Why Pennsylvania is ultimate swing state
Of the seven swing states, Pennsylvania is, by far, the swingiest
There are basically seven swing states that will determine the course of this pivotal election in American history. Those states are: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin and the all-important Pennsylvania. Arizona has 11 electoral college votes; Michigan has 15 electoral college votes; Nevada has 6 electoral college votes; Georgia has 16 electoral college votes; North Carolina has 16 electoral college votes; Wisconsin has 10 electoral college votes; Pennsylvania has 19 electoral college votes. Politico this morning makes the compelling claim that, in fact, there are only three swing states — Georgia, North Carolina and, of course, Pennsylvania. Always: Pennsylvania.
AdAge calls Pennsylvania “the center of the 2024 universe.” They note that Harris/Walz has already spent $188 million and of that $81 million in the Philadelphia ad market alone (add to that sum $45 million in the Pittsburgh market). That is, we cannot fail to note, greater than the GDP of Tuvalu. (Averted Gaze) And while we are not at all fans of these enormous funds spent on our political system and the corruptions as well as the beholdenness that all that entails — here we are, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. In the gladiatorial fundament. The Casey-McCormick Senate race in the Keystone state is breaking records as well. To add to the almost surreal, hyper-competitive importance of Pennsylvania in this election cycle is the fact that both Casey and McCormick have been on the airwaves in dueling ad spends since March!
I am old enough to remember when Missouri, not Pennsylvania, was the perennial American swing state. That seems now, with Trump’s 2016 storming of The Blue Wall, a thing of remote antiquity. Quaint. With the exception of 1956, the state of Missouri voted for the winner in all U.S. Presidential elections from 1904 to 2004, securing its status as the great American swing state for most of my politically-obsessed childhood. Barack Obama in 2008 altered that reality significantly. “In 2008, (Missouri as the bellwether state) ended when Barack Obama lost to John McCain by the slenderest of margins, 49.4% to 49.3%, or about 3,900 votes out of 2.93 million cast,” says 270towin. Former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, loyal to the end, stuck by the President in 2012 and suffered the political consequences. 2020 in the intervening years marked the 6th consecutive Republican win in the state during election cycles. And the abortion rights referendum on the 2024 ballot notwithstanding, Missouri is almost certainly ruby-red once again.
The pendulum swings. And Pennsylvania, post-Trump, is a far better bellwether predictor than Missouri of our present political age. Of the seven swing states that were mentioned above, Pennsylvania has also the most electoral college votes and so it is the biggest prize. Also, its demographic makeup — largely white, Christian, non-college — mirrors the other Blue Wall states, making it a reliable gage of the region. And in both 2016 and 2020, the state anticipated the eventual Presidential contest’s victor, with a less than two percent difference each time. From Alauna Safarpour at The Conversation:
In 2020, Pennsylvania was decided for Democrat Joe Biden by about 1.16 percentage points, which translates to 80,555 votes.
That’s a small margin, but it was not even among the top three closest states that cycle. Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia were all decided by even smaller margins. North Carolina, Nevada and Michigan were also very close, though not quite as close as Pennsylvania.
The poverty rate in Pennsylvania, according to the US census, is 12 percent. That is down, slightly, from its peak in 2011, where it was 13.8 percent. That having been said, there are many counties — like Wilkes-Barre, Clairton, Lebanon and Titusville — where poverty rates are above 20%. Shamokin, for example, has a 35% poverty rate. And these areas, like Butler County, are Republican strongholds. The inflation argument that the Trump campaign is making holds significant resonance in these counties. The success of the Trump message in those counties is not unlikely the success of that message exported to rural counties in North Carolina and Wisconsin.
According to Mediaradar/CMAG data supplied to Silver Oak, the common advertising themes in Pennsylvania are: Public safety, the economy and immigration. Which sounds about right. The fact that violent crime is down nationwide and the economy rebounding nicely for some, admittedly, is largely missed in counties like Norristown. The danger, of course, is that a message that holds resonance in a white, largely rural Pennsylvania county could also work in Wisconsin and, presumably, even in Michigan where Trump campaigned this week.
Demographics, it has been said, are Destiny. It should be noted that in 2020, nearly 3.4 million people, or about 26 percent of the Pennsylvania’s 13 million residents lived in the state’s 48 rural counties. And we are witnessing here, in real-time, racial as well as economically-exaggerated messaging. That having been said, it is testament to the robust engine that is the Harris campaign that they have not conceded the economy to Trump and, in the latest Quinnipiac poll, have actually risen against Trump on the issue to within a statistical dead heat. So there’s that, also.
Harris, at present, is up by a bit in the Keystone state, but with the margin of error the two are essentially tied. And, so, of course, Trump has targeted Charleroi, Pennsylvania with his racist anti-Haitian message. In retrospect, it seems that Springfield, Ohio was the experimental testing ground of this irresponsible and bigoted strategy, calculated to appeal to our animal nature. “Charleroi, what a beautiful name, but it’s not so beautiful now, it has experienced a 2,000 percent increase in population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris,” Trump said at a rally in Tuscon, Arizona last week. “This is a small town and all of a sudden they’ve got thousands of people. The schools are scrambling to hire translators for the influx of students who don’t speak a word of English, costing local taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.” The borough manager of Charleroi, Joe Manning, told the Philadelphia Inquirer (via TNR): “It’s no different than, you know, people moved to here from Tucson, Arizona, you’d have to deal with it.”
