The final countdown | PA 2024 Newsletter

📅 There are 4 days until Election Day.

In this edition:

—Julia Terruso, Fallon Roth, Gillian McGoldrick, Anna Orso, Katie Bernard, Oona Goodin-Smith, pa2024@inquirer.com

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As the candidates make one last pitch to voters, national politics reporter Julia Terruso looks at their final messages:

It’s finally time for closing arguments – and some trash talk.

Harris and former President Donald Trump previewed their final pitches in a pair of visits to Pennsylvania this week.

Trump, at a rally heavily touting Latino voters’ support for him after a shock comic made a disparaging joke about Puerto Rico, calling it a “floating island of garbage,” largely stuck to the stump speech he’s been giving across the commonwealth for the last year.

He tried to divert from his own “garbage” scandal by referencing a gaffe Biden made in seeming to refer to Trump supporters as garbage.

“Remember Hillary? She said ‘deplorable.’ … ‘Garbage,’ I think, is worse, right?” Trump said. He added of Biden: “But he doesn’t know. … Please forgive him, for he not knoweth what he said. Terrible to say it.”

And he took it all a very Trumpy step forward by briefly riding in a garbage truck as part of a photo op in Green Bay.

For Trump, his closing strategy seems clear: a hope he can turn out his base and the less politically active voters he’s set his sights on by being a showman and disarming Harris’ warning about the dangers he poses all while slamming her. During Tuesday’s rally in Allentown, a majority Latino city in the Lehigh Valley, Trump also said he was offering “a message of hope for all Americans.”

“Our country will be bigger, better, bolder, richer, safer, stronger than ever before,” he said.

After stumping at a Philly church, bookstore, and Puerto Rican restaurant earlier in the week, Harris visited Harrisburg on Wednesday, and said this election presents an opportunity to turn the page on “a decade of Donald Trump trying to keep us divided.” She repeated a line she’s honed in on lately, saying Trump will walk into the Oval Office with an “enemies list,” while she’ll walk in with a “to-do list.”

“I will give a middle-class tax cut to a hundred million Americans, enact — (applause) — enact the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on groceries — and fight to make sure that hardworking Americans can actually afford a place to live,” she said.

Harris is trying to thread the argument that she presents an escape from the chaos and division of Trump with a solution to people’s economic problems.

The question now is whose message galvanizes more voters in the final days of the race.

We expect to see both candidates back here making their final, final pitches before Election Day on Nov. 5.

Trump is due back in the state this weekend (exact location not yet announced), and construction workers are already erecting a stage in front of the Art Museum for Harris’ campaign curtain call on Monday.

🇺🇸 With his legacy on the line — and Harris keeping him at a distance — Biden is expected to return to Pennsylvania today, stepping up his political activity in the most important swing state in the final days of the race.

👫 In a dead-heat race in Pennsylvania, a stark gender gap complicates the political picture. Trump is stoking the hypermasculine fervor that surrounds him, while Harris’ supporters have taken a more nuanced approach — with some reminding women that “what happens in the booth stays in the booth.”

🤐 From an outsider’s perspective, U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick’s race for reelection in purple Bucks County should be competitive. But the former FBI agent is treating the election like a sure bet, avoiding questions and public events.

⭐ From Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro to Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama, there’s some serious star power being deployed in Philly in the lead-up to Election Day. It’s all part of the Harris campaign’s multipronged strategy to boost historically soft Democratic turnout in the city. Will the amped-up ground game be enough?

💻 X, formerly known as Twitter, has been fertile ground for misinformation in last several election cycles. But a key difference this year is that the company’s owner, Elon Musk, is now an active participant in its spread, and dead-set on helping Trump win Pennsylvania.

🧑‍⚖️ Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is taking Musk to court over the Tesla CEO’s $1 million daily giveaway to registered voters in Pennsylvania and other battleground states. The lawsuit, Krasner said, has brought on “an avalanche” of social media posts attacking him, and some “inviting political violence.”

🔴 Five Pennsylvania Republicans who signed on to Trump’s 2020 slate of alternate electors are back this year — and some say that, under the right circumstances, they’re prepared to do it again.

💰 A political action committee has spent $52 million on ads attacking Democrat U.S. Sen. Bob Casey and promoting Republican Dave McCormick. Meet the billionaires backing it.

📱 Russian actors created and spread a clearly false video circulated online last week of a Bucks County election worker tearing up ballots purported to be for Trump, federal authorities said.

✉️ Right-leaning activists have challenged mail ballot applications of hundreds of voters in the Philly suburbs in recent days, claiming they no longer live at the addresses where they are registered to vote. Voting rights advocates have broadly dismissed the effort as baseless, legally invalid — and born of a misunderstanding of government data.

🏛️ This 29-year-old could become Philly’s only GOP state senator. But the city’s party isn’t standing behind him.

🔵 Rife with “swing state envy,” these Harris supporters from perennially blue New Jersey are crossing the Delaware River to knock on doors in Pennsylvania’s “Trump alley.”

