Pennsylvania Is Slipping From Donald Trump’s Grip

When asked why he robbed a bank, William Sutton, one of the FBI’s most wanted criminals in the postwar era, replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” If Sutton were running for president in 2024, he would plan a raid on Pennsylvania’s Hispanic vote.

The road to the White House runs through Pennsylvania, America’s largest swing state that he must win. Yet Donald Trump’s campaign is making no visible effort so far to court his fastest-growing demographic.

With nearly 600,000 adults in a state that has won by margins of less than 100,000 votes in the last two elections, Pennsylvania’s Hispanics are the biggest vote-getters.

“It looks like we’re making an unforced error,” said Albert Eisenberg, a Republican consultant in Philadelphia. “Hispanics could be the deciding factor.”

Joe Biden’s campaign got off to an early start, airing Spanish-language ads in Pennsylvania in March, eight months before the November presidential election. Kamala Harris, who replaced him in July, booked a new round of ads this week.

“I’ve never seen a campaign start as early as Biden’s — it would normally start in September,” said Victor Martinez, owner of Pennsylvania’s largest Spanish-language radio network and host of his morning show from Allentown, the state’s third-largest city.

“What confuses me is why the Trump campaign isn’t even trying to reach Spanish speakers. As a businessman, I would go bankrupt if I ignored my fastest-growing audience.” Harris also did a phone interview with Martinez in English.

The Trump campaign’s apparent indifference may partly stem from complacency. Until Biden’s resignation in late July, Trump consistently led the polls in Pennsylvania without offering a single Good morning.

His narrow escape from assassination last month in Butler, a western Pennsylvania town north of Pittsburgh, also appears to have given the Republican nominee more momentum in the polls.

But since Harris replaced Biden about a month ago, the energy in Pennsylvania has changed dramatically.

“A few weeks before she resigned, I went to a Biden campaign event and maybe five people showed up, including me and a Trump opposition researcher,” said Lindsay Weber, a political reporter for The Morning Call, Allentown’s local newspaper. “When the Harris campaign rebranded the campaign office, it was full of new volunteers.”

The latest poll from the Cook Political Report, a veteran forecasting firm, puts Harris, who will be officially confirmed as the Democratic Party’s nominee next week in Chicago, five points ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania.

Unlike Florida Republicans, who had no choice but to embrace Spanish given the state’s non-Anglo character, Pennsylvania’s habits die harder.

“Some party officials say to me, ‘America is an English-speaking country. Why should we speak to voters in Spanish?'” said one frustrated Republican. “I say, ‘Because we want to win?'”

Trump’s campaign’s complacency may also be due to the fact that most of the state’s Hispanics are Puerto Ricans, making them U.S. citizens. Unlike large Central American communities in Northern Virginia and Maryland, or illegal Venezuelans in U.S. border states and Florida, Puerto Ricans are not directly threatened by Trump’s promise to carry out large deportations of illegal immigrants. That makes them more open to his economic message, blaming Biden for inflation and unaffordable housing.

Yet Trump has trouble following the script. His campaign regularly vows he’s about to turn political; their candidate continues to make headlines with personal attacks on Harris.

“The party that wins in November is the one that avoids doing and saying outrageous things,” said Maria Montero, a Republican attorney in Allentown and a native Spanish speaker. “For Latino voters, it comes down to the economy.”

In 2000, Hispanics, a term used for Spanish speakers, while Latino includes those with heritage in all Latin American countries, made up less than a quarter of Allentown’s population. The city is now majority Hispanic, mostly Puerto Rican and Dominican. Just as quickly, the neighboring city of Reading became 70 percent Hispanic.

On a walk through a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood, Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerk was greeted every few feet by residents lounging on the steps of the neighborhood’s bodegas. Tuerk, a bicycle-riding mayor who speaks fluent Spanish, is trying to arrange a direct flight between San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital, and Allentown. He and Susan Wild, the Democratic congresswoman for the area, recently slept on the floor of the San Juan airport.

“Hispanics are not going to automatically vote for either party, and many won’t vote at all,” Tuerk said. “But you’re not going to get anywhere if you don’t meet them halfway.”

Harris’s campaign has 15 campaign offices across the state. Trump has just one, in North Philadelphia.

“Trump doesn’t seem to be making a serious effort,” said Charlie Dent, a former Republican congressman who until 2018 represented the district that includes Allentown. “The focus is still on Maga [Make America Great Again]. But I’m skeptical that the Maga base will be big enough to win.” Dent adds that Trump is on his version of “a Grateful Dead tour” – reprising his greatest hits from the glory years.

Trump may also draw comfort from his victory in Pennsylvania in 2016, aVsceker a campaign in which he regularly denigrated Hispanics. He defeated Hillary Clinton in the state by 45,000 votes, a margin of just 0.72 percent.

The next eight years saw rapid demographic change. Large numbers of Hispanics arrived to work in the burgeoning Lehigh Valley logistics hub, which is close enough to East Coast metropolises like New York and Philadelphia to put 100 million Amazon and Walmart customers a truck shiVscek away. Many wealthy New Yorkers, who tend to lean Democratic, moved to the area during the pandemic.

With its roots in German and Czech-Moravian settlers, Northampton County in the Lehigh Valley has been described by one prominent historian as America’s most conservative region. Now it’s a patchwork. Trump was the first Republican to win Pennsylvania since George H. W. Bush in 1988. In historical terms, his victory may have been a fluke.

Could Trump deliver another shock? Only against his will, said Christopher Borick, a pollster at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. Borick admits that polls have yet to fully capture the anecdotal evidence of Harris’s meteoric turnaround. A month ago, polls showed Biden losing even Wisconsin and Michigan, the other two swing states he needed to win. The surge in enthusiasm for Harris has brought new states back into play, including North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia.

A registered independent, Borick lives in Nazareth, a few miles from Allentown, one of America’s most contested townships. A reminder of the region’s early, Bible-filled days, Nazareth is 10 miles from Bethlehem, a former steel hub. In 2020, Biden won Borick’s district, population 1,000, by just three votes. This time, he and his neighbors have been bombarded with door-knocking and campaign mail from Democrats. “The Trump campaign has so far been missing in action,” Borick said.

By the conventional calendar, Trump has 80 days to make up lost ground in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. But in practice, early voting begins in mid-September. About a third of Pennsylvanians are expected to vote by mail. If the 2022 midterm elections are any guide, they will swing strongly Democrat.

Here, too, Trump is running roughshod over his campaign priorities. Republicans are trying to educate their voters about the benefits of mail-in voting. Yet on the campaign trail, Trump has oVsceken repeated his claim that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election through mail-in fraud. Over the next 30 days, Republicans will have to somehow convince their troops to vote early without contradicting their leader’s stolen-election theory, and his warning that 2024 will also be rigged.

For true believers, this requires semantic acrobatics. Traditional Republicans can put it more bluntly. “This is nonsense,” Montero, the Allentown lawyer, tells conservative voters when they express suspicions about mail-in voting. “We can only win by voting.”