Gender battle between Harris and Trump in Pennsylvania.

📅 There they are 38 days until election day.

In this issue: :

—Julia Terruso, Gillian McGoldrick, Aliya Schneider, Fallon Roth, Katie Bernard, pa2024@inquirer.com

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The fight for gender

Polls – including one published last week by The Inquirer – show a stark difference between how women and men will vote in this election. Vice President Kamala Harris is full of women, and former President Donald Trump has a sturdy presence among men. National politics reporter Julia Terruso takes a closer look at how each candidate is trying to close the gender gap to expand their coalition:

A week after Vice President Harris issued an appeal to black men in Philadelphia, saying she would work to “deserve their votes,” former President Donald Trump told a crowd in western Pennsylvania that he would be a defender of women.

“You will no longer be abandoned, alone and afraid. You will no longer be in danger,” Trump said. “You will no longer be concerned about the problems our country is facing today. You will be protected and I will be your protector.

Trump went on to say that women would no longer have to think about abortion, an issue on which an overwhelming majority of voters prefer Harris.

Trump and Harris are deadlocked in Pennsylvania, but a closer look at their support here shows a striking gender gap. In Philadelphia Inquirer/New York Times/Siena College PollHarris had a 17-point lead among women and Trump had an 11-point lead among men.

Nationally, some polls have shown even greater division.

But beyond the comment about the defender, there is little to suggest that Trump is focusing too much on wooing women as he tries to mobilize voters in the six weeks until Election Day.

“Trump is targeting a very specific male audience so strongly in a very specific way,” said Alison Dagnes, a professor at Shippensburg University who has spoken on the impact of gender on the presidential election. “This is agro-masculine, I am a real man.”

From celebrities appearing at the Republican National Convention (including Hulk Hogan) to some of the podcasts he has appeared on, Trump appears to be disproportionately focusing on white, male audiences.

On the other hand, Harris, who did not place gender at the center of her campaign, elevated her running mate, Tim Walz, to try to appeal to a different kind of masculinity.

– They show him how to fix the transmission. “It’s extremely intentional because it’s trying to reach out to the ‘latte dads,’ educated black men and educated suburban white men,” Dagnes said.

Ultimately, direct gender appeals are often ineffective. Hannah Jeffrey, a Democratic strategist from Pennsylvania, said Harris’ best chance in the state is to build a broad coalition.

“I think the candidate who wins Pennsylvania is the candidate with the most resources and a better coalition, who builds the case for a broader group of people. Focus on this rather than trying to appeal to one group over another.

Latest

💼Dave McCormick managed the world Bridgewater’s largest hedge fund. This is an important point in his biography submitted to the US Senate, but it is also one of the greatest weaknesses of his campaign due to the company’s operations in China and the supposedly “cult” environment.

👬Married, cheerful, moderate who supports abortion rights but votes for Trump, New Jersey Republican Curtis Bashaw describes his Senate campaign as “walking on a balance beam.”

🤷‍♂️Josh Shapiro’s visit to the president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to a munitions plant in Scranton has caught the attention of House Republicans, who say the Ukrainian leader campaigned for Harris in a key swing state.

🏛️Trump and his allies lays the groundwork for blaming the potential loss of the November vote on non-citizens, an extremely rare occurrence, just as Trump’s inflated concerns about mail-in voting signaled a strategy to challenge Pennsylvania’s 2020 results.

💵Harris is still tracking down Trump a matter of economics. Her speech in Pittsburgh this week was an attempt to fill that gap. Here’s why it matters for the Pa. race.

Fact checking

Claim: “When Kamala Harris takes illegal actions to grant amnesty to foreigners, it does not mean that they are legal immigrants. That makes them illegal immigrants unless you lose your common sense,” said Sen. J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, as the campaign ramps up its rhetoric on the issue.

Control: ✖️False

Vance was referring to Haitian residents in Springfield, Ohio, many of whom are in the U.S. with momentary protected status.

