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In PA Tour, Trump Hits All the Right Places & Messages
The 'Crazy LNG' Pause Just Got Worse
Luzerne County Is Ground Zero in PA's Rightward Shift
A New PA Voter Is Motivated by Economic Circumstances
JOHNSTOWN, Pennsylvania—Former President Donald Trump said in an interview with the Washington Examiner that his message to undecided voters in Pennsylvania ahead of the Nov. 5 general election is that his second administration would bring prosperity to Pennsylvanians through commonsense approaches to energy, border security, and strengthening manufacturing.
“We are going to bring the cost down on energy, and that is going to bring down the cost of everything,” Trump said.
The former president added that he wants voters to know he would take the country to a better place, not just on costs but on the massive influx of illegal immigrants who have crossed the southern border since the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration.
Data from the Department of Homeland Security showed encounters with illegal immigrants at the southern border soared after President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris entered the White House in January 2021, with at least 6.5 million migrants crossing the border in that time frame.
“They have taken over our cities,” Trump said of illegal aliens in reference to the increase in crime in the United States.
Trump was in Johnstown, a once-mighty manufacturing city in Cambria County, just after Harris sat down with CNN host Dana Bash for her first interview in the 39 days since Biden was pushed out of the race and Harris was named the Democratic presidential nominee.
In the interview, Harris dismissed the notion that she would ban fracking and stated that she said so in her debate with then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2020. But a quick read of the transcript shows Harris only said Biden would not ban fracking. She did not mention her viewpoint.
Harris followed up her fracking claim with Bash by quickly saying her values on climate change have remained the same.
Trump questioned why, if Harris is so supportive of fracking, she hasn’t lifted the pause on exports of liquid natural gas that Biden placed on the industry.
“I would lift that immediately,” Trump said. “I would get rid of everything that she’s done.”
Trump said Harris is accountable for everything that has happened in the Biden-Harris administration, especially because Biden made a point of saying Harris was always the last person in the room with him on big and small decisions.
“Oh, she is totally accountable. She sat in every meeting. She was responsible for what happened in Afghanistan,” Trump said of America’s chaotic exit.
“I look forward to debating her,” he added after watching her interview.
Within minutes after the Examiner interview, Trump walked onto the stage at the Cambria County War Memorial Arena, where the iconic hockey Paul Newman movie “Slap Shot” was filmed, and spoke to a packed crowd of supporters. Outside, a screen was set up for the overflow crowd that filled several blocks of the main street leading to the arena.
Trump began by saying, “Starting on Day One, I will seal the border. We will halt the invasion and deport the illegals.”
He went on to say he would cut regulations that started under the Biden-Harris administration, unleash American energy production, cut consumer energy bills in half, and make the country a more affordable place to live.
Two days earlier, his vice presidential pick, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, was in Erie County, New York. A week before that, Vance was in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. Trump has also been to Pennsylvania’s Luzerne, York, and Dauphin counties, all in an effort to shore up votes in the post-industrial communities outside the major cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
Harris has been to Western Pennsylvania twice. The first time, she visited one of her campaign field offices in Beaver County and held a small, invite-only rally with union members at the airport. The second visit was on Labor Day, when she joined Biden at another invite-only rally with approximately 500 people at a union hall in Pittsburgh.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, visited Erie County on Sept. 5.
To date, Walz’s only interview was the joint one he did Aug. 29 with Harris on CNN. The former high school teacher faced criticism in that interview for claiming “his grammar isn’t always good” when trying to explain why he falsely said he had been in combat. Walz was never deployed in a war zone; however, he was deployed to Italy.
Trump held a town hall Sept. 5 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, hosted by Sean Hannity and Fox News. Harris returned to Pittsburgh to prepare for her debate with Trump, making a public appearance Saturday.
Between 1992 and 2016, every Democratic candidate running for president won Pennsylvania. In 1996, then-President Bill Clinton won by capturing 28 of the state’s 67 counties.
