Without question, the campaign has now begun in earnest.
And at the very center of the battle for the winning 270 electoral votes is my own Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes. So periodically I will be reporting in from the battlefield, explaining exactly what is happening on the ground here in William Penn’s namesake state.
Recall: In 2016 Donald Trump became the first Republican to carry Pennsylvania since George H.W.Bush in 1988. The state has 67 counties, and Trump carried 56 of them, for a margin of some 40,000 votes. This Trump victory was made possible by a decided increase in his support county-by-county as compared to the lesser support in those same counties for 2012 GOP Mitt Romney, 2008 nominee John McCain, and 2004 and 2000 nominee George W. Bush.
Over the weekend I spent some time in Allegheny County, invited to speak to the Allegheny County Republican picnic.
Allegheny County is home to Pennsylvania’s second-largest city – Pittsburgh. It is a Democratic county and was one of the 11 counties carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016. But here’s the rub.
The county is home to the largest number of Republicans in any of the rest of the 67 counties. The impact of this in 2016 was clear.
The hard fact for the Trump campaign was that he did less well in Allegheny County in 2016 than the three previous GOP nominees of Romney, McCain and Bush. Here are the numbers:
Trump – 259,480 or 39.1%
Romney – 262,039 or 42.12%
McCain – 272,347 or 41.81%
Bush (2004) – 271, 925 or 42.13%
Bush (2000) – 235, 361 or 40.41%
Obviously, if that Allegeny County dynamic changes – with a more enthusiastic GOP base – that can be critical to carrying the state.
What’s important to understand is that numbers like those above changed big time in the counties surrounding Pittsburgh – with major or minor increases for Trump over the totals for his GOP predecessors. That is exactly what enabled Trump to carry the state.
That understood, the importance of what I saw unfold at the counties’ massive North Park bodes well for Trump.
To begin, on the three and a half hour trip across the state on the Pennsylvania Turnpike I saw a number of Trump signs – and zero Biden signs.
Interestingly, on my arrival at the site I was told that somebody had complained to someone in the Pittsburgh or Allegheny County government and the party chairman, one Sam DeMarco, on receiving a complaint about a gathering in the age of COVID, smartly said it was a protest – and that settled that.
The key indicator to me was the crowd – hundreds of seriously enthused Trump supporters. Time after time in my discussions with different people it was made plain to me that they viewed the President as not the typical GOP candidate, and they so loved his performance as president that they are determined to get him re-elected. Suffice to say what I call the Trump Intensity Factor was seriously on display at this event. Over and over attendees told me they saw this election as their one chance to “drain the Swamp” – and they were determined to make this happen.
And this is why that is important. While they presumably will not win Allegheny County, the higher the pro-Trump turnout in the county the better for the Trump vote total in the state when added to the Trump support in those 56 pro-Trump counties from 2016.
While previous nominees had scored better in the county, they had not done nearly as well as Trump in those other counties – which is why all of his predecessor GOP nominees wound up losing Pennsylvania to Obama, John Kerry and Al Gore.
So we will be keeping our eye on Allegheny County as we move forward, with updates. Please feel free to come here and check in on my reports that center on the battle in Pennsylvania.
And by the way? This very week the President himself will be campaigning in Allegheny County’s neighboring Westmoreland County at the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe.
The President carried Westmoreland in 2016 – and this visit is part of the central Trump campaign strategy of running up the pro-Trump vote totals to overcome the numbers of Democrats in those 11 counties that went for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
In other words? The battle is on.
Come here to stay tuned!
