Pennsylvania has been one of the keys to the Electoral College for decades, but this year it has reached Ultimate Swing State status. Nate Silver lists Pennsylvania as the most likely tipping-point state for either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump to achieve victory on Election Night, surpassing other perennials like Michigan and Wisconsin.
Both campaigns are treating the state as essential, flooding it with staff, money, and endless ads to prod exhausted voters to the polls and take home its 20 electoral votes. So which candidate is in a better place to do so? To get a sense of how things look in the Keystone State, I spoke with Berwood Yost, the director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College, who also runs the college’s closely watched poll.
The FiveThirtyEight averages have Kamala Harris with a 0.7 percent lead in the state right now. I know the latest F&M poll in August showed her up three in August, but do you see the race as the 50-50 proposition it’s being portrayed as?
The last two cycles have been exceedingly narrow races — a 1.2 percent margin and 82,000 votes last time around, and fewer than that in 2016. So history suggests that this will be close. There’s a good many Trump supporters here — we have a lot of white working-class voters, which is the base of his appeal. But I’ve also written about the fact that Trump is a known commodity. Is he at his ceiling or his floor in the polling? I think that remains unanswered.
Relatedly, I read something you wrote about how to define undecided voters. Only about 3 percent of people are truly undecided, you posit, but there’s a much larger bloc of moderates who may be leaning one way or another but haven’t fully made up their minds. And those voters don’t like Donald Trump at all, which tracks with your point that maybe there isn’t that much more room for him to gain.
I think that’s true. If you look at his favorability ratings in the state, they’re basically where they were in October of 2020. Everybody knows who he is and they know what they’ll get.
Polling shows that Harris actually holds her own pretty well with white voters compared to Biden’s 2020 margins, but that she’s still behind him among Black and Hispanic voters. This kind of surprised me.
That’s probably a working-class thing. The divide in this state to me, when I look and think about what’s going on here — one is an educational divide and one is a geographic divide. And the two work together.
If you look at what’s happened in Pennsylvania over the last 20-plus years, the state has flipped itself on its head. The Democratic strongholds of southwestern Pennsylvania that Al Gore won pretty comfortably completely flipped to Biden. And in the Southeast, you’ve seen the opposite. I’ve often wondered how fracking has played into this. Because if you think about the fracking belt in Pennsylvania, it runs from the southwest and comes across the northeast. Luzerne County was a county that Gore won with I think 54, 55 percent of the vote in 2000. And by 2020, Biden had gotten about 42 percent. For Harris, the question is: Can she cut the margins in those communities that support Republicans, and can she build or maintain the margins in those urban centers of Philly and Pittsburgh and the southeastern counties up through the Lehigh Valley? It’s very much the same strategy Biden used.
Pennsylvania is quite similar, demographically, to Wisconsin and Michigan. But Harris holds slightly larger leads in both of those states. These are small differences, but obviously small differences can matter a lot. Do you have any theory as to why Pennsylvania is stubbornly closer?
Your point is an interesting one, because if you think about the white non-Hispanic population overall in Wisconsin, it’s a larger share than in Pennsylvania. And there are fewer white working-class voters here, probably. Pennsylvania is an interesting........