What was missed between that year and 2012 was that the state was slowly moving right by 0.04 percentage points every four years. Then-President Barack Obama won Pennsylvania in 2012 by carrying only 13 of the state’s 67 counties.
In 2016, the next Republican nominee only had to gin up approximately 2,000 more votes in the 10 rural, post-industrial counties such as Luzerne, Erie, Cambria, and Westmoreland. It didn’t matter what happened in the heavily populated counties of Allegheny and Philadelphia.
Instead, what mattered was the counties that Hillary Clinton, former secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee, failed to visit.
Trump went on to win the 2016 presidential election by gaining those counties. The fact that Pennsylvania had been trending right wasn’t the only thing missed. The coalitions of both parties had changed.
Obama had shed the New Deal Democrats from his coalition in 2012, which is why he won the state by fewer voters than he did in 2008. And Trump’s constant talk about the dignity of work and showing up in places no candidate typically does paid off.
Four years later, Biden picked off just enough of those heirloom Democrats to narrowly defeat Trump in 2020.
Polling shows Trump and Harris in a statistical tie in Pennsylvania. At this same time in 2016 and 2020, both Hillary Clinton and Biden held leads over Trump, with Clinton eventually losing to him in Pennsylvania and Biden barely winning the state.
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The post In Pennsylvania, Trump Vows to Hold Harris Accountable and Take Country to Better Place appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Kamala Harris' Choice: Divisiveness, Spiced Up
ERIE, Pennsylvania—The chaser last Wednesday in Sen. JD Vance’s, R-Ohio, trip to this all-important county in the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania came when the Republican vice presidential nominee said Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris can “go to hell” for her handling of the 2021 attack at Abbey Gate in the final days of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Harris, for her part, has claimed that she was the last person in the room when Biden made the decision that led to the death of 13 American soldiers.
It was a decision that Harris pointedly said she was “comfortable with.”
Vance said that if he was going to discuss any questions related to Abbey Gate, “It’s that Kamala Harris is so asleep at the wheel that she won’t even do an investigation into what happened, and she wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up. … She can go to hell.”
His remarks came in response to a reporter’s question about an alleged incident that occurred when former President Donald Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery with family members of those who were killed in the attack.
While the “go to hell” quip made headlines, it was all the other things Vance did last Wednesday and the groundswell of support he received that are important in understanding where voters’ sentiments lie toward either ticket.
While the national audience read about Afghanistan, what was not written but will definitely be talked about by voters in Erie was Vance’s well-received off-the-cuff speech at Team Hardinger, a local logistics and trucking company, where he talked about the dignity of work and the importance of community.
It was a speech that connected so well with those in attendance that one woman wondered out loud where the heck his teleprompter was, to which Vance quipped, “Ma’am, I don’t need a teleprompter. I’ve actually got thoughts in my head, unlike Kamala Harris.”
There was also nothing written about his visit to Firestone’s Kitchen, located at Gordon’s Butcher Shop, where one of the cooks, Mark Spagel, gave the former Marine a beer after everyone around the bar asked Vance to join the group in a toast.
An ice cold beer he downed to cheers.
The standard narrative coming from the national media is that Vance is weird, that he doesn’t connect with Midwest voters, that Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., is everybody’s father and coach, and “Oh look, he wears plaid,” because that is what the national media is writing.
Or they are writing about one incident in which a woman became uncomfortable when Vance walked into a bakery and there were dozens of cameras on her because he was there.
These are the same blind spots in the media that were in place in 2016, and they really haven’t changed. If, by chance, Trump and Vance do win and the national media are again surprised, it is because they only wrote about Arlington and did not balance it out.
What they do not understand is that the majority of people who were at the events in Erie will be talking about what they experienced and heard there, not what happened in Arlington, Virginia.
The happy-warrior vibe Vance gives out comes from a place of gratitude, he told me in an interview.
“I’m here, and I’ve been given this incredible opportunity, and I’m going to try to make something of it, and the way to make something of it is to actually get out there and talk to people,” he said.
