PITTSBURGH — No state has played a bigger role in the presidential campaign in the run-up to Election Day than Pennsylvania.
It’s been the backdrop for Donald Trump and Kamala Harris more than any other state and the site of the most spending on behalf of either candidate. It’s where Trump was almost killed over the summer, only to make his triumphant return months later. It’s where he served french fries during a photo op at a McDonald’s restaurant and danced before the cameras for almost 40 minutes during a rally that turned into an impromptu music-listening session. It’s where Harris unveiled her running mate, her economic platform and made appeal after appeal to disaffected Republicans.
It’s where Harris and Trump held their only debate of the cycle. It’s served as a proverbial red carpet for prominent surrogates. Harris has benefited from having three presidents on the trail here boosting her, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, while Trump has had Antonio Brown and Le’Veon Bell, two-thirds of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ “Killer B’s” offense of the prior decade, backing him.”
Over the final two weeks of the race, both candidates and their running mates held 16 events in Pennsylvania — including Monday, marking some of their final rallies of the campaign.
In short, in Harris’ and Trump’s cross-country dance, Pennsylvania is the belle of the ball.
“We get to be the pretty girl in high school,” Mike Szegedy, a Harris supporter from McKeesport, said of the attention his state was getting in the presidential race.
“It’s not fair to the rest of the country,” he added, following a rally featuring Clinton at a University of Pittsburgh branch campus in Greensburg, “But it’s super cool for me.”
NBC News heard from many others in the Keystone State, though, who were ready for this in-person and over-the-air onslaught to come to an end.
“I promise you, you don’t have to poll to know that 98% of people are like, ‘I’ve got to get away from this s—,’” Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., said. “‘It has to end. I’m just tired of it.’”
There’s no guarantee of that after Tuesday’s election, particularly as Trump has already pointed to a few thousand fraudulent voter registrations — which were caught — and disputes over in-person mail ballot requests as evidence of widespread “cheating” at the ballot box, which no evidence suggests. Even after the state’s results become clear this week, the fight could carry on.
But even Trump has started to ponder the end.
“We’ve been on this journey now for nine years together,” he said at a rally in State College last month, adding, “It’s coming to an end. In one way, it’s sad, in another way, it’s beautiful.”
To get a sense of life in the pivotal battleground state during this closing stretch of the campaign, NBC News traversed Pennsylvania for two weeks and spoke with more than two dozen voters, officials and operatives working on races here.
As it stands, most supporters on either side are not expressing over-the-top confidence that their side will pull out the victory. Polling in the state shows an incredibly tight race — one that mirrors the results of the last two presidential elections here. Driving through Pennsylvania, one notices the swing state is made up of swing streets, along which neighbors have signs for the opposing candidates right next to one another. In some cases, there are even swing families — and talk of politics is verboten.
Jennifer Mann, a Trump supporter from Philipsburg who attended the former president’s rally in State College late last month, said that everyone here has friends or family in their immediate circle voting for either candidate.
“So it’s really a sticky situation,” she said, adding that such political conversations “usually don’t happen, because it causes a lot of risk.”
An ‘embellished’ closing argument
Trump’s and Harris’ closing messages have seemingly been playing through a bullhorn on loop around Pennsylvania these final weeks. For Trump, the central theme is that everything he says voters are upset over — primarily an influx of migrants and rising prices — is directly Harris’ fault.
“What they’ve done to our country, this incompetent group of fools, what they’ve done to our country is so damn bad,” Trump said at a rally in Lititz on Sunday in which he described the U.S. as a “failing nation” and mused about a gunman shooting the press at his rallies.
Republicans up and down the ballot have also put a ton of money behind ads highlighting Harris previously expressing support for people detained in U.S. prisons having access to gender transition care or pointing to violence committed by undocumented immigrants. (In one radio campaign ad against Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., a narrator describes the longtime senator as normal on some issues but “nutty” on transgender policy.)
“It feels like their strategy is to gin up their folks through outrage and depress people with this horrible, negative campaign they’re running,” said J.J. Abbott, a Democratic strategist in the state. “Particularly the advertising, which is awful … and not appropriate for children.”
Harris’ closing argument warns of an increasingly unstable and authoritarian Trump further dividing and destabilizing the country. At a rally in Harrisburg last week, Harris described Trump as “obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power.”
“I think they’re both embellished quite a bit,” Richard Perini, a volunteer at Trump’s State College rally, said of each candidate’s closing message.
But if there is a factor that is going to determine the outcome of the election here, Democrats and Republicans said it was likely to be tied to feelings about the economy.
“No matter who wins, it will be narrow,” said Eugene DePasquale, the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania attorney general. “If Harris wins, I think you’re going to say we offered a different vision for the country moving forward. And there was finally … a wanting to turn the page from Trump.”
“If it goes the other way,” he continued. “And I don’t believe it will, though, but if it does, I think it would mean the economic concerns impacted it just enough.”
The candidate who seemed to be devoting more attention to their economic message here was Harris. Her advertising has been heavily focused on her proposal to combat price gouging and cost increases that Pennsylvanians could face because of wide-ranging tariffs Trump wants to impose. She has framed the potential tariff-based price increases as a “national sales tax.”
“People know that Donald Trump’s answer to the financial pressures that you face is the same as the last time,” Harris said at a Harrisburg rally last week. “Another trillion-dollar tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, and this time, he will pay for it with a 20% national sales tax on everything you buy that is imported. Clothes, food, toys, cellphones. And a Trump sales tax would cost the average family nearly $4,000 more a year.”
