Updated September 13, 2024 at 06:21 AM ET
Wilkes-Barre and Johnstown, Penn., are seeing a lot of motorcade traffic these days.
Vice President Harris is visiting the communities today. Former President Donald Trump was there just last month.
And that is telling. A candidate’s time is the campaign’s most valuable and limited resource. So, in the race for president, there is one simple way to tell which states are the most competitive: just look where the candidates are going.
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An NPR analysis finds that in this final stretch of 2024, the seven swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are getting the bulk of the visits.
Since Harris entered the race in late July, she and Trump have each made trips to each of these states at least once.
But Pennsylvania, with the biggest prize of 19 electoral votes, is getting the most visits by far.
Friday’s trip marks Harris’ sixth to the state since she started running for president. Trump has also been there six times in the same period.
Both were in Philadelphia for their debate on Tuesday, and both returned on Wednesday to mark the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks at the memorial to Flight 93, which crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside.
For her part, Harris hunkered down in a Pittsburgh hotel for her debate preparations, a deliberate choice to earn more headlines in a key swing state.
Before that, she and her running mate Tim Walz held a big rally in Philadelphia and went on a bus tour in the western part of the state, which included an obligatory stop at a Sheetz gas station to buy snacks.
Trump won this state in 2016, and wants to win it back again
Trump has been to Harrisburg three times this year, two of those trips just since late July.
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“Oh, I could have had such a nice, easy life,” Trump joked during a rally speech. “I could be in a nice place right now, relaxing, watching the waves breaking, but I'd rather be right here in Harrisburg with you.”
Trump won Pennsylvania and the presidency in 2016. In 2020 he narrowly lost the state, and he is putting a lot of time and money behind winning it back.
“They say if you win Pennsylvania, you win the whole thing,” Trump said at another rally. “We cannot let these people win Pennsylvania.”
They’re blanketing the airwaves, too
In addition to all the rallies, Trump and his allies have booked more than $64 million in television ad time in Pennsylvania between September 10 and Election Day. That’s according to analysis of data from the tracking firm AdImpact.
To put that in perspective, that’s as much as Team Trump has reserved in Arizona, North Carolina and Wisconsin combined.
Harris’ campaign and allies have reserved even more, with $77 million in planned ad spending in Pennsylvania.
David Urban ran Trump’s Pennsylvania operation in 2016. He expects the race in the state will be decided by a narrow margin of 50,000 to 75,000 votes, as it was in the past two presidential elections.
“I think Pennsylvania’s going to be in that same spot,” Urban said. “One way or another, that’s what’s going to determine the election.”
Pennsylvania is easy for the candidates to get to
Urban points out there is also a practical reason both campaigns are spending so much time in Pennsylvania. It’s close to home for Trump — who spends his summers in New Jersey — and for Harris, who lives at the vice president’s residence in Washington, D.C.
“Arizona and Nevada, you’ve got to go all the way across America,” said Urban. “It’s a long flight. To go to Pennsylvania, both for Harris and for Trump, it’s a 20-minute flight.”
Trump is working to drive up turnout among the state’s white working-class voters, outside of the major cities, aiming to win the same way he did in 2016 – though he is also hoping to make gains with Black and Latino men.
The Harris campaign is trying to boost turnout in the cities and suburbs, but also aims to cut into Trump’s margins in more rural parts of Pennsylvania. The stops in Johnstown and Wilkes-Barre are part of that strategy.
“We are going into places where Democrats haven’t gone before,” said Quentin Fulks, Harris’ deputy campaign manager.
In August, Harris did bus tours of both Western Pennsylvania and the southeastern part of Georgia, in and around Savannah. That’s a city that hasn’t seen a general election candidate visit since the 1990s.
“When you are talking about some of these states that are being decided by 12,000 votes, it doesn’t matter if those votes come from Atlanta, or it doesn’t matter if those votes come from Savannah or Augusta or somewhere more rural like Schley County, my home town,” said Fulks.
According to AdImpact numbers, the Trump team has reserved nearly $30 million in ads in Georgia, while Harris and her allies plan to spend more than $40 million. It’s a sign they both see the state as winnable.
North Carolina is another state getting a lot of candidate facetime, even though Obama was the last Democratic nominee to win there, back in 2008.
Trump has been there three times since Harris got into the race. Harris made her second visit there as a presidential candidate on Thursday, but had held public events in the states six other times this when she was still President Biden’s running mate.
Polls show North Carolina is close, with an advantage to Trump. But he probably wouldn’t be spending all the time he is in North Carolina, if his campaign was sure they had it in the bag.
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