“And yeah, sometimes that’s mediated through a really hostile interviewer, but I’m not going to sit here and whine and complain because somebody asked me a tough question,” he said. “There are still a lot of people who are going to hear the answer. It’s very amazing to know that I get to make this case directly to the American people, and you should take every opportunity you get.”
Vance said that on his drive into Hardinger, he was struck by how similar the post-industrial city was to Middletown, Ohio, where he was born.
“I just think it is important to go where a lot of politicians often don’t go and make the case directly to people, and hopefully, they feel seen,” he said of places such as Erie.
Once upon a time, the General Electric plant here employed 18,000 people. Just about everyone who lived here had an uncle, father, grandfather, sister or mother who worked there. Today, after being known as GE Rail, it is now called GE Transportation and owned by Wabtec.
The most recent report by the Erie County Data Center found that Wabtec employed 2,240 people in the county. Like Middletown, Erie is a region left behind by globalization, automation and technology. The locomotive, tool and die shops, machine shops and factories that once prospered here have struggled to rebuild and rebrand the region.
Voters here matter, and they want to hear what Vance and Trump have to say, as well as Walz and Harris. Whatever way Erie County goes, so goes Pennsylvania, and so go places such as Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia.
“Not everybody’s going to agree with me on every issue, not everybody’s going to agree with Donald Trump on every issue, but I hope that after the campaign, what they’ll at least be able to say is they cared enough to show up and they cared enough to take questions and they cared enough to come to the places where we work and where we live, because that’s what a person who wants to be our president or vice president should do,” Vance said.
Christopher Borick, political science professor at Muhlenberg College, said it cannot be overstated how important Erie is.
“It also cannot be overstated how important showing up and meeting people where they are and connecting with them on issues that impact their lives, like the economy, [is],” Borick said.
Borick said that while Pittsburgh and Philadelphia have larger populations than Erie, “it is counties like this and Northampton, Luzerne, Cambria, and Beaver who will decide the election because, as I say all the time, in our state, it is the margins in those places that matter.”
Vance said one of the things he hears a lot from people he meets and talks to on the trail is the struggle to achieve the American dream of homeownership.
“It is the most common complaint that I hear, and I hear the same exact complaint coming from younger people versus more elderly people, but the perspective on it is slightly different,” he said.
Vance said he hears frustration from the young people and heartache from the elderly.
“Young people tell me that when their parents were their age, they could work and as long as they played by the rules and did a good job, they could afford to buy a home,” he said. “They could put down some roots. They could send their kids to a nice school. And they can’t do that anymore.
“When you talk to their grandparents they’ll say, ‘Well, we just want our kids to be able to have as good of a life as we did, and we’re worried they’re not going to.’ And we are worried that they have no prospects of homeownership, and they’d like to build a life down the street from us but they can’t because they can’t afford it.
“It just makes you realize that we really have failed in a very big way in this country,” he added.
Vance said one way to think about Trump’s presidency is that it was a brief respite from 25 years of things broadly going in the wrong direction.
“And I think it’s always possible to overstate these things,” he said. “There’s still a lot of joy, and there’s still a lot of great things in this country, and people are still raising families, and it’s not all bad, but it’s a hell of a lot harder than it should be, and I think people feel that in a very acute way.”
Vance said one of the things that has surprised him as he is going across the country trying to earn votes happened just the day before and involved his mother.
“We were in Big Rapids, Michigan, and we go to this A&W root beer stand at Big Rapids—one of these places that’s open six months out of the year because the other six months out of the year, it’s way too cold—and the very first person wants to give my mom a hug,” Vance explained. “And the person said to Mom, ‘You’re such an inspiration, and a lot of us have struggled with addiction and the fact that you and your son kept at it, that’s an inspiration.'”
He said with a smile, “When you come from a nontraditional or nonconventional background, I think there’s a certain tendency to want to hide it a little bit and not to tell the story. And obviously, I told the story in ‘Hillbilly Elegy.’ But even then, you don’t necessarily want to talk about it so much because it feels a little uncomfortable. You realize that there are a lot of people who take, not even from my story, but from my mom’s story, take some inspiration from that.
