How Kamala Harris Could Beat Donald Trump in Pennsylvania

With two months until the election, things are heating up in the swing states, and one expert told Newsweek what he thinks it will take for Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris to win in Pennsylvania.
Millions of dollars are being splashed on fundraising, hundreds of volunteers are being hired, and both candidates are traveling the length and width of the country in an effort to pick up votes.
One state in particular where the candidates are focusing their efforts is Pennsylvania. Trump is expected to air a pre-recorded townhall speech for voters in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, today after visiting Johnstown on Wednesday—one of several visits he has made to the state this month after he was shot at during a rally on July 13 in Butler, narrowly avoiding death.
His visit followed an appearance by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden in Pennsylvania on Labor Day.
With 19 Electoral College votes, the battleground state is a critical one that a candidate needs to win in the presidential race. And polls have indicated that Harris is currently ahead in Pennsylvania, having evaporated Trump’s lead when she became the candidate in July.
But recent polling suggests Harris’s lead in the state may be narrowing.
The latest surveys conducted by Wick and Emerson College between August 25 and 29 showed Harris and Trump tied in Pennsylvania. Another recent survey by Trafalgar Group showed the former president 2 points ahead in the battleground state.
Meanwhile, the RealClearPolitics poll tracker shows Harris is only 0.3 points ahead in Pennsylvania, while the Economist’s poll tracker shows she is 0.1 points ahead, and pollster Nate Silver’s model shows the Republicans have gained 0.5 points in the polls in Pennsylvania in the last week.
“If she’s only tied in Pennsylvania now, during what should be one of her stronger polling periods, that implies being a slight underdog in November,” Silver wrote in his Silver Bulletin newsletter, adding that his model would have expected Harris to see a 2 point bump nationally in the polls following the DNC.
However, her post-DNC bump was just 1.2 points according to Silver’s model, which he partly attributes to her underperformance in Pennsylvania—a critical battleground state likely to be the tipping point in the election, determining who secures the crucial 270th Electoral College vote.
Newsweek has contacted the Trump and Harris campaigns for comment via email.
To ensure that Pennsylvania delivers Harris a victory, Robert Speel, Associate Professor of Political Science at Penn State University, told Newsweek that she needs to avoid making the same mistakes as her predecessor, Hillary Clinton, who lost the state in 2016.
“One key goal of the Harris campaign if she wants to win Pennsylvania is to not repeat the mistakes that the Hillary Clinton campaign made in 2016 when she lost Pennsylvania,” he said.
“While the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh metro areas are the two largest in the state by far, they only contain about half of the state’s population. In 2016, Clinton herself campaigned almost exclusively in the two big metro areas and ignored much of the rest of the state, for example never visiting Erie County where I live. Trump did visit Erie and many of Pennsylvania’s smaller cities during the 2016 campaign, and Biden visited Erie in 2020 before winning the county,” Speel added.
So far, Harris has only visited Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, Trump has visited Johnstown, Butler, Wilkes-Barre and York.
As well as reaching out to other parts of the state, Speel said that Harris needs to focus on balancing her positions so she can appeal to a wide cross-section of voters across Pennsylvania.
“Harris also needs to balance her issue positions, as she already seems to be trying to do, between differing opinions in different parts of the state. For example, fracking is important to the economies of parts of the southwest and north central parts of the state, but many people in the Philadelphia area and other parts of the state probably oppose fracking,” he said.
In an interview with CNN last week, Harris sparked backlash when she appeared to reverse her stance on fracking, having previously supported a national ban on the practice in 2019, she told CNN’s Dana Bash that she would not ban fracking as president.
“No, and I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020, that I would not ban fracking, as vice president I did not ban fracking and as president I will not ban fracking,” she said, adding that she has not changed her position, “nor will I going forward.”
While recent polls have given Trump a lead, poll trackers still show Harris ahead in Pennsylvania. For example, FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker shows she is 1.2 points ahead, on 46.2 percent to Trump’s 45 percent.
Meanwhile, FiveThirtyEight’s election forecast model shows the Democrats are projected to win the swing state by 0.7 points.
However, although Harris is in the lead, she may still not win in November if she fails to win over voters older than 65, who make up just under 20 percent of the population in Pennsylvania, according to pollster and Democratic political strategist Celinda Lake.
“It is a little bit more conservative than most of the polls that were seeing, but I think Pennsylvania is really tight, and there’s other battleground states that have been moving in Harris’ direction. This has been one that is a little more resistant,” Lake told the 2Way podcast.
“Pennsylvania is the oldest of the battleground states…so that age distribution works against Harris,” she said.
Nonetheless, Speel is still optimistic about Harris’ chances in the state.
“Right now, the momentum seems to be with the Harris campaign. Her candidacy has excited younger voters, especially women, in urban and suburban areas,” he said.
“But we still have two months before the election, with opportunities for conditions to change based on debate performances, newly revealed scandals, or verbal errors.”
Pennsylvania has voted Democrat in seven of the past eight presidential elections, going for the Republican candidate only in 2016, when Trump won by a narrow margin of 0.7 percent.