One day before the presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris made her first campaign visit to Reading, Pennsylvania — a majority Latino city just an hour outside of Philadelphia. Donald Trump’s campaign had been running outreach to Latino voters in the Berks County city since June, when the Republican National Committee opened a Latino Americans for Trump office as it ramped up its appeals to Latino voters across the state.

When votes were counted in Berks County, the gap between the campaigns was stark. As in 2020, Berks again went for Trump on Tuesday — this time up 4.6 percentage points to 58 percent. Harris received 43 percent of the vote, where President Joe Biden had won 45.2 percent in 2020.

The problem was not that Berks had become a Republican stronghold, but that Democrats had ceded the territory long before Trump opened his campaign office this summer. It was a familiar story to progressive organizers across Pennsylvania, who have spent the last several campaign cycles trying to claw back voters Democrats have left on the table.

Democratic consultants in Pennsylvania had been caught on their heels in 2016, when Trump flipped the state red for the first time in three decades and won three counties that had voted twice for former President Barack Obama. When Biden won Pennsylvania back in 2020, analysts and organizers attributed the win to the work done in progressive cities like Philadelphia. But it wasn’t the Biden campaign doing the legwork, it was progressives and independents working within coalitions led by groups like Pennsylvania Stands Up, Make the Road Action Pennsylvania, the Working Families Party, and unions like Unite Here and Service Employees International Union.

Democrats’ reliance on progressive enclaves and local organizers to fill the gap they lost with Trump’s first win was never more clear than in the midnight hours heading into Wednesday, as Trump pulled away with electoral votes and Harris’s narrowing path to victory fell once again to voters in cities like Philadelphia.

While Biden won 13 Pennsylvania counties in 2020, Harris won just eight — with Trump flipping the counties of Bucks, Northampton, Erie, Monroe, and Centre. As the results solidified for Trump, mainstream media and Democratic pundits turned their fire not at the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party but in two other directions — at minority voters who had drifted, along with white men and women,........

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