LITITZ, PA — The stakes couldn’t have been higher Sunday ahead of Donald Trump’s rally in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where Republican surrogates have laid the groundwork to turn out new voters on a message focused on the economy and immigration.
But that’s not the message Trump delivered Sunday morning. Not even close.
Instead, Trump did what he normally does: He went off script, rambling about the integrity of the upcoming election in what has unarguably become the most crucial state to win in 2024.
He said he “shouldn’t have left” the presidency when he was voted out of office. He repeatedly bashed the media in attendance, even more than a typical Trump rally. And, at one point, while noting the glass barrier separating him from the crowd at the Lancaster Airport, he noted that to shoot him, “somebody would have to shoot through the fake news.”
“And I don’t mind that so much,” Trump said.
It was a far cry from the message Trump surrogates on the ground in Lancaster have been pushing over the last few days, as former Trump administration official Peter Navarro, Rep. Byron Donalds and Trump acolyte Stephen Miller have been pushing Republicans to each get 10 more people out to the polls — preferably the low-propensity voters who either weren’t registered or didn’t vote in the last two presidential elections.
Trump’s message to those reluctant voters was different.
“If you don’t vote, you’re stupid,” he said Sunday.
It was just the latest example of Trump, in the closing days of the campaign, not staying on message — a dynamic that has people close to the former president privately expressing concern.
But some believe Trump being Trump is already baked into the election. And if that’s the case, his veering off course and saying controversial things won’t really have a huge effect at the ballot box.
“Disastrous, but it doesn’t matter at this point,” one GOP member said of Trump’s closing message over the final week. “He is who he is. The election is already decided in my opinion.”
Whether Trump’s shaky close matters, during an era of politics when supposedly “nothing matters,” is unknown at the moment. But both campaigns agree on the importance of Lancaster.
It’s the largest county that Trump won in 2020, with Trump collecting 57% of the vote (160,000 votes) and Joe Biden getting 41% (115,000 votes). Trump got more votes in Lancaster than in Philadelphia County, despite its smaller population.
Trump’s operation in Lancaster is fueled by 100 to 200 regular volunteers here. That estimate of 100 to 200 active volunteers was given to NOTUS separately by five active volunteers. The Trump campaign staff in Lancaster and the county’s GOP party chairman, Kirk Radanovic, both did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Trump campaign also did not provide any information on the number of doors volunteers knocked on this cycle.
“The turnout in Lancaster is incredibly important to a win in Pennsylvania, and of course, the president knows this. Both teams know this,” GOP Rep. Lloyd Smucker told NOTUS. “They’ve been spending a lot of time on the ground here.”
And yet, the Trump volunteers actually on the ground here suggested they’ve been doing less, not more, this election cycle.
Joyce Hottenstein, a Trump Force 47 captain who also volunteered for the Trump campaign in Lancaster County in previous cycles, said the operation this year is more relaxed.
“Back in 2020, they made us knock on thousands of doors. But this time, I just have to knock on a few and I get a reward. It’s so much more simple,” Hottenstein said.
It’s less a question of whether Trump will carry Lancaster County. He should. But in the must-win state of Pennsylvania, where polls show a race within the margin of error, by how much Trump wins in Lancaster could make all the difference.
What is clear is that Lancaster County Democrats see an opening to break into Trump’s margin.
A combination of changes — population increases in the county’s suburbs, the development of the party’s local operation, serious investment from the national campaign and the rise in independent voters who tend to vote Democratic — all factor in a turning tide.
“The most likely scenario is that we don’t flip the county and don’t get more than 50% of the vote,” said Stella Sexton, vice chair of the Lancaster County Democrats. “But we will get a lot more votes out of the county than we did last time, and it’s going to cut into his margin a lot.”
Democrats in the county knocked on 27,000 doors on Saturday alone, an all-time record for a group that, less than a decade ago, had no serious political or fundraising arm.
