With the US presidential election just over a month away, Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump — and Tim Walz and JD Vance, their respective running mates — have been frequently holding rallies in rural areas of Pennsylvania. But it is voters in Philadelphia (or Philly, as the locals here call it) whom both Democrats and Republicans are urging to get politically engaged.
The stakes felt particularly high at a local grassroots event I attended last Wednesday in Chinatown’s Crane Community Center.
“We have the power right in Philadelphia to win Pennsylvania”, said Councilmember Nina Ahmad of the Philadelphia City Council. “We can show the country that Philadelphia saved this election. We [the state] have 19 electoral votes, but we’ve got to have a good turnout. If we can achieve 80%, we are good!”
“Turnout is everything” was the overall message at the event, called “Voter Protection Advocacy and the Asian American, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander [AANHPI] Community”, run as part of the “Harris for President PA Dems” campaign.
As experts and pundits alike keep saying, it’s difficult for either Trump or Harris to win the presidency without winning Pennsylvania. But it’s not enough for Philly voters to be anti-Trump or anti-Harris; they’ve got to mobilise others to vote and make each vote count.
“In New York, likely Democratic voters vastly outnumber Republican voters, so whether my family in New York City votes for the Democrats is not going to affect the statewide outcome. In Pennsylvania, the balance of voters is split evenly, with rural areas heavily Republican and urban areas heavily Democratic,” Josh Freedman, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, explains to me.
“So, if the Democrats win Philly by, say, 80%, then they might be able to outnumber Republican votes in rural areas. All that matters is who has more votes in the entire state in America’s winner-take-all electoral college system.”
Although there were only about 20 people in the room, the panel of speakers all had impressive titles. Beyond Councilmember Ahmad, there was also Jenny Yang, whom Biden appointed to head the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, having previously chaired the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the Obama administration; and the Honourable Erika Moritsugu, deputy assistant to Biden and Asian American and Pacific Islander senior liaison, was also visiting from Washington DC in an unofficial capacity. Yang explained the importance of increasing the voter turnout in Philadelphia:
There is virtually no way for either presidential candidate to win without winning the 19 electoral votes in Pennsylvania. In 2000, President Biden won PA by only 80,000 votes, and that comes to 12 votes per precinct, and that’s why it’s so important every vote is counted, and we wanted to make sure that the Asian-American voters know what their rights are, where to go, and if they have a problem voting, to ensure that they have the language access and other resources they need to make sure that they cast their votes early or on election day.
Yang told her audience that she had seen deliberate efforts to disseminate misinformation aimed at discouraging marginalised communities from voting, particularly those who often haven’t voted in the past. She told people to be aware of potential suppression efforts, including attacks on voters by mail and “misinformation about pre-canvass and canvass ballot counting, as well as attacks on provisional ballot voting”.
In Pennsylvania, the issues are particularly complex, Yang told the meeting. As she explained, my head was spinning: “There are 67 [different] county-based set of rules that govern voting,” she said.
Still, Yang believed that “the AANHPI can be the margin of victory this year”, saying, “The community is growing, and we have more eligible voters, so we want to make sure your vote is counted.”
Ahmad, herself an immigrant from war-torn Bangladesh, told the meeting that Donald Trump had already set up an office to delegitimise naturalized citizens:
They are going to look at your application, whether it was 20 years ago or 50 years ago. And they’re going to find something wrong in that. And they are going to tell you to leave this country. If you think you’re a citizen by naturalisation and you are safe, you are not. So, people who are feeling ambivalent about this election, tell them what this means … If you think that these two candidates are the same and it doesn’t matter, it matters, immensely, because you might not be in this country anymore.
Not all of the Democrats’ campaign events involve bringing in VIPs from Washington. And many events also focus on specific issues. While the AANHPI community forum targeted ethnic minorities, a message-training event in the area of Upper Darby and Yeadon last Sunday targeted women, focusing exclusively on the issue of reproductive rights.
The convenor of the training class was volunteer Lisa, an African-American woman living in Delaware County (“Delco”), in the southeast of Pennsylvania. She spoke to an audience of 18 people, including myself, and had been well briefed. Her task was to educate prospective Democratic volunteers about what to say and how to talk to voters when they were phone banking, canvassing (door-knocking), distributing yard signs, and hosting watch parties for the vice-presidential debate scheduled for Wednesday, October 2 (AEST time).
Equipped with slides outlining key messages in dot points that juxtaposed Trump’s and Harris’ policies on reproductive rights, Lisa wanted her audience to grasp the potential impact of Trump’s policy on women’s access to abortion:
Trump would ban abortion nationwide, and he would have the right to prosecute women and monitor women’s pregnancies, and his close allies plan to take executive action including potentially prosecuting women and doctors for receiving medication for abortion in the mail.
She also offered practical advice on how to have this potentially difficult conversation with strangers who may be on the other side of the aisle:
When you’re having this conversation with people, you always want to check in; you want to acknowledge the conversation they’re having with you, and thank them for chatting, and be prepared to make yourself vulnerable enough if the person is really, authentically and with an open heart, listening to the conversation, to move forward. If they say, ‘I really have to think about this, there’s a lot to think about’, call them up [later] and ask them, ‘Have you thought about these issues?’
She then regaled her audience with examples of how they could persuade voters more effectively on social media:
For example, if you read an interview, or saw an interview on one of your social media sites, saying Trump will throw people into prison if they decide to have an abortion, this is an instance when you want to make a comment, you want to share the impact. You want to connect the dots between what the person says and what Vice President Harris is saying.
Early voting by mail has already started in several states, and Pennsylvania is expected to open its mail voting soon. Both parties will intensify their grassroots campaign to encourage voter turnout. So far, supporters and volunteers for both parties have not shied away from making claims that seem to be big on exaggeration and short on nuance. In an earnest, if not desperate, attempt to jolt disengaged and undecided voters into taking action, both sides seem to resort to ramping up the fear factor.
Will Democratic voters in Philadelphia learn a lesson from the 2016 election and step up this time, or will they resort to their famous “Philly Shrug” and say, “There’s no point, so why try?”
