Donald Trump will campaign Wednesday in the former coal mining hub where President Joe Biden grew up as the Republican White House candidate woos traditionally Democratic blue-collar voters in the key election battleground of Pennsylvania.
Trump is polling neck-and-neck with Democrat Kamala Harris in the Keystone State, the once-thriving epicenter of the US industrial heartland, and the battleground considered one of the biggest prizes in the Electoral College system that decides US elections.
“The Harris-Biden administration’s inflationary policies and disastrous handling of our southern border has devastated Pennsylvania,” the Trump campaign said in a statement ahead of his rally in Scranton.
“With prices up over 20 percent and real wages down since Kamala Harris took office, Pennsylvanians are struggling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, tens of millions of illegal immigrants have flooded our country on Kamala’s watch, worsening already sky-high rent and real estate costs.”
Although Biden’s family base is in Delaware, he grew up in Scranton and remains enormously popular in the county where it is located, which he won by nine points on the way to claiming the state in 2020.
Harris, Biden’s vice president, has maintained a nationwide polling lead of two to three points since mid-August and has been gaining on Trump on the economy, boosted by easing inflation and a robust jobs report last week.
But the polls in Pennsylvania and the other six swing states likely to decide the election have been much closer.
And with four weeks to go until Election Day on November 5, new Gallup polling shows Trump outperforming Harris 54 percent to 45 percent on the economy as he touts proposals for a tariff-led manufacturing “renaissance.”
Pennsylvania is seen as a bastion of the working class vote, and both candidates have visited regularly.
The former president, 78, has a second event Wednesday in Reading, 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of Philadelphia.
– Media blitz –
Trump was last in the Keystone State just four days ago for a defiant return to the site of a campaign rally where he was grazed on the ear by an assassin’s bullet in July, joined onstage by billionaire backer Elon Musk.
The tech entrepreneur turned right-wing conspiracy theorist stressed the tight margins that will likely decide the election in battleground states like Pennsylvania, claiming that Trump “must win to preserve democracy in America.”
Trump was facing outrage ahead of his Pennsylvania swing over allegations in a new book that he secretly sent coveted Covid-19 test kits to Russian leader Vladimir Putin in 2020, as the pandemic was raging and Americans were facing a shortage.
Harris, 59, told radio personality Howard Stern that Trump has the “desire to be a dictator” and is easily manipulated “by flattery and with favor” from people like Putin.
The interview was part of a new media blitz targeting undecided voting blocs after weeks of criticism from Republicans — and some dissenting voices on her own side — that Harris has been avoiding journalists and sticking to scripted events.
As well as Stern’s show, the vice president has appeared this week on ABC’s daytime show “The View,” CBS’s flagship “60 Minutes” program, comedy hour “Late Night with Stephen Colbert” and influential women’s podcast “Call Her Daddy.”
Harris will join Biden virtually for briefings about Hurricanes Milton and Helene before heading to Nevada later for a campaign event in Las Vegas on Thursday. She then hits Arizona, where she will campaign in Phoenix on Friday.
Wednesday marks the first day of early voting in Arizona, which had the closest margin of any state in the 2020 presidential election, and the vice presidential nominees — Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Walz — are due to hold rallies in Tucson.
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