White Catholics in Northeastern Pennsylvania felt a cultural connection to Joe Biden, a connection Harris currently lacks according to reports, and it could cost her the White House.
While Joe Biden deciding not to run for reelection catapulted his Vice President, Kamala Harris, to the forefront of the Democratic Party and their efforts to defeat former President Donald Trump, Harris has struggled to make the same visceral connection with rural and culturally conservative white voters the way Biden did his entire career.
Northeastern Pennsylvania, as detailed in Politico, has shown resistance to Harris. Biden’s Scranton roots kept him popular in the region, as part of a nostalgia for a forgotten Democratic Party focused on organized labor and economic policy. Catholics dominate the area, and Harris’ disconnect compared to Biden, particularly on her stance on abortion, is making it more difficult for Democrats to capture the all-important Keystone State in the presidential election.
Harris represents what Politico called “the Democratic Party’s leftward drift” in the culture wars, allowing Trump and his brand of cultural and economic populism to fill in a vacuum of white, Catholic voters that make up a larger number of voters compared to the rest of the state. Nationally, Trump cleaned up with Catholic voters in 2016, beating Hillary Clinton by more than 30 percentage points. Biden cut that lead in half in 2020, but some fear Harris’ margin will be closer to Clinton’s than Biden.
The polls in Pennsylvania show a jump ball, with the average poll showing Trump with the slimmest of leads.
It is telling how important Pennsylvania, with 19 electoral votes and a wide range of large, diverse voting blocs, by the focus paid by the campaigns and the media. African-American sororities are getting electoral attention in Pennsylvania’s urban areas as Harris herself is an alumna of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s “oldest Greek-letter organization established by African American college-educated women.” Polish Americans in Pennsylvania are the subject of coverage from CBS News while Aljazeera discusses how important Muslim voters are in the Keystone State.
It’s not just Catholic voters with whom Harris is having difficulty replicating Biden’s charms. Younger voters in Pennsylvania are also failing to flock to her as they did with her predecessor. Her “sudden shift to the center” is turning off a Gen Z crowd that identifies as more progressive than previous generations, which has manifested itself in polling.
The Harris campaign has a campaign blitz in the state featuring Republican voters supporting Harris in ads and in-person campaign events. Both campaigns have spent an enormous amount of time and money in must-win Pennsylvania. Trump himself will be returning to Butler on October 5, where he was shot and nearly assassinated three months ago.
