Megan trotter | news editor
With the presidential election 46 days away, Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania have been getting special attention from the candidates. Local experts say the locations of their visits provide insight into Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump’s target voter demographics.
Leading up to last week’s debate Harris spent a week in Pittsburgh visiting local businesses in the Downtown area, whereas Trump has been primarily focusing his efforts in the more rural areas surrounding Pittsburgh such as Westmoreland and Butler Counties.
Professor and Chair of Duquesne’s Political Science Department Clifford Bob said both candidates are trying to get enthusiasm up among their likely voters.
“They want to solidify the turnout by boosting voter enthusiasm about their candidacies in the areas where they’re strongest,” Bob said.
According to Bob, this approach is standard strategy for a presidential race because there is only a small percent of the voter population who doesn’t know who they’ll be voting for.
“I’d say [a] significant proportion are already pretty sure who they would vote for, but the question is whether they’ll actually come out and vote,” he said.
Alison Dagnes, a professor of Political Science at Shippensburg University, said she has heard this presidential race described as the “girls versus boys” election.
“Donald Trump is targeting the bro voters, non-college educated men, to include younger black men and Latinos,” Dagnes said. “Harris, meanwhile, is targeting women, educated men, young voters, independents and people who have tuned out.”
Social media platforms are one place voters can really see the different running strategies, Dagnes said.
“Trump is kind of hitting on this masculine idea … his usual right wing media stuff, but also now podcasts, he’s attracting a lot of social media influencers who are big in the bro world,” she said.
Despite losing an electoral vote following the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania remains one of the states
with the highest number of electoral votes, making it a major battle-ground state.
“We are the largest of the swing states in terms of electoral votes, so that’s thing number one. Thing number two is that we are very evenly divided in that we have a very close number of Democrats and Republicans,” she said.
Associate Professor of law Eugene Mazo said that often candidates will receive voting records for each state to help them know what areas hit along the campaign trail.
“If you look at the makeup of Pennsylvania, the blue dots are in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and potentially in the Philadelphia suburbs,” Mazo said. “Then the rest of the state sort of leans red.”
Mazo said he sees a major difference between Harris and Trump’s campaigns.
“From a professional standpoint, her campaign is kind of very light on policy,” Mazo said. “They were trying to run a kind of happy campaign.”
“I think Trump is a little bit of a rudderless candidate,” he said. “I don’t think his campaign advisors … I don’t think they advise him to do all the things he’s doing. Some of the comments are sort of off the cuff.”
Mazo said that he believes Harris is struggling to differentiate herself from Biden’s policy.
“She doesn’t want to be Joe Biden, because he’s just got really negative poll numbers. So she’s trying to straddle this fine line between supporting, advancing and defending his policies, having some of her own as they’re unique, and yet saying something different than he is.”