Temporary Protected Status Program was created by Congress in the 1990s and is awarded to people whose home country is in crisis. The Obama administration first offered it to Haitians living in the U.S. after the 2010 earthquake. Trump has sought to strip Haitians of their status during his presidency.

The Biden administration’s exploit of the program is legal – although not without controversy. The Department of Homeland Security announced in June that it was offering TPS to about 300,000 Haitians who arrived in the country before June 3. This status will be valid until February 2026. There are 200,000 Haitians who already had this status.

Stock up

📈Influencers: Democratic donors hosted two dozen content creators at an extravagant home in the posh Philadelphia suburb of Gladwyne, which was accessorized with a Harris-themed corn hole and a beer bong. The mansion was transformed into a “content house” where creators – 10 from Pennsylvania and 10 from across the country – strategized on pro-Harris messaging and crossed their networks to expand their reach. They collaborated on content such as satirical videos about “White Ladies for Kamala” classes and the bearded man embodying Project 2025. They also went to a Phillies game, sang “Karaoke for Kamala” and learned about “greedflation.”

Stocks down

📉Spell checker: Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance arrives in Newtown in purple Bucks County for a rally Saturday. Yes, Newtown, not Newton, as a misspelling in the press release announcing his visit to Pennsylvania suggested. The Ohio senator probably wasn’t referring to Isaac Newton’s beloved bar in Newtown Borough. The blunder was met with jokes online, including from Sen. John Fetterman (R-Pa.), who joked X that “Vance claimed Haitians ate one of the ‘W’s in ‘Newtown,'” a reference to xenophobic false claims about Haitian immigrants that Vance and former President Donald Trump spread during the campaign. Vance’s visit comes after Trump canceled a stop in Bucks County earlier this month.

Policy translator

What he said: Former Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican who focused on preserving democracy as part of his law school at Duquesne University, recalled his own 2015 re-election loss to former Gov. Tom Wolf at the Keep Our Republic event in Harrisburg.

“People will lose races. I lost re-election. Deal with it. Keep going and keep moving forward,” Corbett said.

What did he mean: “Former President Donald Trump, accept your loss in 2020. And if you lose again this year, keep going.”

Campaign money

State campaign finance reports filed this week show Democrat Eugene DePasquale will enter the final weeks of the race for Pennsylvania attorney general with more than $2.1 million in the bank after spending more than $1.1 million over the last four months. Republican Dave Sunday is earning more than $1.2 million in the final months of the race after spending just under $160,000 in his own campaign funds.

But these numbers don’t mean DePasquale has a monetary advantage.

Democrats outraged Sunday’s report, arguing that one of the GOP’s most critical donors – the Commonwealth Leadership Fund, financed largely by Pennsylvania’s richest man, Jeff Yass – was not properly and intentionally hidden from voters. The Commonwealth Leaders Fund PAC has set aside more than $6 million for TV ads and streaming through November, and it has been airing on TV for weeks.

Sunday campaign officials said there was nothing wrong with their report and that the Commonwealth Leaders Fund did not tell them how much it had spent on in-kind contributions until after the campaign funding application period closed on September 16.

“They are making a mountain out of a molehill,” Sunday spokesman Ben Wren wrote in a text message.

📸 Scenes from the campaign trail

About 200 people attended the event organized by the Harris campaign, including representatives of Republicans, Democrats and independent politicians.

What are we watching next?

➡️ Josh Shapiro will campaign for Kamala Harris in suburban Philadelphia with television producer Shonda Rhimes, who created Scandal AND Gray’s anatomy.

➡️ JD Vance will visit Bucks County on Saturday as the Trump campaign aims to make gains in the key county.

➡️Donald Trump will hold a rally in Erie on Sunday. He will return to the state next weekend, returning to Butler on Oct. 5 after surviving an assassination attempt there this summer.

As always, thank you for reading. We invite you to the last weekend of September!