When asked why he robbed banks, William Sutton, one of the FBI’s most wanted postwar criminals, replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” If Sutton were running for president in 2024, he would likely be planning a robbery to target Pennsylvania’s Hispanic vote.
The road to the White House runs through Pennsylvania, America’s biggest must-win battleground state, but Donald Trump’s campaign has so far made no conspicuous effort to court the support of the state’s fastest-growing voter base.
Pennsylvania, where the past two elections have been decided by margins of less than 100,000 votes, is home to about 600,000 Hispanic adult voters.
“We seem to be making a self-defeating mistake,” said Albert Eisenberg, a Republican consultant in Philadelphia. “Hispanics could be the deciding factor.”
Joe Biden’s campaign got underway in earnest early, airing Spanish-language ads in Pennsylvania in March, eight months before the November presidential election. Kamala Harris, who replaced Biden in July, booked a new set of ads this week.
“I’ve never seen a campaign start as early as Biden’s, which is usually in September,” said Victor Martinez, owner of Pennsylvania’s largest Spanish-language radio network and host of his own morning show in Allentown, the state’s third-largest city.
“I don’t understand why the Trump campaign isn’t even trying to reach out to Spanish speakers. As a businessman, I would go bankrupt if I ignored my fastest growing constituency,” Harris said. She also spoke with Martinez by phone in English.
The Trump campaign’s apparent apathy may stem from complacency. Trump routinely led the polls in Pennsylvania until Biden dropped out in late July. Good day.
The Republican candidate’s popularity appears to have been further boosted by his escape from assassination last month in Butler, a city in western Pennsylvania just north of Pittsburgh.
But nearly a month after Harris replaced Biden, the mood in Pennsylvania has changed dramatically.
“A few weeks before Biden left office, I was at a Biden campaign event and there were about five of us there, including myself and a Trump opposition pollster,” said Lindsay Weber, a political reporter for the Morning Call, a local newspaper in Allentown. “When the Harris campaign renamed their campaign office, they filled it up with new volunteers.”
Harris, who will be formally endorsed as the Democratic nominee in Chicago next week, is leading Trump by five points in Pennsylvania, according to the latest poll from veteran forecasting agency Cook Political Report.
In contrast to Florida Republicans, who have had little choice but to embrace Spanish due to the state’s non-Anglo character, Pennsylvania habits die hard.
“Some party leaders say, ‘America is an English-speaking country. Why should we speak to voters in Spanish?'” one frustrated Republican said. “I say, ‘Because we want to win.'”
The Trump camp’s complacency may also stem from the fact that most of the state’s Hispanics are Puerto Rican and hold U.S. citizenship. Unlike the large Central American communities in Northern Virginia and Maryland, or the undocumented Venezuelans who live in the U.S. border states and Florida, Puerto Ricans are not directly threatened by Trump’s vows to deport illegal immigrants en masse. This makes them more receptive to Trump’s economic policies, which often involve blaming Biden for inflation and high home prices.
But Trump has struggled to stick to the script, with his campaign regularly vowing that he is trying to pivot on policy, and their candidate constantly making waves with personal attacks on Harris.
“The party that’s going to win in November is the one that doesn’t do or say the most outrageous things,” said Maria Montero, a Spanish-speaking Republican lawyer who lives in Allentown. “For Latino voters, it really comes down to the economy.”
In 2000, Hispanics (a term used to describe Spanish speakers, with “Latinos” including people of Central and South American descent) made up less than a quarter of Allentown’s population. Today, the city is majority Hispanic, primarily Puerto Rican and Dominican. At a similar rate, the neighboring city of Reading has become 70% Hispanic.
When Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerk walks through his largely Puerto Rican neighborhood, he’s greeted every few meters by residents lounging on the front porch of a local liquor store. Tuerk, who bikes to work and speaks fluent Spanish, is working to launch a direct airline between Puerto Rico’s capital, San José, and Allentown. Tuerk and Susan Wild, a Democratic congresswoman who represents the area, recently slept on the floor of the San José airport.
“Hispanics don’t automatically vote for one party or the other — many don’t vote,” Tuerk said, “but if we don’t get to grips with them, we’re not going to get anywhere.”
The Harris campaign has 15 campaign offices in the state; the Trump campaign has just one, in North Philadelphia.
“Trump doesn’t seem to be taking it seriously,” said former Republican congressman Charlie Dent, who represented the district that includes Allentown until 2018. “The focus remains on MAGA. [Make America Great Again]But I’m skeptical that MAGA’s support base is large enough to win,” Dent added. Trump is reportedly doing his own version of a “Grateful Dead tour,” reprising hits from the Dead’s glory days.
Trump may be emboldened by his victory in Pennsylvania in 2016 after a campaign that repeatedly derided Hispanics, where he beat Hillary Clinton by 45,000 votes, a margin of just 0.72 percentage points.
In the eight years since, the demographics have changed rapidly. Hispanics have migrated in large numbers to the Lehigh Valley’s burgeoning logistics hub, close to major East Coast cities like New York and Philadelphia and where a single truck can serve 100 million Amazon or Walmart customers. Affluent New Yorkers, many of whom are Democrats, have also moved to the area during the pandemic.
Northampton County in the Lehigh Valley, with roots in German and Czech-Moravian settlers, was once described by a leading historian as the most conservative county in America. Today, it’s a mixed bag. Trump is the first Republican to win Pennsylvania since George H.W. Bush in 1988. In historical terms, his victory may have been a fluke.
Could Trump pull off another shock? Against his own wishes, says Christopher Bolick, a pollster at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. Bolick acknowledges that polls have yet to catch up with anecdotal evidence of Harris’ sudden shift in momentum. Polls a month ago showed Biden losing Wisconsin and Michigan, two other must-win battleground states. Harris’s surge has brought new states back into the fray, including North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia.
Borick, an independent, lives a few miles from Allentown in Nazareth, one of the most hotly contested towns in America. A harkback to the region’s Biblical-steeped early days, Nazareth is about 10 miles from Bethlehem, once a steel-industry center. In 2020, Biden won Borick’s district (population 1,000) by just three votes. This time around, he and his neighbors are being bombarded with Democratic door-to-door canvassing and campaign mailings. “The Trump campaign is not active right now,” Borick said.
Under normal circumstances, Trump would have 80 days to make up ground in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. But early voting actually begins in mid-September. About a third of Pennsylvanians are expected to vote by mail, which would give Democrats a strong lead if the 2022 midterm elections are any guide.
Here again, Trump is trampling on a campaign priority. Republicans are trying to educate voters about the benefits of voting by mail. But on the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly made the claim that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election through mail-in vote fraud. Over the next 30 days, Republicans must somehow galvanize their members to vote early without refuting their party leader’s theories of election fraud and warnings that the 2024 election will be stolen as well.
For true believers, this requires semantic acrobatics. Traditional Republicans can be more blunt: “That’s nonsense,” Montero, an Allentown-based lawyer, tells conservative voters who express skepticism about mail-in voting. “We can only win by voting.”
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