Donald Trump’s performance in places like Wilkes-Barre could decide the election

Northeastern Pennsylvania is known for its coal-mining history, the Pocono Mountains, the region’s pizza — and, increasingly, its decisive influence on presidential elections.

Former President Donald Trump will make his first 2024 campaign visit to the U.S. Northeast on Saturday in Wilkes-Barre, following a three-week race that has grown tighter in a key swing state with less than 100 days left until Election Day.

And as Trump looks at his 2024 map, places like Wilkes-Barre in Luzerne County offer him the most potential and perhaps the most uncertainty. While the political trajectory of Pennsylvania’s suburbs and rural areas has followed a fairly predictable trend, the working-class cities of the Rust Belt have been a political pendulum.

Trump’s path to victory in Pennsylvania in 2016 mostly went through white, working-class petite towns and mid-sized cities in northeastern and southwestern Pennsylvania. Now he’s looking to those areas again, hoping to take votes away from Harris in places where President Joe Biden, a Scranton native, won by a narrow margin.

“The Trump campaign believes there’s still some juice in the orange for them in the heart of northeastern Pennsylvania,” said Pennsylvania GOP consultant Chris Nicholas. “When you go to western Pennsylvania or north-central Pennsylvania, they’re maximizing their vote. There’s still room to grow in the heart of northeastern Pennsylvania.”

It will be Trump’s seventh visit to Pennsylvania this year, and comes as the former president has set his sights on the community, which could facilitate secure his presidency. He recently proposed two presidential debates to be held in Pennsylvania.

Even as Harris’ campaign gains momentum, GOP leaders say they remain cautiously bullish.

“I think Luzerne is the keystone of Keystone,” Republican county chairman Gene Ziemba said as he prepared to host the former president on Saturday.

From Obama to Trump

Luzerne County, where Wilkes-Barre is located, voted for Trump in the last two elections. It is the only county in the state to flip from President Barack Obama to Trump in 2016 and then stay with Trump in 2020. Registration has also favored Republicans in recent months, though that is a lagging indicator of how people vote.

Nicholas, who analyzed media markets in Pennsylvania — which receive the most advertising of any battleground state — noted an outsize focus on the Scranton market, which includes Lackawanna and Luzerne counties. For a region with just 11 percent of the state’s population, it’s saturated with ads, suggesting that both parties see it as a place to reach undecided or impressionable voters.

Luzerne, like several counties in the Northeast, was solidly blue in presidential elections for 20 years until 2016, when Trump came along and won by 19 percentage points. Now the district is evenly split between registered Republicans and Democrats, with several Republicans representing the area.

However, like the entire Northeast, it is still a battleground.

“Northeastern Pennsylvania is an irritant to Republicans because a lot of us are still waiting for it to change the way it did in non-urban southwestern Pennsylvania,” Nicholas said. “It’s a lot of hard-working, working-class people, but it hasn’t moved as far toward the Republicans as some people would like.”

In 2020, about 89% of Luzerne County residents were white, the median household income was almost $52,000, and only 23% of people age 25 and older had a bachelor’s degree or higher. according to Ballotpedia’s aggregation of census dataThe county also saw a 4% escalate in Hispanic and Latino voters from 2016 to 2020.

Lucerne’s second-largest city, Hazelton, is home to a growing number of Latinos, some of whom support Trump, noted Ziemba, the county chairman.

To appeal to the region’s residents, Trump has exploited distrust of government institutions and dissatisfaction with immigration.

Is Harris doing worse in northeastern Pennsylvania than Biden?

Almost as soon as Harris became the presumptive nominee, questions began to emerge about how she would fare in arenas like the one where Biden spent his early years.Kamala Harris Has a Problem with Scranton,” read the headline of a recent article on the NOTUS news website.

Scranton is located in Lackawanna County, which is in many ways Luzerne’s sister county. Both counties have two immense population centers, as well as the Yankees triple-A baseball team and radio and television stations.

In 2020, Scranton delivered a immense number of votes to Biden, won Lackawanna by about 8 percentage points after a campaign that leaned heavily on his Pennsylvania roots. Trump ultimately won Luzerne County by about 14 percentage points in 2020, 5 points less than in 2016.

Ziemba and other Republicans familiar with the region say that without Biden on the ballot, Republicans’ ratings in both counties are likely to rise.

“It doesn’t matter anymore that Joe Biden is Joey from Scranton, so I think it’s more like Trump in 2016,” said Tim Murtaugh, Trump’s former communications director for his 2020 campaign.

“Is there a place more different from Scranton than San Francisco?” Nicholas asked, referring to the city where Harris has spent most of her career.

Ed Mitchell, a Democratic strategist in the area, noted Harris’ strength in national polls among independents, who make up 21,000 registered voters in Luzerne. He also said he sees Harris gaining support among nonwhite, working-class voters in the area.

“Does [Trump] still has a cult following here?” Mitchell said. “Sure. But we have more jobs than people to fill them, and grocery prices are still a problem, but inflation is down, and the roads are getting fixed.”

Polls in this region are limited, but do not paint a bleak picture.

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll in the state showed Harris ahead of Biden by 5 percentage points in the Northeast and Lehigh Valley. She also won where Biden was in the region before he dropped out of the race, although the sample size was small.

“Everybody is saying, ‘This district is going to be worse for Harris than it is for Biden,’” said a Pennsylvania GOP strategist, wary of sounding alarm bells. “And I’m saying there is no … district in America that is going to be worse for Harris than Biden.”

Is the honeymoon phase coming to an end?

Murtaugh sees the Luzerne rally as an opportunity for the Trump campaign, which has had a tough two weeks, to reset itself as Democrats head to Chicago for their convention next week. It was a split screen, with Harris generating momentum and Trump struggling to define it.

Murtaugh believes Trump should focus his Saturday speech on fracking, which Harris opposed in 2019 when she ran for president and now says she supports.

“It’s a long, steady rise, but… she can’t hide forever,” Murtaugh said. “And when she does come out of hiding, it’s going to be uncomfortable having to explain these new positions.”

Ziemba, the county chairman, has simpler advice for Trump when he comes to town. “He has an incredible message, and I think he should stick with it,” Ziemba said.

“It’s work, work, work.”