With 19 electoral votes, Pennsylvania is considered a must-win state.
And with about seven weeks until the election, the Trump and Harris campaigns must scramble to get as many voters on their side as possible.
In 2020, Joe Biden won the state by about 80,000 votes and in 2016, Donald Trump won by 40,000. For comparison, the city of Harrisburg has about 50,000 people.
“Pennsylvania should get ready for, I think, a flurry of campaign activity over the next six or so weeks we have left until Election Day,” said Kush Desai, Pennsylvania communications director for Team Trump.
He said Pennsylvania should expect candidates or top surrogates, such as governors or U.S. senators, to visit the state weekly.
The Harris campaign is bringing its nationwide bus tour to more than a dozen cities across the state with a focus on reproductive rights.
“Our over 350 staffers are going to be organizing communities, knocking on doors, making phone calls,” said Brendan McPhillips, senior advisor for the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania. “It’ll be tough to miss us.”
Harris herself will also tour the state during these final weeks.
“You can definitely expect that you’ll be seeing the vice president in your neighborhood soon,” McPhillips said.
For the Harris campaign, one strategy is traditional organizing.
“We’re talking to our neighbors, asking them to talk to their friends and neighbors and just having honest conversations with people about what’s at stake,” McPhillips said.
But it is also employing new technology to bring voters out, such as Whatsapp threads to court Latino voters.
“We’ve got digital organizers who are tapping into online communities,” McPhillips said. “And all of this work is being led by young staff who are familiar with and use these platforms every day.”
Both campaigns have also been opening offices across the state.
Harris has 50 and has been targeting rural areas, such as Franklin and Lancaster counties, which Trump had won in the past.
Trump has more two dozen offices across the state, including one in the Latino-majority city of Reading.
While there are more registered Democrats in Pennsylvania, Republicans have been registering more voters on a weekly basis, according to numbers from the Department of State.
But, Democrat registration did spike the week after Biden announced he would no longer be running.
“There’s a lot of enthusiasm for Vice President Harris and we’re seeing that both in a shift in voter registration trends and also on debate night, 17,000 people signed up in Pennsylvania to take action on the campaign,” McPhillips said.
The Trump campaign is using new tools, such as integrating its “Swamp the Vote USA” website with that of the PA Department of State’s site to help people register to vote.
It will post QR codes to take voters directly to the website.
Desai said their website gives them “another kind of edge here to kind of increase our strike rate and increase and keep bumping up those numbers.”
Desai said Pennsylvania is key, not just because of its number of electoral votes but also because it represents a microcosm of the issues the campaign is discussing.
Across the state, $360 million is expected to be spent on political advertisements this cycle, the most of any battleground state, according to AdImpact.
As for messaging, Trump is fixating on illegal immigration and energy production as Harris centers on affordable housing and restoring women’s access to reproductive health services.