Donald Trump will visit Wilkes-Barre on Saturday — the type of place he hopes will hand him Pa. and the presidency
As Trump looks at his 2024 map, places like Wilkes-Barre offer the most potential for him and, arguably, the most uncertainty.
Northeast Pennsylvania is known for its coal mining history, the Pocono mountains, regional pizza — and, increasingly — determining presidential elections.
Former President Donald Trump will make his first stop of the 2024 campaign in the Northeast on Saturday in Wilkes-Barre, following a three-week turn in the race, which has become tighter in the critical swing state with less than 100 days until Election Day.
And as Trump looks at his 2024 map, places such as Wilkes-Barre in Luzerne County offer the most potential for him and arguably the most uncertainty. While the political trajectory of Pennsylvania’s suburbs and rural areas has followed a somewhat predictable path, working-class Rust Belt towns have been a political pendulum.
In 2016, Trump’s path to winning Pennsylvania ran through mostly white, working class, small towns and mid-sized cities in Pennsylvania’s Northeast and Southwest regions. Now, he’s looking to those areas again with hopes of chipping away votes from Harris in the places that President Joe Biden, a Scranton native, won by a small margin.
“The Trump campaign believes there’s still some juice left in that orange for them in the heart of Northeast Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Republican consultant Chris Nicholas said. “When you go to Western or north-central Pennsylvania, they’re maximizing their vote. There’s still room to grow in the heart of Northeastern Pennsylvania.”
This will be Trump’s seventh visit to Pennsylvania this year and comes as the former president has focused intently on the commonwealth, which could win him the presidency. He recently proposed two presidential debates to take place in Pennsylvania.
And though Harris’ campaign has momentum, Republican leaders say they are still cautiously optimistic.
“I believe Luzerne is the keystone to the Keystone,” Republican county chair Gene Ziemba said as he prepared to host the former president on Saturday.
From Obama to Trump
Luzerne County, home to Wilkes-Barre, has voted for Trump in the last two elections. It is the only county in the state to swing from President Barack Obama to Trump in 2016, and to then stick with Trump in 2020. Registrations have also favored Republicans in recent months, though that tends to be a lagging indicator of how people vote.
Nicholas, who has analyzed the media markets in Pennsylvania — which are seeing the most ads of any battleground state — noted the outsized attention on the Scranton market, which includes Lackawanna and Luzerne Counties. For a region with just 11% of the state’s population, it is saturated with advertising, an indication that both parties see it as a place to reach undecided or persuadable voters.
Luzerne, like several counties in the Northeast, had been solidly blue in presidential elections for 20 years until Trump came along in 2016 and won it by 19 percentage points. Now, the county is evenly divided between registered Republicans and Democrats, and several Republicans represent the area.
Like the Northeast as a whole, though, it’s still a battleground.
“Northeast Pennsylvania is exasperating Republicans because many of us keep waiting for it to turn in the same way that non-urban Southwestern Pennsylvania has,” Nicholas said. “It’s a lot of hardworking blue-collar folks but it has not moved as far toward the Republicans as some would hope.”
As of 2020, about 89% of Luzerne County residents were white, the average median household income was almost $52,000, and only 23% of people 25 years and older had a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to an aggregation of census data by the website Ballotpedia. There was also a 4% increase in the population of Hispanic or Latino voters in the county from 2016 to 2020.
Luzerne’s second largest city, Hazleton, is home to a growing number of Latinos, some of whom have been shifting toward Trump, observed Ziemba, the county chair.
To appeal in the region, Trump has tapped into a distrust of government institutions and grievances about immigration.
Does Harris fare worse in Northeast Pa. than Biden would have?
Almost as soon as Harris became the presumptive nominee, the questions started about how she’d fare in areas such as the one where Biden spent the earliest years of his life. “Kamala Harris has a Scranton problem,” a recent article on the news site NOTUS was headlined.
Scranton is in Lackawanna County, which is in many ways the sister county to Luzerne. The two counties are home to the two large population centers and share a Yankees triple-A baseball team, and radio and TV stations.
In 2020, Scranton delivered a large number of votes to Biden, who won Lackawanna by about 8 percentage points after campaigning heavily on his Pennsylvania roots. Trump ended up winning Luzerne County by roughly 14 percentage points in 2020, 5 points less than he did in 2016.
Ziemba and other Republicans who know the region think that without Biden on the ballot, Republican numbers in both counties will likely improve.
“Joe Biden being Joey from Scranton is not a factor anymore, so this, I think, comes closer to a 2016 picture for Trump,” said Tim Murtaugh, Trump’s former director of communications during his 2020 run.
“Is there a place more different from Scranton than San Francisco?” Nicholas asked, referencing the city where Harris spent much of her career.
Ed Mitchell, a Democratic strategist in the region, pointed to Harris’ strength in national polls among independents, who make up 21,000 of the registered voters in Luzerne. He also said he sees Harris making up ground among non-white blue-collar voters in the area.
“Does [Trump] still have his cult here?” Mitchell said. “Sure. But we have more jobs open here than it seems people to work them, grocery prices are still a problem, but inflation is coming down and roads are being fixed.”
The polling of the region is limited but also doesn’t paint a grim picture.
A recent New York Times/Siena College poll of the state showed Harris’ popularity 5 percentage points higher of Biden’s in the Northeast and Lehigh Valley. She also was outperforming where Biden had been in the region before he dropped out of the race, though the sample size was small.
“Everyone says ‘that district will be worse for Harris than it was for Biden,’” said a Pennsylvania Republican strategist, wary of sounding the alarm on the record. “And I say there’s not a … district in America that’s gonna be worse for Harris than Biden.”
Does the honeymoon phase end?
Murtaugh sees the Luzerne rally as an opportunity for Trump’s campaign, which has had a rough three weeks, to reset as Democrats head to Chicago next week for their convention. It’s been a split-screen of Harris generating momentum and Trump struggling to define her.
Murtaugh thinks Trump should focus his message Saturday on fracking, which Harris opposed in 2019 during her bid for president but now says she supports.
“This is a long and sustained bounce but … she cannot hide forever,” Murtaugh said. “And when she does come out of hiding, what’s gonna be uncomfortable is to be forced to explain these new positions.”
Ziemba, the county chair, has a simpler piece of advice for Trump when he comes to town. ”He has an incredible message, and I think he should stick to that,” Ziemba said.
”It’s jobs, jobs, jobs.”