ERIE, PA — Republican Pat Fuller was canvassing in perhaps the swingiest suburb of the swingiest county in Pennsylvania when he realized he had a problem.
It wasn’t dogs. After knocking on over 2,500 doors this cycle — more than anyone else in Erie County — Fuller knew how to handle aggressive pets. And it wasn’t police, though he said the cops have been called on him while canvassing three times this year alone.
His problem was technological. Every few houses, the app he was using to canvas kept crashing.
“It’s acting weird, every time I put something in, it keeps kicking me out,” Fuller said while canvassing in Millcreek Township last Wednesday afternoon.
Today he’s using the Campaign Sidekick app deployed by Trump Force 47, though on different days to canvas for other Republicans he’s used an entirely different app, which he said has often tasked him with knocking on the same exact doors.
Fuller, who’s been involved with the Erie County GOP since George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, estimated that on a given weekend, there’s 50 to 75 Republican volunteers knocking doors in Erie County. But that’s just a guess. With various grassroots organizations and individuals separate from the county party out on their own, the groups don’t communicate with each other, he said.
“There’s not really an official schedule. We kind of just all go out and do our thing,” Fuller said.
Harrison Dunn was once involved in the county party, but he’s now one of the Republicans doing his own voter outreach through his own political action committee.
“It is definitely an experiment with live ammunition right now,” Dunn said. “There’s definitely a lot of lessons to be learned.”
Erie County in northwestern Pennsylvania is one of the few places where Trump signs and Harris signs are displayed on neighboring lawns, and where people are just as likely to hang a Pride flag as they are to fly one showing Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt on him in Butler County.
Erie is one of just 25 counties in the country that voted for Barack Obama twice, flipped for Donald Trump in 2016, and then flipped back for Joe Biden in 2020.
The blue-collar community has an urban center, swingy suburbs and a reliably Republican rural base. It’s home to millionaires and to the poorest zip code in the nation. It’s also heavily white, with a large number of working-class, non-college educated voters that have traditionally voted for Democrats but went for Trump in 2016 — part of a larger movement that year which led to Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania and neighboring Michigan and Wisconsin.
Erie has just a fraction of the voters as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and those cities’ suburbs, where Democrats are relying on high turnout for Kamala Harris to win the state. Democratic Party leaders in Erie told NOTUS that Harris can’t win in those places alone, and that how Erie votes sends a greater message of how communities just like it across the Great Lakes “blue wall” vote as well.
“We’re just talking about moving 2,000 people, which isn’t a lot, but if that happens here, you can just kind of assume it’s going to happen everywhere,” said Sam Talarico, chair of the Erie County Democratic Party.
“We’re just kind of in that unique position. I don’t know how we got here, but we are the center of the universe now,” he said.
Republican and Democratic leaders told NOTUS that the results will be close in Erie, just as they were when Trump won it by nearly 2,000 votes in 2016 and when Biden won by just over 1,400 votes in 2020.
Republicans think they have a winning message on the economy. They believe kitchen table issues even give Republicans who don’t necessarily love Trump a reason to vote for him. On the ground game, however, many Republicans acknowledge it’s been a bit of a challenge. There’s no coordinated campaign office. There are only three campaign staffers in Erie. And most of the ground game has been outsourced to largely untested groups.
The Harris campaign has 11 paid staff and two coordinated offices in the county. The campaign has over 500 active, regular volunteers. And those volunteers have knocked on more than 55,000 doors and made over 239,000 phone calls, according to the Harris for Pennsylvania campaign.
But local Democrats unaffiliated with the campaign told NOTUS they’re concerned that Harris’ economic plans aren’t resonating with voters who remain concerned about inflation at the grocery store and the gas pump.
Jim Wertz, the former Erie County Democratic Party Chair, is now running for the state senate in what is expected to be one of Pennsylvania’s closest races. (Republicans currently have a slim majority in the upper chamber.)
“These days, when I talk to people at the doors, they’re all worried about the economy, they’re all worried about inflation. Very few of them point to the pandemic as the cause of that, and so I think that’s a real challenge in this election cycle as well,” Wertz said.
Wertz pointed out that, economically, Erie County is in a relatively bright spot. It has a lower unemployment rate and a higher GDP than the state as a whole. The area lost hundreds of manufacturing jobs in recent decades, but new jobs in “eds and meds” — education and health care — have brought new opportunities. The city of Erie also got an influx of $76 million from the American Rescue Plan.
