READING, PA — Rob Gleason thinks he knows why former President Donald Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016, the only Republican presidential candidate to do so in the last 36 years.
“In ’15, when I first met him, he said, ‘Well, how do I win Pennsylvania?’ I said, ‘You have to go there a lot,’” Gleason told NOTUS on Monday.
The former chairman of the Pennsylvania GOP had been in charge of the state party for a decade, building up an operation that could meet the moment when the right candidate came around. He found it in Trump.
“I told the same thing to McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012, that you need to come, that the people in Pennsylvania want to see you, they want to press the flesh,” Gleason said of the two previous GOP nominees. “But they didn’t come. Romney got close, but he didn’t come here the way you need to come to win.”
By the 2020 election, Gleason had stepped down. He said the Pennsylvania GOP wasn’t as strong as it had been in 2016, and he said the Trump campaign had a “poor operation” in the state. A weaker operation, along with shifting demographics, all led to Trump’s downfall in 2020.
But Gleason is now bullish, believing Trump will win the state by 2 or 3 points this time. He still doesn’t think the Pennsylvania GOP has improved from four years ago, but he sees a difference in Trump and his orbit. He thinks that will push him over the edge.
“He’s back again. He’s going to get his now,” Gleason said. “He’s going to get elected, and maybe Pennsylvania will be — will now be a real swing state.”
Few Republican or Democratic operatives based in Pennsylvania who spoke to NOTUS shared Gleason’s confidence. But all had the same assessment of the race: As goes Pennsylvania, so goes the nation.
Both candidates have spent more time on the ground here, invested more money and sent more surrogates and staff to Pennsylvania than any other state. Over $1.2 billion has been spent on ads in Pennsylvania — the first time in history a single state has ever topped $1 billion.
Pennsylvania has also been the site of the presidential campaign’s most defining moments. Harris launched her presidential bid alongside Gov. Tim Walz in Philadelphia and, on Monday night, held her last rally of the campaign there. The only presidential debate between the two was held in Philadelphia. And then there was Butler, where a gunman attempted to assassinate Trump, redefining the race and reshaping American politics.
But for all the money spent, for all the campaign stops, poll after poll has maintained that the state remains too close to call. The pathway to victory, for either candidate, is almost insurmountable — though not impossible — without the state’s 19 electoral votes.
The Trump campaign has focused efforts on maximizing the turnout of its base, particularly among rural, non-college-educated voters — a group that has declined in size since the 2016 election. Voter outreach efforts beyond the base have largely zoned in on low-propensity voters, those who either did not vote or were not registered to vote in past elections.
From largely rural regions like Lancaster County and the area surrounding Penn State to working-class cities like Erie and Pittsburgh, local GOP organizers have told NOTUS their outreach efforts have been targeted at those low-propensity voters, which have been largely outsourced to organizations like Elon Musk’s America PAC and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA.
At the same time, the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania is touting record numbers of volunteers and doors knocked.
On Saturday afternoon, the campaign said volunteers were knocking on 2,000 doors per minute at its height, with a total of 807,000 knocked in Pennsylvania that day alone. The Harris campaign has run a largely traditional campaign operation, with coordinated campaign offices and staff in over 50 offices across the state.
“I guess we’re going to find out what works better, just trying to sort of get up enough outrage to get people to vote, or, you know, doing the things that winning campaigns have done for decades,” Pennsylvania Democratic strategist J.J. Abbott told NOTUS.
But for all the enthusiasm and dollars Harris has infused into the race, for all the doubts that were erased and polls that were flipped when President Joe Biden exited the race, there’s still a lingering doubt hanging over Pennsylvania.
Biden didn’t just win Pennsylvania in 2020 off a better performance in the suburbs; he also courted many rank-and-file union voters in working-class areas across the state. Some Democrats doubt whether Harris will be able to keep their vote, despite her pro-union record as vice president.
“There is an argument to be made that picking a liberal California senator is not the right choice to appeal in Pennsylvania, and it’s possible that she doesn’t fully grasp the kind of fundamental difference in the labor movement and the kind of fundamental nature of organized labor in Pennsylvania,” one Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist told NOTUS.
From the start of her campaign, Harris has taken a “big tent” approach, courting moderate Republicans who are reluctant to vote for Trump, while also engaging younger voters and minorities in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and the suburbs.
“She’s pursuing a bunch of paths to increase her margins in different ways. He seems to be kind of, like, turning off the wrong voters while having to bank on some of the most difficult voters to turn out,” Abbott said.
While the campaign has invested in “losing by less” in the rural swaths of central and western Pennsylvania, her pathway to victory or loss in the state largely comes down to turnout in the cities and “collar counties” that once voted Republican but are trending bluer every cycle.
Ann Womble, co-chair of the state’s Republican Voters for Harris group, told NOTUS that her group estimates that about 10% of registered Republicans will vote for Harris.
“Our message has been about persuading Republicans that, if you’re dissatisfied with Trump, if you’re disaffected from the current MAGA version of the Republican Party, then it’s vitally important they actually vote Harris, not just to write in a name or not vote,” Womble said.
It’s impossible to say which group of the electorate could decide the state that Trump won by 44,000 votes in 2016 and Biden won by 80,000 in 2020. Both campaigns see this race coming down to turnout, and both insist the momentum is on their side.
“In 2020, we just didn’t think Joe Biden could pull it off, and we just felt Trump was gonna roll. So in a way, we were caught sleeping, doing things the traditional way,” GOP Rep. Dan Meuser told NOTUS on Sunday.
This time around, Meuser said the operation has changed completely.
“We’ve trained thousands of poll workers. We have teams, thousands of people, following up on mail-in ballots, knocking on doors, calling people, chasing down those mail-in ballots, low-propensity voters,” he said. “It’s not just running TV ads and kissing babies.”
For all the Republican enthusiasm over increased mail-in ballot returns and all the Democratic enthusiasm around dollars raised and doors knocked, Pennsylvania remains a true swing state. Trump won in 2016, while Democrats took state row offices. And in 2020, Biden won the state while Republicans took two of three statewide offices.
Pennsylvania GOP strategist Jeff Coleman warned that, with all the variables in the air, neither 2016 nor 2020 can predict what will happen here in 2024.
“Anybody that pretends to understand the riddle of how Pennsylvania will turn out is operating under assumptions that have too many question marks and blind spots,” Coleman said. “No past election is going to predict the outcome of this one.”
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.