Kamala Harris arrived at midday Thursday on the 7600 block of Forrest Avenue in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia, and exited a campaign Suburban wearing a black face mask, a black suit, and a stark ivory scarf around her neck. A block-party scene had been set, with music and two dancers from Philadanco! (formerly the Philadelphia Dance Company), and Harris, a good dancer herself, sunk her hips, flexed her front knee, and pumped her palm skyward appreciatively. With less than fifty days until November 3rd, in the sixth month of the pandemic, Harris’s visit seemed in some ways to belong to an ordinary campaign and in others, not at all. There were the motorcycle cops, looking important, and a fancy van to shepherd the press, and a gathering crowd that seemed half starstruck, half confused. The actress Sheryl Lee Ralph, in a high-waisted plaid pantsuit, was on hand to m.c. And all of this pomp for Harris to address a backyard audience of, by my count, twenty.
It was a clear, pretty September day, and Harris, a microphone in hand, settled into a patio chair, with a Biden-Harris mural on a brick wall behind her and an aboveground swimming pool to her left, topped by a single rubber duck. Harris was speaking slowly and purposefully, but she also obviously gets a kick out of herself, and a line out of her own mouth will sometimes trigger a long, cackling laugh while her audience sits bemused. A supporter asked a question about her own perspective on breaking barriers, and Harris, still the only Black woman in the U.S. Senate, said, “Some people may think that breaking barriers means you start off on one side of the barrier and then you just show up on the other side.” The thought was so plainly ridiculous to her that she dissolved into laughter. Recovering, she said, “No, that’s not how it works. Breaking barriers means you have to break things. And when you break things, that can be painful. Sometimes you get cut.”
It was a good audience for this kind of thing: a dozen and a half professional black women, one of whom said she thought she’d been at some parties with the Vice-Presidential nominee in college. Before each question, one of the moderators—Ralph or Philadelphia Councilwoman Cherelle Parker, who was wearing a white suit with a cape—would hype Harris’s interlocutor: “A woman we call our Fannie Lou Hamer, our Harriet Tubman!” for example. That turned out to be Ala Stanford, a pediatric surgeon who had founded a consortium of Black doctors to help with community access to coronavirus testing and treatment, an effort that had required long negotiations with testing companies and local outreach. “We went to church parking lots, we went to street corners,” Stanford said. Her question was about what Harris would have done had she been in charge when the coronavirus crisis hit, and Harris took the opportunity to make what the consultants might have called a “values contrast” with the President. “In times of crisis,” Harris said, strength “is born out of the pain that you feel for the people you know are suffering.” She went on, “In stark contrast, the President seems to think strength is based on who you beat down, as opposed to realizing true strength is based on who you lift up."
Harris’s strength as a politician is that she carries a slightly world-weary perspective on injustice without sacrificing bonhomie—the idea of the politician you’d want to get a drink with was invented for male politicians, but it applies to Harris. Her weakness is that her policy vision—not how does power sit on her but what would she do with it—can often seem slightly out of focus. One reason her Presidential campaign foundered was that she couldn’t make clear whether she supported Medicare for All. In Mount Airy, she began by emphasizing the need for better access to capital for minority-owned businesses—a decent applause line, but something of a niche issue, given the mass-scale pressures of disease and unemployment. After the meeting in Mount Airy, Harris drove downtown to the Philadelphia campaign offices to energize the staff and volunteers, though that office is normally closed so everyone can work from home. The atmosphere was of a visit by a sitting Vice-President; only here and there, when someone stopped to mention it, did it seem like an election was approaching. How many days until the election, Ralph asked. “Forty-seven,” Harris answered. Fewer now.
Of all the Hillary Clinton campaign’s losses in 2016, Pennsylvania might have been the most poignant—Democrats had won the state in six straight Presidential elections, dating back to Bill Clinton’s first, in 1992. In 2016, the Democrats had held their Convention in Philadelphia, and Hillary Clinton had returned there for a final rally, with Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen warming up a crowd of thousands. Donald Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania, by a margin of about forty-four thousand votes (“44,292,” a Pennsylvania Biden-Harris staffer corrected me, dolefully) owed less to a very slight decline in African-American voters than to swelling turnout from white voters without college educations, a significant minority of them registered Democrats, who voted for Trump by larger margins than they had for Mitt Romney. The Biden campaign’s aims are to shrink the Trump margin among rural and small-city voters and to take advantage of a general turn toward the Democrats among suburban voters, especially women. In 2018, female Democratic candidates flipped three congressional seats in the Philadelphia suburbs; the state’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, a bearded, mild-mannered south-central Pennsylvanian who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the U.S. House of Representatives, won reëlection by more than seventeen percentage points. When I spoke with officials from the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party about Pennsylvania, I got the impression that they did not see Joe Biden’s chances there as hinging upon a demographic breakthrough (as they did in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, or Texas) so much as on the correction of what they saw as a historical anomaly. Of course, the main anomaly was Trump, and Trump is on the ticket again.
