Kamala Harris sees path to victory in Pennsylvania running through the suburbs
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign laid out what it sees as her path to victory in Pennsylvania in a memo ahead of Monday night’s rally in bellwether Erie County.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign laid out what it sees as her path to victory in Pennsylvania in a memo shared exclusively with NBC News ahead of Monday night’s rally in bellwether Erie County.
The Harris team pointed to polls showing Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, having made gains in the battleground state’s suburbs — which it dubbed “our own mini ‘blue wall’” in Pennsylvania — compared with President Joe Biden’s 2020 performance there.
The campaign also emphasized that a win involves boosting its popularity among educated suburbanites, including those who have voted for Republicans in recent elections. Nearly 160,000 voters in the state cast ballots for former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in the GOP presidential primary this year — with her numbers proving stronger among suburban voters — even after she had already dropped out of the race against former President Donald Trump.
“The Harris campaign’s path to win Pennsylvania capitalizes on Trump’s unprecedented weakness in the suburbs,” reads the memo, which also highlighted the campaign’s focus on Haley voters. “We have flipped the suburbs from red to blue since Trump won them in 2020, and we have also grown our support with women and tripled our support among white college educated voters in the state.”
The campaign cited surveys last month from The Philadelphia Inquirer/The New York Times/Siena College and Marist College that both showed Harris up 6 percentage points over Trump in the suburbs — a notable improvement from Trump’s 3-point victory over Biden among suburban Pennsylvanians in 2020, as exit polls showed. (The results in both of the surveys last month fell within their margins of error.)
Rating: 5