Donald Trump and his campaign remain laser-focused on Pennsylvania as the key swing state they must win to defeat Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, according to insiders. The former president is preparing to hold a rally in Wilkes-Barre on Saturday afternoon.
Trump’s campaign believes she still has the upper hand in the Electoral College and that the path to victory is easier, despite a tough month in which Harris rode a wave of Democratic enthusiasm and finished roughly even in several polls.
In the simplest path to victory, as outlined by senior Trump campaign advisers, Trump must flip Pennsylvania and Georgia — both of which he won in 2016 but lost in 2020 — while retaining North Carolina.
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Trump’s campaign is also playing out other combinations, including Trump’s wins in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona, which he also won in 2016. But the vast majority of the combinations require him to win the Keystone State, the sources said.
Nearly all roads lead through Pennsylvania. For that reason, Trump has scheduled a rally in the state for Saturday, following his Harrisburg rally in late July. He has also promised to return in October to Butler County, where he survived an assassination attempt last month.
The states that the Trump campaign believes will determine the outcome of the election are the same as they were before Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris. “The fundamentals are still the same,” a Trump adviser recently said of how they saw the electoral map unfolding.
The Trump campaign privately acknowledges that Harris has made gains among certain demographic groups, including some Black men. But its bigger concern is Harris’ potential gains among white men, who were crucial to Trump’s 2016 victory and 2020 defeat.
The white male vote in particular is seen as so important to Trump that it’s the reason the campaign is pleased with the choice of J.D. Vance as his running mate, even though his past disparaging remarks about childless women have dogged him in recent weeks. At least part of the reasoning, along with the support for him from Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., is that Vance can help turn out white male voters in November.
Trump’s campaign is also trying to reach what it calls the “persuadables” — perhaps the last group of truly persuasive voters in the U.S. — who make up about 11% of the electorate and are defined as mostly male, moderate in ideology, under 50 and non-white, the sources said.
The easy-to-persuade target audience is proving particularly difficult to reach because they are not traditional consumers of media, whether through newspapers or cable news. Instead, they get most of their information from other online sources and podcasts, the sources said.
Still, skepticism is growing among some Trump aides, who are increasingly questioning whether internal polling is skewed. A firm hired to help with polling for a Republican political action committee has seen Trump’s support slip in North Carolina, which he needs to maintain.
