Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (L) and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
Credit: Reuters Photo
In a park in northern York County, Pennsylvania, where rural farmland bangs into new suburban construction, busloads of Democratic canvassers on Saturday were preparing to knock on doors in a region where not long ago, their voters scarcely existed.
Among the fired-up faithful, the watchword for Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential ambitions was hope.
"As tight as the race is, as ugly as it's gotten, I do have hope," Stephanie Cramer, a 53-year-old York County native and former teacher, said as she was heading out for another day of canvassing.
Thirty-four miles to the north, at a "tailgate" party in the back room of Arooga's Grille House near Hershey, Rep. Scott Perry, a close ally of Donald Trump, was more than just hopeful about the former president's chances of winning, especially in the biggest, most important swing state of the 2024 campaign.
"The vice president's campaign is in free fall," he pronounced, as Penn State scored an early touchdown against Ohio State and the Republican crowd cheered, with one eye on the congressman, the other on the big screens.
"They're abandoning states like Arizona and Nevada," he continued, which is not true. "They're trying to shore up whatever is left of this 'blue wall,' but it's going to crumble in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night."
And so it goes in the state that long ago, both Harris and Trump identified as the must-win, and where more money and manpower have been directed than any other battleground. On election eve, both sides say they are cautiously optimistic. And in typical fashion, the Republicans are playing up the optimism, the Democrats the caution.
It is a measure of Pennsylvania's importance that both candidates will spend their last day of campaigning blitzing the state. Harris will begin a door-knocking effort in Scranton. Then, aiming at voters still smarting from a pro-Trump comedian calling Puerto Rico "garbage," the vice president will hold a rally in Allentown featuring two Puerto Rican entertainers. She'll stop by Reading, then close out with rallies in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. (Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is campaigning in Wisconsin and Michigan.)
Trump will hold rallies in Reading and Pittsburgh, while his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, closes his campaign in the Philadelphia suburb of Newtown.
"This election, in your state, could turn on a few hundred votes," Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., practically shouted at a gathering of Black men on Friday in Harrisburg, at Crawdaddy's Restaurant, in the shadow of the state Capitol. "We have the power."
With the state tied according to polls, Republicans say the winner will be determined by enthusiasm, an edge they say Trump has. Democrats, who insist they are plenty motivated, say Harris will bring it home on grit and ground game.
"This is just sweat equity now," said Michelle Milan McFall, chair of the Democratic Party of Westmoreland County, a redoubt of Trumpism in western Pennsylvania where, nonetheless, Democrats were mounting an all-out effort to cut into the former president's margins.
The final New York Times/Siena College poll published Sunday found Pennsylvania knotted at 48% of the vote for Harris and Trump. But beneath that tie were trends to buoy both sides. Just about 20% of Pennsylvania voters have already cast their ballots, far lower than other battleground states, where close to half have.
The vice president is winning those early votes by a vast margin, 65% to 31%. But Trump is narrowly ahead among the 56% of the state who say they are almost certain to vote but haven't, 50% to 47%. He is far ahead among the remaining quarter of voters who are less certain they will bother.
At the same time, late deciders -- a critical 6% -- seem to be heading Harris' way. Voters who said they made up their minds in the past few weeks are siding with her, 53% to 45%.
All of that sets up a 13-hour stretch in Pennsylvania on Tuesday that could well determine the next president.
Brendan McPhillips, a senior Harris campaign official in the state, said the effort in Pennsylvania was built for this moment: to persuade, to get out the early vote, and now, to make sure the vice president's last voters get to the polls Tuesday. Canvassers for Harris knocked on 800,000 doors on Saturday alone, the campaign said, talking to 293,000 people.
On Friday afternoon in downtown Mercer, Pennsylvania, Judy Hines, 75, was handing out signs to people who stopped by the new Democratic satellite office, which recently opened in a former bank building. Trump won Mercer County, in rural western Pennsylvania, by more than 25 percentage points in 2020, and Hines said his supporters seemed as invigorated as ever.
But busloads of Democratic volunteers have been coming in from Ohio, New York and other parts of Pennsylvania to knock on doors. A man from Texas canvassed for hours. The Democratic campaign presence here in Mercer County, Hines said, was "larger, much, much larger" than any she had seen before.
Some Republicans allowed that they weren't keeping pace in their locales.