“And that is definitely something that I’ve learned, and it’s been a very cool thing to watch it unfold.”
After Vance’s speech and press conference, which included local and national press questions, he visited Gordon’s Butcher Shop, which, despite the power outage across the entire city block, was packed with people wanting to take a selfie, shake his hand, or just say hello. Vance took the time to fulfill every request.
On the 3-mile drive to the retail stop, people stood outside their homes, businesses, and cars to wave at him.
The same thing happened on the 7-mile drive through neighborhoods and business districts to the airport where his campaign plane was waiting to take him to Wisconsin.
What mattered at this stop was the people of Erie and how they responded to Vance. That is the thing people will be talking about for weeks.
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What Really Happened to J.D. Vance in Erie
PITTSBURGH—Billed as a kickoff bus tour on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, instead spent Aug. 18 in Beaver County in tightly controlled stops before heading to Chicago.
Harris held a short rally at a private airport hangar surrounded by supporters—mostly members of local unions who were bused in for the event—before the vice president went to two retail stops and visited a phone bank before finishing the day at a local Sheetz gas station.
Beaver County, west of Allegheny County and adjacent to the airport, was once a powerful component of the Democratic Party, filled with union families who worked at the steel mills in Aliquippa and Ambridge. As the Democratic Party shifted left, the voters moved toward the Republican Party. In 2020, then-President Donald Trump won the county over Joe Biden by nearly 20 percentage points.
While some local Democrats thought the move was strategic, to show Harris was attempting to expand her universe, others were more cynical. They cited tight control of who attended the vice president’s planned events and the risk she would take doing an event in Pittsburgh and possibly facing her party’s pro-Hamas contingent, which has become politically vocal here.
That movement, spearheaded by the Pittsburgh Democratic Socialists of America, came to a head recently when a proposed ballot question that would ban Pittsburgh from doing business with companies with financial ties to Israel spurred accusations of antisemitism and placed Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey on the hot seat.
The Democratic Socialists of America’s Pittsburgh chapter submitted the petition to the city to put the question to voters this November.
Gainey’s initial reaction as mayor was concern about the implications of a ban that would grind to a halt the city’s ability to deliver services.
Gainey did not, however, publicly object to the ballot question.
When the ballot petitions were handed in last week, it was discovered that over a dozen employees within Gainey’s administration had signed the petition—including Maria Montano, his director of communications.
Within days, Montano stepped down from her position.
Since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel, Pittsburgh has become a hotbed of pro-Palestine protests, including an encampment that was set up on the grounds of the University of Pittsburgh. The city has also become a hotbed of vandalism to synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses, and the homes of Jewish residents in the neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, where the massacre of 11 congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue occurred almost six years ago.
Several longtime Democrat strategists in Pennsylvania believe Harris avoided Pittsburgh for any of her stops and stuck close to the airport so she could avoid the possibility that protesters would interrupt her kickoff tour in an important battleground state.
Many Harris supporters expressed disappointment in not being able to find a way to see her when she was in Beaver County.
The details of her event were kept under lock and key until her arrival—given the distance of Beaver County to the city of Pittsburgh, it made it difficult for supporters to get there in enough time to see her.
Harris was greeted at the airport by three congressional Democrats from Pennsylvania—Sen. Bob Casey and Reps. Chris Deluzio and Summer Lee—as well as Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato. Two Harris-Walz buses were parked there.
Harris greeted her invited supporters by arriving to the beat of her campaign song, Beyonce’s “Freedom.”
An Emerson College Polling/RealClearPennsylvania survey in the state’s presidential race found that 49% of voters said they support Trump and 48% said they support Harris. With undecided voters’ support allocated, Trump extended to a 2-point lead, 51% to 49%. With third-party candidates on the ballot, it was 47% Trump, 47% Harris.
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We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post A Harris Campaign Stop That Shrugs Off Voters appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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