have doubted it would make much of a difference in the presidential race.

In an interview, Fetterman explained his rural campaign plan by saying he has “always been committed” to leaving no stone unturned in the state, though he added that “any credit” for wins in rural parts of the state goes to “all these little red county Dems, because they’re the heroes in all of this.”

In 2022, Fetterman and Shapiro both urged Democrats in red counties to put up yard signs as a signal to others that it was acceptable to support the party’s candidates. In Mercer County, both parties were able to reduce Republican margins, with Fetterman losing by 22 points and Shapiro by 18 — both an improvement over Trump’s results two years earlier.

But Republicans aren’t worried about such a rural bias this time around. They believe that anyone who would have abandoned Trump after voting for him in the past did so before the 2020 vote.

They also see a particularly receptive audience for Trump’s narrative about the dangers of mass immigration and rising prices. And they’ve been encouraged by voter registration and early voting trends in places like Mercer County, where Republicans outvoted Democrats before Election Day while increasing their voter registration rates.

State Rep. Josh Kail, who heads the House Republican Campaign Committee, told News that Democrats had a “smart strategy,” even though he doubted it would work.

“But just showing up is not enough,” he added. “You have to be attractive. You have to have a message that resonates. And I just don’t see it.”

A Trump campaign official said the rural Democratic campaign is nothing more than “a nice series of nice headlines and some earned media.”

“Just because [rural voters] get a knock on the door or a piece of mail or see 50 million TV ads, it doesn’t mean anyone is going to say, ‘Oh, you know what? Maybe I’m OK with [a wave of illegal immigration]. Or maybe I’m OK with inflation,'” the person said. “That’s not how it works.”

‘Beating a dead horse’

Just around the corner from Mercer in neighboring Lawrence County, a busload of Trump surrogates drove by in late October to speak to a crowd of about 100 supporters. The message was repeated over and over: Vote early.

At one point, David Bossier, a Republican National Committee member from Maryland who was a senior official in Trump’s 2016 campaign, told attendees who said they hadn’t voted yet, “Shame on you!”

Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official and key ally, urged voters to have “uncomfortable” conversations with acquaintances who might not vote for Trump, adding that whether Trump wins or not could depend on Lawrence County.

When it was her turn to speak, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota asked the crowd, “How many of you can think of someone right now that you know is not going to vote for President Trump?”

Nearly everyone in the room raised their hands.

Before that event, Joel D’Alessandro, a Trump supporter from neighboring Beaver County, said he sees Republicans more engaged and with a “heightened sense of civic engagement” than in previous cycles. But he thinks it’s ultimately nearly impossible to flip votes at this point in the game, especially with how swamped Pennsylvania has been, which has received the most spending on behalf of both major party candidates and the most visits from each.

“I would challenge anyone to find an undecided vote,” he said, adding: “Unless one of the candidates is publicly committing a federal crime, publicly — maybe not even that — but unless one of them is on camera committing murder, it’s like they’re [entrenched]. I don’t know of any undecideds. Why bother at this point? It’s beating a dead horse.”

Former President Bill Clinton recently campaigned in Johnstown, Pa., to boost the Harris campaign.
Former President Bill Clinton recently campaigned in Johnstown, Pa., to boost the Harris campaign.

D’Alessandro said he supported Democrats until 2006 and recalled voting for Bill Clinton. To reach voters like D’Alessandro, Democrats sent Clinton to western Pennsylvania last week, where the former president made stops in Johnstown, Greensburg and Butler — all in red counties.

During his stop in Johnstown, Clinton promoted Harris’s promise to “explicitly reach out to people who disagree with her,” discussed declining birth rates and how rising home prices in Nevada explained rising home prices nationwide. He criticized Trump’s economic plan as far more expensive than Harris’s, in part because he would give wealthy Americans — “including me,” he noted — a substantial tax cut.

“I hate the idea of ​​doing that,” he said.

He also spoke about immigration, promoting the bipartisan effort Harris and President Joe Biden agreed to with Republicans to solve some of those problems.

“Donald Trump said you can’t do that. ‘My whole deal is based on division. I need problems. I don’t need solutions. I need people who are torn and angry,'” Clinton said, mimicking Trump.

A man standing on the sidelines of his rally walked to the railing and expressed awe at a president standing in the middle of his small town.

“It’s amazing to see a president standing there,” the man said before leaving. “That’s insane.”

But on immigration, Democratic efforts to blame Trump for the failure of the bipartisan border bill have backfired. In Mercer County, during a roundtable with more than a half-dozen Democratic activists and volunteers, everyone gave the same answer when asked if that proposal would pass: “No.”

“It doesn’t ring a bell,” one person said of the response they got when they brought up the episode.

‘Quietly getting it done’

But even though some of the interactions have been discouraging, these Democrats haven’t lost hope. Charles Bald off, a veteran and Democratic activist in the county, recalled nearly getting run over in a parking lot as he and others promoted the party’s candidates. At the same time, he said he couldn’t keep up with the demand for “Veterans for Harris” signs.

“I feel a lot better than I did last time,” he said.

Jennifer Valenti, a Democratic activist in Mercer County, got involved this cycle after the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, sharing her story of being sexually abused as a preteen and having an abortion months later after discovering she was pregnant. She said her conversations about abortion rights have had the most impact on her immediate circle, which includes some Republicans.

“I think a lot of Democrats look at both sides,” she said. “We look at Trump’s policies, we look at her policies, and we say it’s not just because she’s a woman or because she’s black, it’s because of her policies.”

Mercer County went Democratic in every presidential election except one between 1976 and 2000, but hasn’t been won by a Democratic candidate since. (Barack Obama came close in 2008 and 2012.)

Ginny Richardson, the chair of the Mercer County Republican Party, gave a simple “no” when asked if she was worried that Democrats could shrink Trump’s margins there. She said it’s also been much easier on the Republican side to recruit volunteers for local campaign work than in recent cycles. And she noted that Republicans have reversed Democrats’ voter registration advantage over the past three decades.

“Rural people are going to bring Trump in,” she said. “Even though he won so big last time, we want to win even bigger this time.”

During the roundtable, David Henderson, a Democrat from Mercer County, predicted that despite all the Republicans’ shouting about the election in his community, the right wing would get a beating on Tuesday.

“They’re going to lose,” he said. “We’re going to be quiet. I think it’s going to be a landslide in Pennsylvania and the rest of the country. We’ve been quiet because we know that we’re going to make Democrats look bad, that we’re just going to make the election look bad. There’s enough bad in this election. There’s enough hate in this election, and if they’re going to bark at us, then bark away. But eventually, we’re going to do it.”

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