"The party is engaged," said Kermit Bell, secretary of the Lebanon County GOP in south-central Pennsylvania. "But I can tell you this -- sometimes we do drop the ball."
Trump campaign officials dismissed the significance of the Democratic operation, because, they say, more Pennsylvanians want to elect Trump than Harris. The Republicans' get-out-the-vote effort is diffuse, spread among the Trump campaign, the conservative youth group Turning Point Action, and America PAC, a super political action committee affiliated with Elon Musk. Republicans have had to take it on faith that in combination, the groups were having an impact, but the Trump campaign didn't seem bothered by that.
Four years, ago, a senior Trump campaign aide said, Democrats had a 685,000-voter advantage in party registration. That is down to 280,000, with key counties like Luzerne and Bucks flipping from majority Democratic registrations to majority Republican.
And, he said, it's showing in the early vote, where Democrats have a 23-point lead, down from 44 points in the pandemic year of 2020 but also way down from the 49-point lead of 2022, when Democrats won the governor's race and a Senate contest.
"One thing that infrastructure can't do or manufacture is enthusiasm," said Sam DeMarco, a Republican and an at-large member of the County Council in Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh sits. DeMarco believed that the unhappiness over inflation runs too deep in Pennsylvania for the Democrats to overcome.
With the race so close, neither side is willing to concede that the other is more enthusiastic. Both believe they have the right message to win the day. Voters have identified the economy as their top concern, said Malcolm Kenyatta, a Democratic state representative running for the statewide office of auditor general, but in the closing days of the campaign, Trump has been focused on everything but those kitchen-table issues.
At a rally on Sunday in Lititz, outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the former president went on an extended tear accusing the "demonic" Democrats of plotting to rig Tuesday's vote and repeating the lie that he won in 2020, saying he "shouldn't have left" the White House.
"There's something wrong with him," Kenyatta said, contrasting Trump's message with assurances from Harris that her policies would bring down the cost of groceries, underwrite entrepreneurship and help Pennsylvanians buy homes.
Both parties pointed to Greater Philadelphia as the ultimate deciding ground on Tuesday. And this time, Republicans believe they are battling back in the suburbs, where the Democratic firewall is supposed to be at its strongest. At a rally at a sports center in an upscale part of Bucks County, party officials boasted of substantially narrowing the gap in mail-in ballot requests and registrations.
These gains, Lawrence Tabas, the chair of the state party, said to the crowd, were "an indication that voters in Pennsylvania have lost faith in the Democrats."
Democrats are quick to point out that an early Republican vote from the Main Line Philly suburbs isn't necessarily a vote for Trump. Harris has mobilized Republican surrogates like former Rep. Liz Cheney in a pointed campaign to persuade Republicans to vote for Harris, making a plea for cross-party support at an event last month in Bucks County.
Even so, Democrats know they have to turn out voters at record levels in Philadelphia. Tuesday will see armies of canvassers, fleets of vans to drive people to the polls and a blizzard of phone calls in the city, Harris campaign officials said.
In a former beauty supply store on a street in working-class West Philadelphia, the canvassers of One Pennsylvania, a progressive nonprofit that focuses on organizing the Black working class, were gathering Saturday afternoon for yet another round of door knocking.
Steve Paul, the group's executive director, said people with his organization had knocked on nearly 630,000 doors in multiple counties, hosted at least half a dozen parties and made around 1.7 million phone calls.
This has meant putting in long days for several months, but Paul sounded the same note heard from Democrats across the commonwealth: cautious optimism.
"I cannot not not be optimistic with as much work as we've put in," he said, laughing. "Look, we've talked to every person we could talk to. We've talked to them multiple times. We've done everything we can."
Back at Arooga's Grille House in central Pennsylvania, Perry, who faces a stiff challenge from Janelle Stelson, a newscaster turned Democratic House candidate, looked on as Penn State dominated Ohio State early on Saturday, satisfied the game between the two Top 10 teams might not even be close in the end.
Likewise, Pennsylvania might not end up all that close either, he said.
"Here's the thing, dude," he said, "it doesn't matter whether you live in the city, the suburbs or the country. If you can't afford to pay your bills and you're afraid to go outside at night, or have your kids walk to school, like, those things are universal."
But in Pennsylvania, no one really knows. Ultimately, Penn State lost.