Trump, Biden take starkly different approach to campaign in key battleground states
Hunting, fishing, shooting — Donald Trump, Jr., touted his love for the outdoors and commitment to the Second Amendment at an event in this small borough in Pennsylvania, a state his father unexpectedly carried four years ago and will be crucial again in November.
There were signs of the coronavirus pandemic — hand sanitizer, mask-wearing security guards and volunteers and the marginally spaced out crowd of 200 — during the younger Trump’s visit to Lehigh Valley Sporting Clays in Northampton County, an area that played a critical role in the last election.
Trump’s son, who attended boarding and business school in Pennsylvania and has a cabin in the Catskills, was there to launch the Sportsmen for Trump coalition at the outdoor venue. He was the second member of the president’s family last week to visit the battleground state.
“Let’s call it the white whale of conservative politics,” Trump Jr. said of Pennsylvania to McClatchy before his speech. “It’s going to be close every year, and they’ve gotten blown out every year since the ‘80s, right, so the fact that we won it is so important.”
Northampton is one of several counties that delivered the state of Pennsylvania to Trump in 2016 and is expected to play a decisive role again.
It is also one of the counties in the state with the highest coronavirus case count as a percentage of the population, making it an extra challenging environment to reach voters. Northampton has had five recorded coronavirus deaths over the past month.
The difference in approaches taken by the two major political parties to campaigning in the battleground state in the era of COVID-19 is as stark as the choice facing voters this fall.
Republicans in swing counties have been knocking on doors in Pennsylvania since July. GOP county party chairs told McClatchy that their volunteers are wearing masks and talking to voters from an appropriate distance.
Major Democratic groups in Pennsylvania are not currently going door-to-door out of an abundance of caution. They are organizing remote phone banks, digital events and yard sign drops to spread the word about former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Pennsylvania is one of three states that could decide the election, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien has said. If Trump wins in all the other states he took four years ago, “We only need to win either Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania to win this thing again,” Stepien told reporters at the end of July.
The president’s top political allies are not convinced Trump will hold every state he won in 2016, and strategists in both parties told McClatchy they did not see a pathway to victory for either candidate in 2020 that does not include winning Pennsylvania and possibly Wisconsin.
Trump-supporting Super PACs Club for Growth Action and America First Action and Biden-backing Super PACs Priorities USA and American Bridge 21st Century are running millions of dollars of ads each in the upper Midwest states.
The Biden campaign has also announced $280 million of spending on paid digital and television advertising for the fall in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania plus a dozen others. In addition to traditional platforms and broadcast networks, it is purchasing advertising on gaming applications and Black media channels such as BET, TV1, Bounce and OWN.
The Trump campaign has taken a different approach, concentrating its advertising power on southern states with early voting. The new strategy followed a July campaign shake-up that put Stepien in charge.
Trump’s campaign began a new, seven-figure advertising campaign in Wisconsin last week, a spokesperson said. Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said ads would be aired in Pennsylvania “soon.” Miller said the campaign has also reserved nearly $12 million of airtime in Michigan.
A MODEL FOR 2020
The advertising priorities of the well-funded political groups reflect concerns across both parties that the 2020 election will be decided by the blue-collar workers who switched parties to cast their votes for Trump four years ago.
Their political realignment is one that Republicans see as decades in the making, even though former President George H.W. Bush in 1988 was the last Republican presidential candidate to win Pennsylvania prior to Trump. Republican nominees such as John McCain and Mitt Romney were defeated in the state, but the GOP achieved other successes.
Trump broke the logjam at the presidential level when he lost the Philadelphia suburbs but won smaller counties across the state by larger than usual margins for Republicans. He also took three counties, including Northampton, that had previously voted for Democrats.
“This was an instance of driving margins in small counties,” Stepien told reporters during his July presentation. “Republicans for the longest time at the presidential level, McCain, Romney, they didn’t know these votes existed. We found them in 2016, they still exist here in 2020.”
Trump’s surprise success in Pennsylvania in the last presidential election is serving as the model for his campaign’s 2020 strategy in the region.
Democrats believe that by maximizing their performance in major cities like Philadelphia and Milwaukee, and appealing to independents and traditional conservatives in the suburbs, they will be able to capitalize on voters’ displeasure with Trump’s performance in office and turn out a coalition that can defeat him.
Hillary Clinton’s inability in 2016 to turn out as many voters as former President Barack Obama in traditionally Democratic areas resulted in Trump winning Pennsylvania by roughly 44,000 votes, a less than 1 percent margin.
“We don’t have to get the number back to what it was in 2012 or ‘04 or 2000, but making inroads there,” Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) said of blue-collar voters in an interview. “In 2020 we cannot have a collapse in that vote the way we experienced in 2016.”
Democratic gains in local elections since 2016, the success of Democrats representing the Rust Belt in their Senate reelection races in 2018 and an upset by a Democratic judge in a Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April have buttressed party leaders’ belief that Trump’s success with blue-collar voters in 2016 was an anomaly.
In Erie, a Pennsylvania county that Trump flipped, Democrats are criticizing him as weak on worker protections to laborers to try to win back votes, and they are appealing to farmers who have been adversely affected by Trump’s trade war with China.
“In 2016, the folks who took a chance on Donald Trump did so because they were looking for someone who was going to operate differently,” said Jim Wertz, chair of the Erie County Democratic Party.
“And what they’ve seen is that not only has Trump tried to somewhat operate outside of the system, but he’s tried to destroy the system along the way. And that unnerves a lot of folks here who are very proud Americans,” Wertz said.
Democrats are also amplifying Trump’s efforts to restrict immigration to new Americans who have settled in the area, Wertz said.
