Three reasons Trump picked the Lehigh Valley for his big rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday

There are several reasons former President Donald Trump is doing a big rally in the Lehigh Valley on Saturday.

First, it’s a political battleground in a highly competitive swing state.

Second, it’s home to a large population of Latino voters, a group Trump is trying to appeal to in his third bid for the White House.

And finally, Trump has a major election denier and donor from the region who appears to have helped organize it.

The rally at the Schnecksville Fire Hall is slated to start at 7 p.m., with doors opening hours earlier. The county’s GOP chair told the Lehigh Valley News that organizers are expecting upward of 6,000 people at the outdoor rally off Route 309.

Trump is planning to attend a fundraiser in Bucks County earlier in the day. His Pennsylvania swing comes less than two weeks before the state’s primary election, in which the presidential contest will be largely formulaic, as Trump and President Joe Biden are already their parties’ presumptive nominees.

Trump will visit the state on the heels of a week in which he declined to endorse a national abortion ban, saying laws surrounding the procedure should be left up to the states. His former CFO, Allen Weisselberg, was also sentenced to five months in a perjury trial as Trump’s lawyers aim to delay his pending trials.

Biden will make his own campaign swing through the state next week, with stops in Scranton, the Pittsburgh area, and the Philadelphia region.

Trump and Biden have polled extremely closely in most state polls. The most recent Franklin & Marshall poll had Biden leading by two points, within the poll’s margin of error.

Schnecksville, about 10 miles outside Allentown, is in Lehigh County. The Lehigh Valley is a swing region in the battleground state, which Biden won by roughly 80,000 votes in 2020. Neighboring Northampton County is one of the pivot counties that voted for former President Barack Obama, Trump, and then Biden.

The area is in the 7th Congressional District represented by U.S. Rep. Susan Wild (D., Pa.), who won one of the closest Congressional races in the state in 2020, fending off her GOP challenger by about 5,000 votes.

Several Republicans are lining up to try and defeat Wild in November.

Both Trump and Biden, aware of the region’s importance, have made visits to the Lehigh Valley. In 2020, Trump visited businesses in Hanover Township and Upper Macungie Township. He previously earned an honorary degree from Lehigh University, though the school rescinded that in 2021 following the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Biden spoke in 2021 at a Mack Truck plant where he touted a “Buy America” initiative and more recently in January visited small businesses in Allentown.

The Lehigh Valley region is also home to one of the largest populations of Latinos in the state — and an estimated 615,000 Latino voters, according to Pew Research Center.

Latino political power has grown in Pennsylvania as the population has expanded by more than 40% since 2010, according to recent census data. Much of the growth has been along the Route 222 corridor in Reading, Allentown, Lancaster, and York.

In 2020, Latinos in the region expressed some concern over Biden’s outreach efforts there but he still won the Latino vote both nationally and in Pennsylvania. This year, polling shows support among the group for Democrats has slipped.

A March New York Times/Siena poll showed Trump making significant inroads with Latinos. Despite anti-immigrant rhetoric that Democrats have highlighted to try and deter Latinos from Trump, polls show Latino voters are drawn to Trump on the economy and border issues.

Pennsylvania will be a battleground for both campaigns. Earlier this month, a billionaire-backed conservative Latino voter outreach group launched. Biden’s campaign started a Latinos for Biden effort, including Spanish and Spanglish TV and digital ads around the state and events with community leaders in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Vice President Kamala Harris also recently called into a popular Spanish radio station in Allentown.

Trump’s rally is in North Whitehall Township, the same town where a political ally and one of the region’s most powerful GOP boosters, Bill Bachenberg, has his business.

According to the Lehigh Valley News, Bachenberg’s popular clay target shooting center, Lehigh Valley Sporting Clays, rented the fire hall out for Trump’s rally.

Bachenberg is a former board member of the NRA and a tech company CEO, who chaired Pennsylvania’s slate of fake electors submitted to Congress.

He is also alleged to have provided a $1 million line of credit trying to prove that the election was stolen from Trump. He’s since been accused of stiffing the firm on the bill after it failed to turn up any evidence.

Bachenberg wasn’t charged in indictments against Trump and his allies alleging that they engaged in election interference, though he was subpoenaed by the U.S. House Jan. 6 Select Committee.

Bachenberg has made some political donations to GOP candidates in the past, campaign finance records show, but he became more involved in politics since 2016. He has said he knows Donald Trump Jr. through his involvement in the NRA, and has gone shooting with him, and in 2016 became a member of one of Pennsylvania’s first pro-Trump PACs.

He’s kept a low public profile in recent years though one of the exceptions was a fundraiser for Trump in October 2020 when he took the stage, sidled up to a cardboard cutout of Trump and thanked veterans for their service.