Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have a Pennsylvania problem.
Harris, her team and national Democrats finally know it. But does their knowledge come too late? And can they fix it?
With his disastrous debate performance in June, President Biden showed the nation he’s old, floundering and not up to the job. Polls confirmed it. National Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, along with Team Harris, sprang into action.
Something had to be done. The “Democratic Politburo” decided — on behalf of 75 million Democratic voters — what the party’s best option was. Out with “Uncle Joe,” and in with the new and improved product: Kamala Harris.
What Harris and national Democrats didn’t realize was while this may have been a necessary national strategy, it was a horrible Pennsylvania strategy. In 2024, if you want to win the presidency, you need Pennsylvania — especially if you’re a Democrat.
The first big blunder for Harris and her team was taking the Keystone State for granted. “Uncle Joe” is from Scranton and loves to tell stories about his family’s days there. That has helped secure thousands of blue Democratic votes in an increasingly red northeastern Pennsylvania. Take away Biden, and San Francisco Harris has little chance of keeping those voters.
Add to it that for three decades, voters in Philadelphia and its suburbs saw Biden as our “third senator.” He showed up at the Navy Yard, at ballgames, at ribbon cuttings — you name it. In 2020, when the GOP told voters Biden had become a captive of the “far left,” that was a hard sell in southeastern Pennsylvania. It’s a much easier one in 2024 with Harris at the top of the ticket.
Next, after weeks of courting Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate, Harris rejected him for Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota — the state that gave us Gov. Jesse “The Body” Ventura and Al “Saturday Night Live” Franken as a senator.
Another misstep for Harris. While Shapiro isn’t Biden, he is well known in greater Philadelphia and seems comfortable campaigning in Scranton and towns like it across the state.
It still isn’t clear if Harris rejected Shapiro because he is Jewish and supports Israel’s right to defend itself or because he is a tireless campaigner, well-received on the stump, who might show her up. Did she reject Shapiro because picking him would offend the Squad in Congress and endanger the electoral votes of Michigan, home to a large Muslim population? Or did she spurn the Pennsylvania governor because she didn’t want her supporters murmuring, “We should’ve run him“?
Harris compounded her mistake by picking Walz, who represents the Democratic Party’s modern left wing. Walz won’t help Harris win votes in Pennsylvania; in fact, he makes it harder. She picked someone who is unrelatable everywhere, from Philadelphia’s neighborhoods to small-town and rural Pennsylvania. And he’s just plain “weird.”
It gets worse. Her message, agenda and policies are not resonating here.
She has tried to stress that the economy is actually good — “Bidenomics is working,” she maintained. They tried charts, graphs and “experts.” No one in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods is buying it, especially blacks and Hispanics, who are being crushed by inflation and violent crime.
So Harris pivoted to a new message: She would “fix” the economy and “fight” inflation. Her now comically repeated line about being “raised in a middle-class family” draws blank stares, laughs or anger, even among some in her usual base.
It’s even worse in rural Pennsylvania, where Walz and “second gentleman” Doug Emhoff tried a “Real Men for Kamala tour,” complete with ads and Zoom calls about why men should support her.
Then they sent Elmer Fudd — aka Walz — out hunting. In newly purchased hunting clothes, using the wrong rifle (plus demonstrating that he didn’t know how to load it), Walz resembled something like King Charles attending the Indianapolis 500.
Harris was against fracking — that is, before she was for it, as she now claims to be. No one in rural Pennsylvania is buying it. Her “values haven’t changed,” as she herself says. Rural Pennsylvanians know that her preferred policy would hurt the economy of northern, central and western Pennsylvania, to say nothing of the national economy and national security.
Democrats want to win Pennsylvania, of course — but they have selected the wrong candidate, through the wrong method. Harris then dug the hole deeper by picking the wrong running mate. And to top it off, they’re running on a misguided, if not delusional, platform.
To try to save the campaign, they sent in multimillionaire Obama on a private jet to lecture working-class black male voters in Pittsburgh. The former president chided them about how they have an alleged duty to support a black candidate and how they must overcome their alleged dislike of having a woman in charge. He probably didn’t convince many of them.
In a state that Trump carried by 0.7 points in 2016 and lost by 1.4 points in 2020, the margin of victory figures to be close. There’s no room for unforced errors.
Harris and the national Democrats either severely miscalculated, or they think their candidate’s record and platform don’t matter.
Is it ignorance or arrogance? Or is the Democrats’ strategy now just about collecting votes for a “brand”? The results will tell us a great deal — not only about the winner of the presidency in 2024 but also about the battle for Pennsylvania in the years ahead.
Guy Ciarrocchi writes for RealClearPennsylvania and Broad+Liberty. He is a former Republican nominee for Congress and a strategist.
Twitter: @PaSuburbsGuy
Republished with permission from RealClearPennsylvania.