Salena Zito writes for the Washington Examiner that former President Donald Trump has a good reason to expect positive news from Pennsylvania voters.
“If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole damn thing.”
Two weeks ago, former President Donald Trump announced these words to rallygoers in this Westmoreland County town at a packed event, which included several former Pittsburgh Steelers taking the stage to endorse him and steelworkers as well, who even got the former president to put on a hard hat that ruffled his hair.
It was a statement that made the thousands of supporters, most of which were young, go understandably wild with emotion. Many of the attendees I spoke to were young women, many of them mothers with their children, who could not wait to vote in the first election they were truly excited about.
Trump wasn’t wrong. Heading into the final stretch of the election, I’d rather be him than Vice President Kamala Harris in the Keystone State. Several pollsters across the political spectrum shared data showing that Trump has a consistent edge in Pennsylvania and that Harris is at a standstill.
However, he’s a better fit for the commonwealth than Harris for reasons beyond just polling. In weeklong travels across the 67 counties in Pennsylvania, all the indicators told a story outside the worldview, or bubble, of Washington, D.C., and New York City, of why Harris has failed in key places to earn people’s votes and Trump has found a way to bring out new voters and earn just enough support to win the state.
In 2016, David Urban, a western Pennsylvania native, West Point graduate, and former chief of staff to the late Arlen Specter, a Republican senator who changed his party to Democrat in 2010 but lost in the Democratic primary, was a senior adviser to Trump.
Urban, who did not work with Specter when he changed parties, understood the importance of the smaller counties outside of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, explaining that there was an untapped center-right constituency in those counties that could sway the election for Trump over Hillary Clinton.
