Pennsylvania is a key issue as Harris and Trump prepare for their showdown in Philadelphia

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — When Donald Trump and Kamala Harris meet onstage Tuesday night in Philadelphia, they will both know there is no doubt that Pennsylvania is critical to their chances of winning the presidency.

The nation's most populous state, where presidential elections are decisive, has sided with the winner in the last two elections, each time by just a few tens of thousands of votes. Polls this year suggest Pennsylvania will be very close again in November.

A loss in that state would make it difficult to make up electoral votes elsewhere to win the presidency. Trump and Harris have been frequent visitors in recent days. Harris plans to return Friday, and the former president was speaking in Butler County on July 14 when he was the target of an assassination attempt.

The stakes could be particularly high for Harris: No Democrat has won the White House without Pennsylvania since 1948.

Pennsylvanians snapped a six-game Democratic winning streak in the state when they helped propel Trump to victory in 2016 and then backed native Joe Biden in the 2020 race against Trump.

They say if you win Pennsylvania, you'll win everything, Trump told a crowd at the Wilkes-Barres Mohegan Arena in August.

Republicans are seeking to ease Trump’s unpopularity in Pennsylvania’s increasingly liberal suburbs by criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of the economy. They hope to counter Democrats’ huge advantage in early voting by encouraging their base to vote by mail.

Harris is seeking to rally the coalition behind Biden's winning campaign, including students, Black voters and women motivated by the protection of abortion rights.

Democrats also say it will be critical for Harris to win a landslide victory in Philadelphia, the state's largest city, where black residents make up the largest group by race, and its suburbs, while also narrowing Trump's wide margins among white voters in large swaths of rural areas and small towns in Pennsylvania.

The debate will take place at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The city is a Democratic stronghold where Trump said in 2020 that bad things were happening, one of his baseless attacks suggesting Democrats could only win Pennsylvania by cheating.

Biden swung Pennsylvania in 2020, not only winning by a landslide in Philadelphia but also by picking up larger margins in the densely populated suburbs around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. He also got a boost in northeastern Pennsylvania, in the counties around Scranton, where he grew up.

Ed Rendell, a former two-term Democratic governor who is wildly popular in Philadelphia and its suburbs, says Harris can do better than Biden in the suburbs.

There are a lot of votes to be had, a Democrat can get a bigger margin in those counties, Rendell said.

Lawrence Tabas, chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, said Trump could make headway there, too. Polls and GOP outreach show that the effect of inflation on the economy is a priority for these suburbanites, he said, and that the issue plays into the party's hands.

A lot of people are really starting to say, 'Look, beyond the personalities, they are who they are, but we really need the American economy to get strong again,'” Tabas said.

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Rendell rejects that claim. He said Trump is going off script and saying bizarre things that will ensure he gets a smaller share of independents and Republicans in the suburbs than he did in 2020.

He's become so weird that he's going to lose a lot of votes, Rendell said.

Harris has advocated a variety of measures to combat inflation, including capping the cost of prescription drugs, helping families pay for child care, reducing the cost of groceries and offering incentives to encourage homeownership.

Pennsylvania’s relatively sluggish economy has generally lagged the national economy, but its unemployment rate in July was nearly a full percentage point lower. The state’s private-sector wage growth, however, has lagged slightly behind the nation since Biden took office in 2021, according to federal data.

Meanwhile, Democrats are hoping the enthusiasm generated since Biden dropped out of the race and Harris entered the race will carry over to Election Day in November.

They hope first that she will do better with women and black voters, as the first black presidential candidate. Rendell said he is more optimistic about Harris' chances of winning Pennsylvania than he was with Biden in the race.

I think we're the favorites now, Rendell said.

The debate takes place before voting begins in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

A national survey conducted in July by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed that about 8 in 10 Democrats said they would be satisfied with Harris as the party's nominee, compared with 4 in 10 Democrats in March who said they would be satisfied with Biden as the candidate.

There is some optimism among Pennsylvania Democrats, even in Republican-leaning counties, including a number of whiter, less wealthy counties near Pittsburgh and Scranton that once voted consistently Democratic.

In Washington County, just outside Pittsburgh in the heart of the state's natural gas-producing region, Larry Maggi, a Democratic county commissioner, thinks she will overtake Biden there.

Maggi sees more signs for Harris than he ever saw for Biden, as well as more volunteers, many of them young women concerned about protecting abortion rights.

I've been doing this for 25 years and I see people I've never seen before, Maggi said.

Democrats are also hoping that a growing number of voters like Ray Robbins, a retired FBI agent and registered independent, will regret voting for Trump in 2016. Robbins did so, he said, because he believed a businessman could break the logjam in Congress.

“He's a liar,” Robbins said. “I think he's completely devoid of any morals. And you can quote me: I think he's a despicable human being, even though I voted for him.”

But Republicans also have reason to be optimistic.

In the nation’s second-largest gas-producing state, even Democrats acknowledge that Harris’s earlier support for a fracking ban during her 2020 campaign could prove costly. During that campaign, the vice president said the country could meet its clean energy goals without a ban, though Trump insists she would reverse course again.

Meanwhile, the Democratic advantage on state voter rolls has steadily declined since 2008, from 1.2 million to about 350,000 today.

Republicans credit their surge to young voters, as well as black, Asian and Hispanic voters.

A lot of them tell us it's the economy, Tabas said. And in Philadelphia, it's also crime and safety in neighborhoods and communities.

Those gains have yet to translate into GOP victories, as Democrats have outscored Republicans by more than 2-to-1 margins in statewide elections over the past decade.

Daniel Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, attributes the narrowing of the registration gap, in part, to Reagan Democrats who long voted Republican but did not immediately change their registration.

One of those voters is Larry Mitko, a longtime Democrat turned Republican who lives in a Pittsburgh suburb.

Mitko, 74, voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, and was leaning toward voting for Trump in 2024 because of inflation and Biden's handling of the economy before Biden withdrew from the race.

That's when Mitko was sure he would vote for Trump.

“I don't like the fact that they're lying to us and saying, 'He's fine, he's fine, and he can't walk up the stairs, he can't finish a sentence without forgetting what he's talking about,'” Mitko said of Biden.

Harris' late entry into the race could mean many voters are still learning about her, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania communications professor who studies presidential debates.

More voters than usual may not be ready to make a decision even as the election approaches, Jamieson said, so this debate could make a difference.

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Follow Marc Levy at twitter.com/timelywriter.

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Follow AP coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.

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