The main challenge for Democrats and the Harris campaign is that, for all the signs that the economy is on the rise, inflation is persistent and the minimum wage in Pennsylvania is lower than in neighboring Ohio, New York and Michigan.
Talarico, who took over as party chair for Wertz, said those inflation concerns will be an issue.
“It’s kind of like a commercial for Trump every time you fill up your tank, so that’s tough to overcome,” Talarico said, despite the fact that the current national average for gas prices is $3.17.
“When you go to the grocery store and you see the high prices, and when you go get gas and see the high prices, naturally you think, ‘Well, things aren’t really that good,’ that’s been the narrative, and it kind of feeds itself every time you go to the grocery store,” he said. “‘How can the economy be good when my yogurt is, like, $4.25?’”
A deciding factor for Trump in blue-collar communities across Pennsylvania was the turnout of union members for Trump in 2016. T.J. Saddell, a leader in the local plumber’s union, said members with the “right information” believe there was progress under the Biden-Harris administration. The work that lies ahead is getting more rank-and-file members informed.
“There are some people that are stuck in one- or two-issue voting. They’re pro-life, or it’s the Second Amendment stuff, and those particular voters that are members, they’re not going to change their mind, even if you, you know, give them the information that’s correct,” Saddell said.
“They’ll vote against their own self-interest in their pocketbook because of some ideologies,” he said.
While there are clear warning signs for Harris in Pennsylvania, Democrats said it’s a different situation from 2016 when leaders were concerned about what they were hearing about Hillary Clinton during door-knocking visits.
Ryan Bizzarro, a state representative in Erie County, voiced his concerns to the Clinton campaign in May 2016. He was brushed off.
“By the time that they recognized that there was a problem, quite frankly, it was just too late,” Bizzarro told NOTUS.
“I remember her campaign manager who said that, for every western Pennsylvania Democrat, working-class person we lose, we’re going to gain two suburban women in Philadelphia,” Talarico said. “Politics is about addition, you can’t surrender any voters.”
But for all the scar tissue surrounding 2016, for all the comparisons about the energy surrounding Barack Obama in 2008, the most comparable election is probably the last one — 2020.
Biden won Erie County and similar working-class areas due to his image as a “normal” person and a supporter of unions. Harris has the same pro-union message as Biden — and she has his administration’s track record to boot. But there’s concern that the GOP’s framing of Harris as a coastal liberal, instead of as “Scranton Joe,” resonates in the minds of undecided voters.
“His blue-collar roots, his Blue Dog Democrat roots, helped him in Erie County,” said Bob Merski, a state representative whose district includes part of the county.
“A lot of the criticisms of Kamala Harris are because she’s not white and she’s a woman, yeah, and I think we — I think people say other things to make it more palatable. But that plays an influence,” he said. “Go on social media and look at any Erie political sites, you see it.”
Tom Eddy, chair of the Erie County Republican Committee, said his strategy is to focus closely on inflation and not on Trump himself to appeal to more moderate voters.
“I don’t think it’s me that gets his voters to vote for Trump, it’s Biden and Harris policies,” Eddy said.
Both Talarico and Eddy said they’re focused on Republicans in Erie’s suburbs who won’t vote for Trump. For Eddy, that means steering the conversation away from Trump and toward inflation instead.
“How many times are you going to go out to dinner with him? When are you ever going to meet Trump on a personal basis if you don’t like his personality? I try to focus on policy,” Eddy said.
But the Harris campaign in Erie is using moderate Republicans who have rejected Trump as a counterpoint to that message.
Joe Hoag has been against Trump from the start. He wrote in former Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s name in 2016. And he voted for Biden in 2020, though he said that vote was really to keep Trump out of office, not out of any love for Biden himself.
This year he’s been volunteering and knocking on doors for Harris in Millcreek, the same swing suburb outside Erie where Fuller knocked on doors for Trump last week.
Hoag said it’s been “frustrating” that some Republicans he talks with aren’t concerned about Trump on issues like Jan. 6 and protecting democracy. But his support for Harris goes beyond his anti-Trump view. He’s now working to convince other Republicans and undecided voters that Harris is the best choice on the economy as well.
“As far as policy wise,” he said, “I’m comfortable with her policies as well.”
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.