The question for Kamala Harris is whether a superior ground game, and a changing electorate, can really make a difference in a county like Lancaster.
Once largely rural and almost exclusively Republican, the county is now one of the fastest-growing areas in the state. New developments and duplexes jut against the farmland. The county attracts more seniors every year to its independent living facilities, which could help Trump. But since 2020 — with the rise in remote work — thousands of younger voters have also moved here from Philadelphia and its suburbs, which could help Harris.
Still, Republicans are confident about Lancaster.
“We serve as kind of the firewall, if you will,” former county GOP Chairman Dave Dumeyer said. “They don’t have to worry about Lancaster; they know who’s going to take it.”
“It’s just, is it going to be enough to offset some other areas?” he added.
Pennsylvania’s white, working-class, rural voters are both declining in numbers and becoming more diverse, according to data compiled by the Center for Rural Pennsylvania.
“It’s just about building success so that we can take advantage of the natural demographic change here, and eventually flip the county government 2027, which is the next goal,” Sexton said.
That’s a far cry from Republican County Commissioner Ray D’Agostino’s vision of Lancaster.
“This is a conservative county. It always has been, and as far as I’m concerned, it always will be,” D’Agostino told NOTUS.
D’Agostino, along with Smucker and other local Republican leaders, pointed to the surge in GOP voter registration as a sign of hope that Trump will turn out more Republican voters this time around.
Republicans have 72,000 more registered voters than Democrats in Lancaster County. But Democrats who spoke to NOTUS point to the increasing number of independent voters in the county, the majority of whom have voted for Democrats in previous years.
The Democratic strategy of “losing by less” in Lancaster and elsewhere breaks down into three core groups: the growing number of seniors, registered Republicans who don’t support Trump and the growing Latino community in the city of Lancaster and the suburbs.
Daisy Millan, vice chair of the party’s Latino Caucus, said she’s noticed a shift among the Puerto Rican community in Lancaster since Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, when comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
“I’ve heard a lot of people in the city that now tell me they’re gonna vote for Kamala,” Millan told NOTUS. “They were reluctant to vote, but now they’re gonna do it just because he insulted us.”
State Rep. Ismail Smith-Wade-El, who represents part of the city of Lancaster, has also organized a Black and Latino paid canvassing program separate from the Harris campaign, particularly targeting low-propensity voters in the city. He pointed to the 2020 vote totals that showed overperformance among Latino and Black voters in central Pennsylvania towns like Lancaster and York compared to the turnout in Philadelphia.
“The path to the White House runs through central Pennsylvania,” he said. “Just as some people are unaware that there are Black and brown folks here in Lancaster County, I think central Pennsylvania is coming into the level of political relevance it deserves.”
But if minority voters are essential to Democrats making progress in Lancaster, older voters are key to Republicans. Democrats are keenly aware of it.
The senior caucus of the county Democratic Party first launched in 2022, and now every senior living facility in the county has a representative on the caucus to organize in areas that traditional party organizers haven’t usually reached. The group is largely led by senior women, a group that polls show are more likely to back Harris than Trump.
But Democrats are also trying to make progress with Republicans.
Ann Womble, a co-chair of the statewide Republican Voters for Harris group, is the former GOP county chairwoman in Lancaster. She told NOTUS that the group’s outreach shows that about 10% of registered Republicans across Pennsylvania will vote for Harris. (In the GOP primary of April 2023, 20% of all registered Republican votes in Lancaster County were for Nikki Haley.)
“Even though this is considered a red area, we have a large number of professionals here that have moved to Lancaster County,” Womble said. “They bring with them their Republican registration, but certainly do not identify with the MAGA version of the Republican Party.”
Womble said Trump was as much a cultural phenomenon as a political one.
“There will be people that turn out for that reason,” she told NOTUS. “But as much as he drives certain new and low-propensity voters to the polls, he drives certain voters to the polls to vote against him as well.”
“Especially white women,” she added.
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
Reese Gorman, who is a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.