Republicans in the state are zeroing in on Biden’s pledge to restrict fracking on federal property and echoing Trump by equating a Biden presidency to the chaos at protests that erupted in Portland, Ore.
“Suburban voters are going to be very drawn to the president’s message of restoring law, order and tranquility to our domestic life,” said Charlie Gerow, a Harrisburg-based strategist who is vice chair of the American Conservative Union.
“Personal safety and community safety is very, very important to them, and I think that the president has a big leg up on that issue in the Philadelphia suburbs, in particular,” Gerow added.
SPARRING OVER SCRANTON
After mentioning his own attendance at Wharton, a prestigious business school in Philadelphia, during a recent telerally Trump told voters his Democratic opponent “abandoned” the state at the age of 10, when the Biden family moved from Scranton, Pa., to nearby Delaware.
Trump is now planning to visit the Scranton area on Thursday, the same day of Biden’s acceptance speech during the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating convention.
“We go where we feel we need to go,” Trump’s son said, repeating his father’s accusation that Biden has overplayed his ties to the state. “I’ve spent more time in my life than Joe Biden has in the state of Pennsylvania, but he gets to say he’s from Pennsylvania. It’s all nonsense.”
The political attack is unlikely to move many voters in the state, said Kathy Bozinski, chair of the Luzerne County Democratic Party.
“It’s not like Joe decided to pick up and say, ‘I’m out of this town,’ at age 10,” she said. “I don’t think anybody holds anything against him for that.”
Boyle pointed out that Biden, a former U.S. senator who represented Delaware, resides in Wilmington, which is fewer than 30 miles away from Philadelphia.
Public polls show Trump trailing Biden in not just Pennsylvania, but also Michigan and Wisconsin, by four or more points heading into the presidential nominating conventions.
This year the Democratic Party saw record-breaking turnout in its presidential primary in Michigan, presenting a problem for Trump that he did not have in 2016.
Trump won Michigan by just 10,704 ballots in 2016, making the state and its 16 electoral votes uncertain for his reelection campaign in 2020. It is why backers of the president are focusing their advertising money on Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, instead. Trump had a close but cushier victory of 22,748 votes in Wisconsin. The state is expected to be narrowly decided once again.
Club for Growth Action President David McIntosh told McClatchy that private polling his organization conducted in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona found that Biden had the votes of 95 percent of the Democratic Party’s base, while Trump was winning the support of just 80 percent of the Republican Party. Trump’s support was especially sluggish with middle-aged men and suburban Republicans, he said.
McIntosh shifted his advertising priorities as a result and his group is running ads promoting Trump’s plan to provide tuition assistance to attendees of private and religious schools.
Trump is focusing on other issues. “Joe Biden and the Democrats are against oil, gas, guns and God,” he said during a Wisconsin telerally in early August.
Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler said that Trump’s religious charge against Biden, a devout Catholic, is evidence that the Republican is “grasping at straws.” Democrats in the state are criticizing Trump on his administration’s coronavirus response and seizing on GOP efforts to block increased funding for schools in relief legislation.
Haunted by the refrain that Clinton may have been president, if only she had gone to Wisconsin,
Wikler, the state’s party chair since last summer, has focused on creating a strong voter outreach program. Wikler said that Democrats in the fall of 2018 knocked on almost twice as many doors as they did in the fall of 2016.
Although the party is not knocking on doors in the state now, “We are at every step of the process looking at the best public health guidance about how to ensure that we are keeping the public safe. Our strategy is itself a form of our message,” Wikler said.
ECHOES OF 2016
Wisconsin is a problem that is plaguing the party again as it heads into the Democratic National Convention, which had been scheduled to take place in Milwaukee this week. Biden will now give his speech from Delaware.
His campaign has held more than a dozen virtual events featuring high-profile surrogates like Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin. During a “Weekend of Action” this month, the campaign said it held 275 other events across the state, reaching out to 370,000 Wisconsin voters.
The pandemic has also limited Trump’s ability to travel to battleground states and hold the type of large gatherings that were a hallmark of his first election. Trump will visit Wisconsin on Monday and Pennsylvania on Thursday.
Trump’s surrogates, including Vice President Mike Pence and top campaign aides, have sought to make up ground with events that garner local media coverage like the one in Coplay last week with the president’s eldest son. The president’s daughter-in-law Lara, who is married to Trump’s son Eric, led a bus tour through Pennsylvania last week.
Bozinski said she had stressed to the Biden campaign and Democratic Party officials that before the November election Biden should visit Luzerne in Pennsylvania, another county that Clinton lost after she did not go there in 2016. “There’s still a lot of sore feelings that that didn’t happen,” Bozinski said.
Erie County Democratic Party chair Wertz said that he is distributing Biden signs and over the next couple of weeks planned to have small gatherings to promote voter registration and mail-in ballot efforts. Wertz said he expects his volunteers to do literature drops on doorsteps soon.
Bozinski said that she is hopeful she will be able to resume door-knocking in Luzerne before the election. It has been difficult to engage seniors who do not own laptops or have email addresses through Zoom events, she acknowledged. She is also planning to have glove-wearing volunteers hang prepackaged literature on doorknobs, she said.
The county party chair is currently using yard sign drops as a voter engagement opportunity. She said she and another county party chair jointly purchased the Biden campaign logo for $350 and printed yard signs to distribute for free.
“Signs do vote,” Sandy Wolfkiel, a Tilbury Terrace resident, told McClatchy during one of Bozinski’s socially distant sign drops. “I think if you do take that moment to put up that sign, you have that commitment to say, I’m voting.”
