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    • One last pitch to Pennsylvania voters
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    One last pitch to Pennsylvania voters

    Online Niel Posted on

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    PHILADELPHIA — When Kamala Harris wraps up her campaign with an election-eve rally at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Monday, she will make more than a cultural reference to her fight against the Republican presidential nominee. Donald Trump.

    The boxing movie “Rocky” made the museum a landmark. But for the Harris campaign, its location is symbolic of a pointed argument the vice president has made about the fragility of American democracy.

    “Having it on the Ben Franklin Parkway, in the city that founded our democracy, for an election where we’re fighting to save it, I think that speaks volumes,” Harris Pennsylvania senior counsel Brendan McPhillips said in an interview.

    Harris spoke last week from Ellipse in Washington, DC, where then-President Trump addressed his supporters on January 6, 2021, just before they stormed the US Capitol. She said Trump, who refused to concede his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden and thought over the weekend that he should not have left the White Househe would spend a second term on grievances.

    The candidates were in deep trouble in the polls heading into the final day of the election, in which over 80 million votes have already been cast.

    Harris started his morning in Detroit after a series of rallies in Michigan the day before. She had four stops scheduled in Pennsylvania before the evening concert in Philadelphia, where she will make her final presentation to voters. The lineup for her final rally includes Ricky Martin, Fat Joe, Oprah Winfrey and Lady Gaga.

    The vice president’s campaign said Monday in a call with reporters that it expected to have multiple routes to win the 270 Electoral College votes needed to secure the presidency and pointed to Harris’ recent campaign work in battleground states.

    “We’re spending the resources, we’re building the organization, we’re maximizing our advertising and our programming, and we’re traveling to each of these battleground states in the blue wall and the Sun Belt because we see them all as viable for us,” Harris co-campaigned. President Jen O’Malley Dillon said on a call with reporters.

    But Harris closing her storming presidential bid in Pennsylvania is a tacit acknowledgment that the state, which is part of the Democrats’ vaunted blue wall, is vital to her ability to win the White House.

    “It says what everybody already knew, which is that Pennsylvania is the key to Tuesday’s electoral success,” said Republican strategist Charlie Gerow, who supports Trump. “And most people believe, they believe correctly, that as Pennsylvania goes, so goes the nation.”

    The fight for 19 electoral votes

    Harris and Trump each emphasized the importance of Pennsylvania. Trump told his supporters at a rally in Allentown last week that he believes the state, which has 19 electoral votes, will decide the outcome of the election.

    “It’s in your hands. If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole deal,” the Republican presidential candidate said.

    Trump won Pennsylvania by about 44,000 votes in 2016 en route to the presidency. Biden won the state in 2020 by more than 80,000 votes and also won the White House.

    Biden four years ago ended his campaign in Pittsburgh, when Harris organized a simultaneous rally, drive-in in Philadelphia, where black voters make up a significant portion of the population. The 2020 running backs won both cities, plus Erie in the northwest; Harrisburg, downtown; and the Lehigh Valley in the northeastern part of the state.

    Harris identified Pennsylvania as a pillar of his campaign on a trip to Philadelphia in late October. “Pennsylvania will be the key. Without a doubt,” she told reporters.

    On Monday afternoon, Harris stopped at a canvass event in Scranton and then made her first campaign visit to the Hispanic-majority city of Allentown. She also plans to pitch a Puerto Rican restaurant in Reading with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

    Wrapping up her final day on the 2024 campaign trail, Harris will address supporters in Pittsburgh at a rally and concert with Katy Perry and Andra Day before her overnight rally in Philadelphia.

    Harris is using the 2022 election plan

    The vice president is watching a plan drawn up by Democrats who have won statewide elections in the past four years, including U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, who campaigned for Harris in rural parts of the state.

    Trump won big in many of these counties in the last presidential election, even as Democrats running nationally managed to undercut their Republican opponents’ votes.

    Fetterman campaigned over the weekend with former President Bill Clinton in Butler County, near Pittsburgh, and Erie County, which the senator described as the “best vantage point” in the state, if not the nation. He spent Sunday in Beaver County, another Trump-won county outside Pittsburgh, that Harris visited weeks in her campaign.

    In a phone call from the road, Fetterman stressed the importance of campaigning beyond Philadelphia and inner-city Pittsburgh into the redder parts of the state.

    “They’re the ones blocking the edges,” Fetterman said. “It’s never about turning a county into a color on a map.”

    Harris initially prioritized Pittsburgh and surrounding counties before shifting his focus to Philadelphia and its suburbs in the final weeks of the race.

    More recently, she has focused on counties where the campaign believes suburban women and anti-Trump Republicans can turn out. She toured counties in Philadelphia and targeted cities that have traditionally voted Democratic, such as Harrisburg.

    Former Trump 2024 primary opponent Nikki Haley he won about one in five GOP voters in those areas, even though she wasn’t running for president until Pennsylvania Republicans went to the polls.

    Gerow, who lives in the Democratic stronghold of Harrisburg, rejected the strategy.

    “Nikki Haley has made it very, very, very, very clear that she is one hundred percent for Donald Trump, and her supporters are not going to say, oh, well, we don’t like Trump, ergo, we like Harris,” he said. “They just won’t do that. I mean, Kamala Harris is the most left-wing candidate ever to run for a major party.”

    Harris’ campaign says it is rolling out a strategy that includes reaching out to voters in more conservative parts of the state.

    “It’s been a very important part of our campaign that we go everywhere and talk to everyone and have very genuine, serious interactions with people,” said McPhillips, who was Fetterman’s campaign manager.

    Make a play for Allentown

    Harris’ late visit to Allentown on Monday was an example of how, in the shortened campaign, the candidate herself could not be everywhere. Her stop in the city she and Biden won four years ago came after Trump’s visit and an offensive joke about Puerto Rico from an insult comic at the Republican nominee’s Madison Square Garden rally. Allentown has a large Puerto Rican population.

    “She’s showing up and demonstrating the commitment she’s made throughout the entire campaign to fight for every last vote,” Fetterman said of Harris’ events on the eve of the statewide election.

    The second Mr. Doug Emhoff was in Lancaster and Altoona on Saturday while his wife campaigned in other battleground states.

    Biden also campaigned in Pennsylvania on Saturday in his childhood home of Scranton, and former first lady Michelle Obama held a rally in Philadelphia. First Lady Jill Biden campaigned in suburban Philly and Harrisburg on Sunday.

    Harris traveled to Arizona and Nevada late last week, spent Friday in Wisconsin, rolled through Georgia and North Carolina on Saturday and campaigned in Michigan on Sunday before arriving in Pennsylvania on Monday. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, made several stops in Wisconsin. He will end his night in Detroit.

    Trump stopped by Reading earlier in the day and closes his campaign with stops in Pittsburgh and a final rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, wraps up the 2024 campaign with stops in four different states; Newtown, Pennsylvania; Flint, Michigan; La Crosse, Wisconsin; and Atlanta.

    The Republican ticket also had surrogates in Pennsylvania throughout the day Monday, including Republican Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida and former U.S. Attorney General Matt Whitaker.

    Joey Garrison contributed to this report.

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