Over the weekend, I spoke with Brendan McPhillips, the Biden campaign’s state director in Pennsylvania, and Sinceré Harris, a senior adviser to the state campaign. In a Presidential race, where message and policy are set from national headquarters, the operatives who run a state are often veterans of field work (as McPhillips is) and their focus is on the blunt work of turnout, vote counting, and matching volunteers and staffers to particular voters who might need a nudge. Both McPhillips and Harris worked on the Clinton campaign in 2016, and though they were circumspect about their views on its strategies, they emphasized that they had planned a much more intense program of voter outreach in the small cities and towns that had shifted to Trump.
“I’m sure you’ve heard the expression that Democrats need to do what they need to do in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and then Pennsylvania’s done—well, that’s clearly no longer the case,” McPhillips said. One of the campaign’s talking points has been how little Trump’s Presidency has done to improve the material well-being of the voters who swung to him in 2016. McPhillips said that his operation was organizing all sixty-seven counties in the state; the campaign pointed out that it is holding weekly (Zoom) organizing meetings with members of growing communities of color in blue-collar cities like Erie, and in the Lehigh Valley. (Some of those communities are very small.) The hope, McPhillips said, was that Biden’s presence on the ballot and their outreach could persuade some ex-Democrats to “come back home to the Democratic Party.” There were counties in Pennsylvania, McPhillips went on, where shrinking a Clinton loss by twenty-five points to a Biden loss by twenty might make a big difference.
The Democrats might be able to get away with margins like that because of the swing that has taken place in Pennsylvania’s suburbs, particularly in the mostly prosperous belt around Philadelphia—Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery counties. Harris told me that, from her view, the political transformation of these places was more durable than it might at first appear. “Women have been super-energized since Trump’s reëlection—it wasn’t just in 2018,” Harris said. In 2017, Democrats won control of the Delaware County legislature for the first time since the Civil War; in 2018, they flipped four suburban congressional seats; in 2019, they took control of the Bucks County board of commissioners for the first time since 1983. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s wrapup of last year’s election results was headlined “The Blue Wave Crashed Down on Pennsylvania Again.”
Harris and McPhillips sounded relatively sanguine about the electoral effect of the Supreme Court vacancy brought on by Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, perhaps because it will likely elevate the same issues that have turned the suburbs over the past four years. “Choice is on the ballot, yes. But having access to health care, or not, is also on the ballot,” Harris said. “Health care has been a crystallizing issue for many folks.” Harris was echoing the Biden campaign’s line on the vacancy, which marks a subtle retreat from the rhetoric of the Clinton campaign: from a specific focus on the difficulties faced by women and minorities to a more general discussion of some of those same issues, like health care, without the identity-politics framing.
Biden’s campaign, unlike Trump’s, has suspended door-knocking, as part of its precautions against COVID-19, which led last week to a round of Democrats expressing anxiety over the decision in the media. Obviously, McPhillips said, the campaign was not knocking on doors, but he emphasized that the campaign had put in five million phone calls to Pennsylvanians, and that it held regular Zoom meetings for organizers. This seemed like quite a lot to ask of Zooms. The Biden campaign had envisioned a strategy for Pennsylvania that had seemed most precisely expressed by the act of door-knocking—if the Republicans planned to demonize Democrats as representing the values of coastal élites, then the Democrats would put ordinary Pennsylvanians, starting with the Scranton-born candidate, in front of voters, maybe even at their doors, as a counterweight. There will be no door-knocking this time, and there have been no mass rallies yet; they have been replaced instead by other, less tangible forms of organizing (the phone banks, the Zooms) that do less to shrink the cultural distance between the swing voters in rural Pennsylvania and the Democrats on the coasts. Instead, there was the Vice-Presidential candidate visiting an audience of twenty, another of eleven, and a Zoom among a few dozen, whom the campaign would rely upon to pass the word. Running a Presidential campaign during a pandemic is a bit like learning to speak through a mask.
