‘We can’t compete with him in the visual media, but we can out-compete him on the ground.’
Erie, Pa. – Here in one of Pennsylvania’s swingiest counties late last month, Erie Democratic Party chairman Sam Talarico didn’t hesitate to acknowledge that it’s hard for his party to compete with Donald Trump on the airwaves.
“He just tends to suck up all the oxygen in the room,” the tall, mustachioed former high-school science teacher and local union president told National Review during a sit-down interview here in his party headquarters last week.
Yes, Democrats have spent millions in ads this cycle. But the problem for Harris, Talarico says, is that “Trump says one outlandish thing, and then that gets some that gets media attention, and then the news cycle just starts all over again the next day when he says the next outlandish thing.”
Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign here knows this too, he says. “We can’t compete with him in the visual media, but we can out-compete him on the ground,” Talarico says of Trump. Given the closeness of the polls, his best barometer for how things are swinging this cycle is the enthusiasm he’s seeing on the ground, which he maintains is greater than it was for Barack Obama in 2008. He’s optimistic that a robust canvassing effort will be the difference maker for Democrats in a swing county that went for Donald Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden four years later.
The Democrats have two coordinated campaign offices, eleven paid staffers, and hundreds of volunteers who completed 700 shifts this weekend alone, according to a Harris-Walz spokesperson. The campaign says that as of Monday, Democratic canvassers had knocked on more than 135,000 doors and made nearly 700,000 phone calls.
“We’re doing all this work to maybe move 1,000 voters,” Talarico says of Democrats’ robust ground game here in bellwether Erie, which serves a microcosm of both parties’ battleground state get-out-the-vote efforts this cycle.
Things are a bit quieter over at the county GOP headquarters about a quick drive across town here in Erie, which is nestled in the northwest corner of the state between Ohio and New York. Republican residents were trickling into the office on a recent Monday morning to pick up Trump-Vance signs and stickers.
“Most of our ground game is geared towards focusing on registered Republicans and independents,” Erie GOP County chairman Ted Eddy said in a recent telephone interview with National Review. “We don’t really waste too much time going to Democratic houses, because you’re not really going to get much response out of that.” He maintains that the 2024 GOP ground game is stronger here than it was four years ago.
Tomorrow will put these competing ground games to the test. The Trump campaign does not have hard data to share with National Review regarding Republican canvassing efforts here, such as how many doors have been knocked and phone calls have been made in recent weeks by paid staff and volunteers.
The GOP ticket has gotten grief from some battleground-state operatives about ground-game efforts but insists that the electoral impact of the Democratic ticket’s canvassing efforts is being overblown.
“I genuinely feel like the biggest value added by their ground game is the amount of earned media they’ve gotten from being able to pitch all of these metrics about their ground game,” a Trump-Vance campaign spokesperson working in Pennsylvania this cycle tells National Review.
As National Review has reported at length, the GOP ticket is hoping for a win by targeting low-propensity voters, buoyed by a cadre of “Trump Force 47” volunteers and a web of aligned GOP grassroots organizations and political action committees who are knocking doors.
The Trump campaign is confident that the early-voting numbers and voter-registration trends signal that the electoral winds are blowing in the right direction. Aligned GOP groups have also touted the increased number of Republican voters who have been added to the permanent absentee list here, as well as the increase in percentage growth of absentee-ballot requests to absentee-ballot returns this cycle.
“Democrats are conflating input and output here,” this Trump campaign official said of the Harris-Walz campaign’s focus on touting their robust canvassing efforts here in Erie and across Pennsylvania. “If their field game is this great, if there are so many staff on board and this many offices and there’s this much activity, I think they would have some tangible output to report.”
A look at the data shows that the voter-registration gap has indeed closed in Republicans’ favor since last cycle. According to Pennsylvania political party registration data updated December 31, 2020, There were 86,502 registered Democrats in Erie and 67,466 registered Republicans four years ago. According to Erie’s voter registration data updated yesterday: there are now 81,830 registered Democrats and 73,054 registered Republicans.
The Democratic counterpoint to this, of course, is that increased voter-registration numbers for Republicans do not translate to GOP votes, and that the output will come on Election Day. And on the ground here, Democratic door knockers and rallygoers are cautiously optimistic that Kamala Harris will carry Erie and the presidency. But in the closing weeks, the polls have left them feeling puzzled and a bit nervous, given the Democratic enthusiasm they say they’re seeing on the ground.
“She only had a couple months to pull this together, but I think she came out and is now very specific as to what her goals are and where she is going, and comparing herself with Trump,” Erie resident Paul Dill told National Review at a recent Bernie Sanders rally here for the Harris-Walz ticket. His wife, Raylene, says she is stunned by the tightness of the polls given the enthusiasm she hears from friends and even strangers around town. The people that they bump into are completely on the same page as they are “as far as voting totally blue” up and down the ballot here, she says.
The campaign signs rally-goers waved around during Bernie Sanders’s campaign stop here last week represent some of the many groups that compose the Democratic electoral coalition — “students” for Harris-Walz, “veterans and military families” for Harris-Walz, “union labor” for Harris-Walz, “out” for Harris-Walz (with a rainbow flag).
Lillian Fanzine, a recent Penn State graduate working to elect the Democratic ticket here, spoke with National Review right outside the Harris-Walz campaign office here late last month about how abortion rights motivated her to help knock on doors this cycle and persuade one of her Republican-leaning male friends to vote for the Democratic ticket. As an Erie native, she’s seen this county “swing back and forth right in front of me” over the years. “And after Trump won that last time, I realized I can’t let him get in the office again, so that got me canvassing.”
“I’m definitely confident in what we’re doing” on the ground here, she says.
Cautious optimism abounds on the Republican side too. Eddy, the campaign chairman here, maintains that people are unhappy with the status quo under the Biden-Harris administration, and feel nostalgic for the lower prices they experienced under Trump.
“People in Erie County have to do the same thing, and that’s they have to go to grocery stores, they have to put gas in their cars,” he says. “And those two elements have seen a huge increase due to inflation because of the policies that the Harris and Biden administration has put forth.”