Her surrogates have focused heavily on their economic pitch in the closing weeks, too. At his rally in Westmoreland County, a stalwart red locale in western Pennsylvania, Clinton asserted that Harris’ economic plan will cost far less than Trump’s, citing economists’ projections and adding that the tariffs will “cost the average American about $4,000.”
In Pittsburgh, Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, a fast-growing language learning app that was birthed at Carnegie Mellon University, said at a Harris campaign event that “one of the big reasons” he is backing the vice president “is I actually believe she will be much better for the economy,” before citing initiatives she’s proposed for small businesses and entrepreneurs.
“I’m worried about the risks that [Trump] will pose to our economy in the future if he is able to do what he says he wants to do,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro told reporters after that event Friday. “The kind of tariffs he wants to put in place are going to really harm the economy here in southwestern Pennsylvania.”
“I think he’s someone who is just clearly out of touch with our economic needs and issues,” Shapiro added.
But it’s not clear the anti-tariff message will succeed in Pennsylvania. As it stands, Casey, locked in a tough re-election fight himself, is running an ad boasting of his support for Trump’s tariffs during his first term — a message that has Trump’s allies feeling particularly confident about the former president’s standing in the state.
“It’s going to hit home in Pennsylvania in particular,” said state Rep. Josh Kail, who chairs the state House Republican campaign committee.
And a senior Trump adviser felt the state was setting up well for the former president in large part because of the economic concerns. This person also pointed to the Casey ad as further evidence.
Though Trump’s ad blitz has focused most heavily on immigration, his economic message — namely blaming Harris for “skyrocketing” prices — has been a fixture of his over-the-air campaign, too, AdImpact tracking showed.
“He clearly has devoted a ton of attention and a ton of time and resources there,” this person said of Pennsylvania. “I think the message is right. I mean, honest to God, Harris broke it, Trump will fix it, I think that speaks to Pennsylvania almost specifically, because of the economy. Their concern about the fossil fuel industries, fracking in particular.”
The battle at the margins
Trump is the only Republican to carry Pennsylvania in a presidential election over the last three decades. And since his 2016 win, no Republican has won a top-of-the-ticket statewide race here.
But there’s little doubt, even among Democrats, about Trump’s staying power in the state. And after the assassination attempt in July, officials and operatives said his brand here only grew stronger.
“You had a transformative, transformational situation” with the assassination attempt, Fetterman said, adding, “And then I would never tell everybody to deny what your eyes are showing. I mean, drive around, see the visuals and all these kinds of things.”
Trump has also benefited from a sense among supporters that it’s no longer taboo to publicly support him and that his coalition has morphed into something different compared to 2016 and 2020.
This dynamic was on display at a panel with former independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and television psychologist Phil McGraw in Lancaster, where self-described “Make America Healthy Again” Republicans packed a sports venue and joined in railing against the impact of “seed oils” and the rate of chronic diseases.
“I feel like it’s becoming the cool kind of rebel thing to vote for Trump,” Kail said. “I just don’t feel like there’s this coyness anymore amongst Trump supporters.”
In a more tangible way, the Trump campaign feels good about its chances in the state because of positive voter registration shifts and polling that is better than his past runs.
“We feel confident about things,” a Trump campaign official said. “We also have been through 2022 and certainly 2020, so it’s not lost on us … there’s still a very real and significant chance we could lose this.”
“I’m just not used to us being ahead in any poll, in any situation ever, and we are now,” this person added. “Talk to some of the older guys here, and they get a lot of 2016 vibes.”
Yet, Democrats see plenty to glean in early vote data — particularly that Democratic women and Democratic men are the two biggest groups showing up at polls who did not cast ballots in 2020. After Biden dropped out of the race, Democrats said they’ve been able to translate excitement about Harris into a wave of volunteers and activist energy. That culminated Saturday when her volunteers knocked on more than 800,000 doors in the state in one day, her campaign said.
“No more 80-year-olds!” said Ryan Nash, 38, a Harris supporter who lives in Bucks County. “I’m not saying Biden doesn’t care, but he won’t be here much longer and it’s nice to have people [running for office] who have some future ahead of them.”
Trump, meanwhile, is narrowly tailoring his ground game to low-propensity voters while much of the GOP canvassing effort has been outsourced to a super PAC largely financed by Elon Musk.
In a state that could be decided by a narrow margin, the campaigns’ ground games could make a huge difference.
“Harris is building a big ground game,” Abbott said. “On Trump’s side, he gave up his ground game for the election integrity thing. He’s outsourcing it. But the only groups that we really know that are here for Trump doing turnout is America PAC, which no one knows what they’re doing.”
Democrats have also leaned into their efforts to expand the tent with disaffected Republicans and rural voters.
“This is a unity campaign,” David Thornburgh, son of the late GOP Gov. Dick Thornburgh, said at an event late last month aimed at pro-Harris Republicans in Lititz. “By the way, I don’t think I saw much of a Democrats for Trump presence. Maybe I missed it.”
Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa., who was one of the House managers in Trump’s second impeachment case, said in an interview Thursday that Pennsylvania is not as tight as polls suggest.
“My prediction is that it’s very close, and then it’s not,” Dean said. I believe she [Harris] will decisively win in Pennsylvania. The majority of Americans and the majority of Pennsylvanians will reject the darkness and corruption of Donald Trump.”
Many Pennsylvanians weren’t comfortable making such a prediction.
“We’re not talking about swaying 100,000 people here,” Szegedy said. “We’re talking about swaying 10,000, 30,000 over the entire state. That’s a much smaller number than you might think.”
Allan Smith reported from Pittsburgh, New Castle, State College, Lancaster, Lititz, Mercer, Johnstown and Greensburg. Peter Nicholas reported from Philadelphia, Montgomery County, Harrisburg, Allentown and Bucks County.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