Biden has always been very clear about why he is running for President—his abhorrence of Trump’s corruption of democracy and callousness to the lives of ordinary people, his disgust at the President’s defense of racists in Charlottesville and embrace of Vladimir Putin at Helsinki. But that hasn’t always translated into a concise campaign message, nor a clear view of what a Biden Presidency would concern itself with. The primary voters who picked Biden over younger rivals often did so as an act of projection—he was the kind of Democrat, I often heard in the early primary states, who would not alienate swing voters in the upper Midwest. Tactically, this always sounded smart, and the wisdom has been borne out by Biden’s performance in the polls, where he has reduced Trump’s margins among senior citizens and white voters generally. But the focus on Trump has also made the Biden campaign itself a little elusive. Biden supports a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage, but rarely emphasizes it; he has embraced an expansive, potentially transformational climate agenda, but also tells Pennsylvania audiences he sees no need to phase out fracking. The consensus he means to build against Trump is so broad that it can be hard to envision his Presidency.
Thursday evening, just before the campaign declared a wheels-up for Harris at Philadelphia International Airport, a CNN town hall featuring Biden began two hours away, in Scranton, with a socially distanced audience of people in their cars, like at a drive-in theatre. Advisers to Bernie Sanders recently told the Washington Post of the venerable socialist senator’s concerns that Biden was not doing enough to emphasize pocketbook issues for working-class Democrats. This event, designed for Biden to make the case that the election is about “Park Avenue versus Scranton,” as the press releases framed it, seemed like an effort to show that the Presidential candidate was thinking along the same lines. Biden reminded the northeastern Pennsylvanians in their cars (and, on some occasions, outside of them) that he had been the first in his immediate family to go to college, and that his father had lost his job and left Scranton. “There used to be a bad joke in the sixties in Scranton—no one’s in Scranton, everybody’s from Scranton, because so many people lost their jobs,” he said. “Guys like Trump, who inherited everything, and squandered what they inherited, are the people that I have always had a problem with, not the people who are busting their neck.”
I watched this event on my phone, at an American Airlines gate so underpopulated it made me fear for the jobs of the gate agents and store attendants around me. The Biden campaign had sent me a pair of ads they’d recently put up in rural Pennsylvania, and as I watched them from the gate I didn’t hear much of the harder-edged Park-Avenue-versus-Scranton talk, of the kind that Bernie Sanders had been encouraging. A small-business owner from southwestern Pennsylvania said he didn’t like to talk politics but bemoaned Trump’s “divisiveness.” Rick Telesz, a soybean and dairy farmer from rural Volant, Pennsylvania, said he regretted voting for Trump in 2020 and would not repeat the mistake—on COVID-19, Telesz told the camera, “he’s been totally negligent on how he informed the people. I mean, the guy gets the blame for what’s happened.” The music was serene, and so was the scene, with cows and a red pickup truck and a big American flag on a hilltop. The tone, elegiac, had more sadness than anger. Biden’s campaign might strike some populist notes—he struck some of them again in a strong speech in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, on Monday—but it is not really a populist campaign.
At seventy-seven years old, with half a century of public life behind him, Biden is a less specific figure than the message of Park Avenue versus Scranton might make him out to be: he can’t run in the way that Trump did in 2016 or Barack Obama did in 2008, as a figure new to politics, embodying a single idea. A Republican pollster in Pennsylvania, who often works state legislative races, told me recently that he could detect no special advantage for Biden in his home region of northeast Pennsylvania. If Biden is running a big-tent campaign, then that has something to do with Trump and also with the reality that Biden, at the end of a long political career during which he’s taken many different positions, is himself a big tent. That neither Biden nor Harris is an especially ideological figure is a cause of the periodic fuzziness of their campaign, but it is also an effect, of the kind of figures who Democratic voters imagined might win them back Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. If they win, what comes next? Six weeks from the end, the Biden campaign in Pennsylvania has some of the quality of a light at the end of the tunnel, which, even as it draws near, makes it hard to clearly see.
Read More About the 2020 Election
- Can Joe Biden win the Presidency based on a promise of generational change?
- The fall and rise of Kamala Harris.
- When a sitting President threatens to delay a sacrosanct American ritual like an election, you should listen.
- To understand the path Donald Trump has taken to the 2020 election, look at what he has provided the executive class.
- What happens if Trump fights the election results?
- The refusal by Mitch McConnell to rein in Trump is looking riskier than ever.
- Sign up for our election newsletter for insight and analysis from our reporters and columnists.