🎤 We’re passing the mic to politics reporter Fallon Roth with a look at what Philly’s past voting trends could tell us about Election Day:

As everyone is well aware by now, Philadelphia and its suburbs have become the center of the political universe.

Exhibit A: Both Harris’ and Trump’s campaigns totaled 33 visits to Philadelphia and its suburbs combined (21 visits for Harris-Walz and 12 for Trump-Vance).

But besides our region being the main character in nearly every 2024 election story, past voting trends in the city and the collar counties could help us know what to watch for on Tuesday.

In 2020, Biden’s path to victory in Pennsylvania – and ultimately the presidency — ran through Philadelphia and its suburbs. But while Biden received more than 600,000 votes in the city (the largest portion since LBJ in 1964), he was especially bolstered by his performance in the suburbs, comprising 26% of the Democratic vote share in the commonwealth as Philly’s share dropped since 2016.

Since 2020, GOP voter registration has increased by roughly 4,000 in Philly as Democrats shed about 55,000, but it still remains a Democratic stronghold.

For Tuesday: How will Harris’ performance in the Philadelphia area measure up to Biden’s? And does the Trump campaign paying a little extra attention to Philadelphia make a difference as both candidates vie for battleground Pennsylvania?

📈 Josh Shapiro: Apparently Californians really love our governor. Wealthy businesspeople, venture capitalists and Hollywood stars contributed $9 million to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s coffers so far this year, as his national profile continues to rise. While $9 million is a drop in the bucket of a presidential campaign, it’s a lot for a first-term governor to keep in his warchest until his reelection campaign in 2026. Top donors include a physician in California who contributed $2 million to his PAC; $500,000 from Democratic billionaire George Soros; $500,000 from former video game company executive John Riccitiello; and $200,000 from Ari Emanuel, an executive at the company that owns WWE and UFC. Shapiro has redistributed his wealth to defend the Democratic majority in the Pennsylvania House, sending $1 million to the House Democratic Campaign Committee, $350,000 to the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, $100,000 to Eugene DePasquale’s campaign for attorney general, and $25,000 to Malcolm Kenyatta’s bid for auditor general. (Sorry, Erin McClelland.)

📉 Tony Hinchcliffe: Isn’t it obvious? The comedian known as “Kill Tony” might have killed Trump’s support with some Latino voters after he said during a rally that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage.” It was just one of several racist “jokes” he told that seemed to make a significant portion of the crowd at Madison Square Garden either laugh uncomfortably or outright groan. Hinchcliffe was rebuked by politicians from both parties; Trump himself was basically like, “I don’t know that guy.” Did this roast artist single-handedly torch some momentum Trump thought he had with Pennsylvania’s nearly half a million Puerto Ricans? We may never know the exact impact — but we know enough to say he bombed. Bad. Stock way, way down.

📅 Nov. 5 is Election Day. Find your polling place here.

🗳️ Mail ballots must be returned by 8 p.m. on Election Day. If you haven’t returned yours yet, consider bringing it back in person, rather than dropping it in the mail box.

📍Here is where you can drop off your mail ballot in Philadelphia. If you haven’t yet returned your ballot, make sure to sign the outer envelope, write that day’s date on it and place the ballot itself in the yellow secrecy envelope.

👀 Want to know what happens to your mail ballot after you submit it? See for yourself.

🕔 Bucks County voters have until 5 p.m. today to request and return a mail ballot in person after a judge mandated the county extend the deadline. Locations to request and cast a ballot are here. The extension did not apply to any other county.

➡️ The judge’s Bucks County extension followed frustrations across Pennsylvania over long lines and early cut offs as voters sought to request and cast a mail ballot on demand at local election offices. A key misunderstanding permeated many of those frustrations: what it means to vote early in Pennsylvania. Other states, like Georgia and Wisconsin, have early voting systems that resemble election day and move voters through efficiently using machines. Pennsylvania does not. Instead, voters can request a mail ballot at their local election office on-demand, receive it and cast the ballot in one trip. It’s a cumbersome process that can take around 12 minutes per voter and uses county election staff (who have numerous other responsibilities) rather than poll workers.

✉️ More than 1,200 mail ballots in Philly may be rejected due to simple errors. Here’s how to find out if yours is one of them. And if your mail ballot showed up with the return envelope already sealed, here’s what to do.

🗳️ Several lawsuits could change the rules for which ballots are and are not counted next week. The Commonwealth Court issued a ruling in one of those suits impacting mail ballots submitted without a date on Wednesday. Republicans have already appealed it to the state Supreme Court.

📋 Want to learn more about the candidates on your ballot? The Inquirer voters guide has you covered with key facts on every major race.

⚠️ Beware of misinformation. There’s a lot of false info flying about Pennsylvania’s election, including from powerful sources like Musk and Trump. We’re here to help you decipher the facts.

➡️ The presidency, the U.S. Senate race, control of Pennsylvania’s state House: It all comes down to Tuesday, Nov. 5.

Until then — and after — we’ll be with you every step of the way at inquirer.com. There, you’ll find live result updates, analysis, Pennsylvania election news, fact-checking and more. And we’ll see you back here in your inbox next week to break it all down. 👋