October 15, 2024 - 2:01am

Kamala Harris held a rally tonight in Erie, Pennsylvania. As Jeff Bloodworth describes, Erie is “America’s political no man’s land, as bitter and contested as anywhere in the republic”. But for all the focus on northeastern Pennsylvania in the last election, the western half of the state looks like the hottest part of the battlefield in 2024. If a Republican carries Erie County, he is likely to win the whole commonwealth. Before Trump, the last Republican presidential candidate to win there was Ronald Reagan.

So the visit from Harris is no surprise. At the rally today, the Vice President gave her standard stump speech — long on promises, short on specifics, like most campaign speeches. A rally isn’t about specifics, it’s about impressions. And the impression Harris tried to convey is that she’s just like you, Pennsylvanians.

This worked for Joe Biden in 2020. The state is the President’s birthplace and — to hear him tell it — still his spiritual home. The claim isn’t pure malarkey: Biden might not have lived in Scranton since 1953, but he carried Pennsylvania by 82,166 votes in 2020 where Hillary Clinton had lost the state by 44,292 in the previous cycle.

But it will take more than the ubiquitous camo Harris-Walz ball caps to convince white working-class Pennsylvanians that the Vice President “gets them” in the way Biden seemed to do. It’s not a matter of Right-versus-Left so much as it is Washington-versus-everybody-else, and it’s nothing new to politics. We might call it “insider versus outsider”. Five centuries ago in England, it was “the court versus the country”. By whatever name, the division is the same: those who have power against those who don’t.

The Harris campaign people tried, at first, to make this a “vibes” election, but the Vice President failed to appeal in the small cities and towns of western Pennsylvania. This is a shame, because other Democrats have ridden the populist wave. In fact, one did so just two years ago in the form of Pennsylvania’s idiosyncratic junior senator, John Fetterman.

Fetterman’s appeal to working class Pennsylvanians was in part a product of place. Not the middle-class suburb of his upbringing, but the down-on-its-luck steel town of Braddock, where he made his home as an adult and won his first office: mayor. It was a part-time job, but a full-time platform for the issue that moved him: revitalising an impoverished community. He used his bully pulpit to get national media attention, which helped attract creative types. None of it much changed Braddock’s trajectory, but it brought attention to people who were often ignored.

Fetterman attended the rally in Erie, a county he won handily in his victory over Dr. Mehmet Oz two years ago. The two years in Washington have not dulled Fetterman’s populist edge, mainly because he still maintains a willingness to offend the fashionable vanguard of the Left when their demands don’t make sense to his worldview. Though both would hate the comparison, this is exactly the same energy Trump brought to the Republican Party primaries in 2016 when he refused to endorse the received opinion of his own party on free trade and an interventionist attitude abroad.

Harris has never been someone who seems at ease with the people, nor is she the standard-bearer of any anti-establishment, populist crusade. Can a careerist attorney convince the swing voters of Erie, Pennsylvania, that she is with the outsiders, not the insiders? It seems unlikely — and she may struggle to replicate what a six-term senator and two-term vice president pulled off.


Kyle Sammin is the managing editor of Broad + Liberty. Follow him on Twitter at @KyleSammin.