Tell that to Trump/Vance! The cynicism of such a strategy — to blame an ethnic minority with little clout — is as old as authoritarianism itself. Blaming minorities, immigrants, and ‘outsiders’ for a country’s — or, more specifically, a county’s — problems, while at the same time promising to restore national glory is straight out of the dictator-manqué playbook. Idi Amin of Uganda, for example, used to blame the Indians, who had a negligible population, in the process of the consolidating of his power. We are well acquainted with the dehumanizing strategies of would-be tyrants; of the darkness that they conjure. Pennsylvania, we cannot fail to note, lost 308,676 manufacturing jobs from 1994 to the present, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics. Is rural Pennsylvania receptive to such a cynical strategy?
There are some pundits — like John Heilemann — who think that Vice President Harris should have gone with Governor Josh Shapiro. They consider the Pennsylvania Governor to be the closest thing to a “sure thing” in the all-important swing state, with higher national favorability ratings than Governor Tim Walz. And while national favorability ratings will continue to diminish in importance as Governor Walz introduces himself to the American public, it should be noted that Shapiro also happens to be unusually popular in Pennsylvania. Further, Shapiro showed potential strength among Republican voters in this swingiest of states, according to Harrison Cann of City & State Pennsylvania:
Shapiro beat Republican gubernatorial candidate and Trump-aligned state Sen. Doug Mastriano in the 2022 race for governor by nearly 15 percentage points, a landslide significantly larger than Biden's margin in his 2020 win over Trump.
A poll released this past May showed that about 57% of Pennsylvanians strongly or somewhat approve of Shapiro’s leadership, while Biden had a 38% approval rating. Shapiro’s approval among Republicans was 42% as well, including more than a third of former Trump voters approving of his job performance.
However, it was not to be. Look back upon the past and wonder what might have been at one’s own peril. Walz, it is.
The 90-minute Walz-Vance debate will take place on CBS News on October 1 at 9PM. It may be, if we are to take Trump at his word (and good luck with that), the last debate in this Presidential contest that may or may not determine the future of this evolving nation. It will be, for all intents and purposes, a debate on the future of America aimed at the rural American audience. The author of Hillbilly Elegy will no doubt appeal to rural America in the only way that he knows how, which is to wag his well-manicured finger at liberals as well as to demonize immigrants. But will that resonate in the hearts of rural Pennsylvania? Walz, by contrast, will almost definitely lean into the things that kept him getting re-elected in Minnesota’s red leaning First district. Walz has a solid record of accomplishments — from investments in education and infrastructure; the expansion of worker rights and the protection of reproductive freedom.
In closing, if this is indeed the last debate of this election, this Midwestern dad from a blue wall state will be tasked with making the closing argument on what a Harris administration is hoping to accomplish. Walz will be met by Vance, whose cynical strategy of ethnic demonization and cultural distraction will be aimed at maximizing the white, rural, non-college vote by appealing to their lowest natures. If Governor Walz’s earthy optimism prevails, we will probably see it in the results in Pennsylvania, that most swingiest of swing states.
Heaven help us if he does not.
“In the immediate aftermath of the attack, as surveillance videos showing sudden explosions and victims laid out on the ground circulated across social media, it wasn’t entirely clear how the attack had been carried out. But within hours, Reuters was reporting that up to three grams of explosive material were hidden inside devices that looked like AP924 pagers sold under the name of Taiwanese firm Gold Apollo and manufactured under license by a Hungarian company. The devices were apparently designed to be triggered by an incoming message. Somehow, Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, managed to infiltrate the supply chain and booby-trap the pagers that Hezbollah purchased as an alternative to cell phones, an undertaking that must have required not just imagination and skill but also patience. ‘Israel is demonstrating that it can identify and target members of Hezbollah regardless of their location or position in the organization. This is indicative (again) of a sophisticated Israeli intelligence apparatus, which despite its failures leading up to the October 7 Hamas massacres can execute complex and audacious attacks,’ writes retired Australian Army general Mick Ryan in The Interpreter.” (Jeff Wise/The Intelligencer)
“With a certain liberal arrogance, many took a racist fabrication from Donald Trump at last week’s Presidential debate to be the evening’s crowning gaffe. In the Rust Belt town of Springfield, Ohio, ‘they’re eating the dogs. . . . They’re eating the cats. . . . They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,’ Trump said. The pronoun in question referred to Springfield’s Haitian community, and the claim repeated a conspiracy theory that had been circulating on the right-wing Internet, channelling the centuries-long persecution of Haitians and West Indians. Not that it mattered—Trump’s comment was an instant bipartisan hit. As Springfield residents have retreated from much of ordinary life this week amid threats of violence, including bomb threats to schools and hospitals, social media has been flooded with upbeat videos of perplexed-seeming pets ‘reacting’ to Trump’s remarks. His words have been placed next to images of Snowball and Santa’s Little Helper, the cat and dog from ‘The Simpsons’ (set in Springfield, U.S.A.); the audio has been remixed into a danceable beat. Trump supporters, meanwhile, have used their own memes to play up the notion of Trump as a crusader for the nation’s furry friends with slogans like ‘SAVE PETS VOTE TRUMP’ and related imagery, almost certainly generated by a text-to-image program like DALL-E, such as one animation showing Trump jogging toward the viewer with a cat on either biceps while a computer’s approximation of Black people chase behind. These images’ authors and their audiences have not forgotten the goal of stoking anti-immigration sentiment, even if other posters, engrossed in winning attention with snapshots of their real-life pets, have.” (Lauren Michele Michaels/TNY)