The Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, speaks during a campaign rally at Erie Insurance Arena on Oct. 14, 2024 in Erie, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
ERIE, Pa. — Vice President Kamala Harris packed an arena Monday night in Erie, Pennsylvania, a swing corner of the key swing state in the 2024 presidential election.
Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, told thousands of spectators, “You are a pivot county.”
“How you all vote in presidential elections often ends up predicting the national result,” Harris said.
Harris, attacking the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, urged the crowd to watch Trump’s recent rallies and interviews.
“Please roll the clip,” she said before compilations of Trump appearances showed on two big screens in the arena.
Several showed him talking about the “enemy from within,” including a Sunday interview on Fox News where he said “radial left lunatics” could be “very easily handled, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
Obama to Trump to Biden
Erie County, at the northwestern tip of Pennsylvania, with just under 270,000 residents, has been a “pivot” county in the battleground state for the last several presidential elections.
Former President Barack Obama won the majority of the lakeside county’s voters in 2012. The county turned for Trump in 2016. And, in 2020, just 1,319 voters delivered a win for President Joe Biden over Trump, turning the county blue again.
This is Harris’ seventh visit to the western side of Pennsylvania, according to her campaign.
Trump was on the other side of the state Monday night, speaking in Upper Providence Township, 18 miles northwest of Philadelphia.
Mail-in voting is already underway in the Keystone State — one of a handful that will decide who wins the Oval Office. The others include Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Both the Harris and Trump campaigns are blanketing Pennsylvania — Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, stumped in Johnstown Saturday, where in response to a question, he told States Newsroom he considered what happened in January 2021 to be a “peaceful transfer of power.”
Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will hold a campaign rally in Pittsburgh Tuesday.
Party-like atmosphere
Long lines began to snake outside the arena as early as four-and-a-half hours before Harris’ Monday rally.
A DJ played party music inside as spectators filled the floor and the stands of the roughly 9,000-seat arena.
U.S. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania told the loud crowd, “Erie, my God, have you showed up.”
“The national media’s here, and you want to know why? Because you pick the next president,” Fetterman said.
“Erie is the ultimate bellwether county, not just in Pennsylvania, in the nation right now. Right now the nation is all thinking about you and wondering where you’re gonna go,” Fetterman continued, to cheering. “And we know what you’re gonna do, and you’re gonna make sure that Harris and Walz is the team that’s gonna lead our nation.”
‘Born from personal experience’
Harris spoke for just under a half hour, highlighting her usual themes of a middle-class upbringing and her vision for an “opportunity economy.”
She outlined her platform of tax cuts for new parents, first-time home buyers and entrepreneurs, and a policy plan to “take out corporate price gouging.”
Harris also laid out her plan to expand Medicare to help pay for in-home senior care so “more seniors can live at home with dignity.”
“And like so many of my priorities it is born out of a personal experience,” she said, prefacing the story of how she cared for her mother, who died of colon cancer in 2009.
“But far too many people who want and need to take care of family members — either you have to leave your job or spend down everything you have to be able to qualify for Medicaid. That’s not right.”
“I will always put middle-class and working families first. I came from the middle class, and I will never forget where I come from,” Harris said as the crowd broke into chants of “U.S.A.”
Harris also told the crowd that Trump threatens health insurance for tens of millions of Americans with his platform to overhaul the Affordable Care Act.
During the single presidential debate of the election cycle, the former president said he had “concepts of a plan” to replace the insurance program that ushered in an era of covered medical care for pre-existing conditions.
“The seriousness of this cannot be overlooked. Think about that, taking us back to a time we all remember when insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions, you remember what that was? Well, we are not going back,” she said, repeating a common rally cry at her events.
‘Brutally serious’ consequences
Harris slammed Trump as an “unserious man” with a “very different plan” if he wins in November.
“But the consequences of him ever being president again are brutally serious,” she said.
The vice president highlighted the July U.S. Supreme Court opinion that granted former presidents immunity for core constitutional duties, and presumptive immunity for other actions, except for personal ones.
“Now just imagine Donald Trump with no guard rails,” she said. “He who has vowed that he would be a dictator on day one, that he would weaponize the Department of Justice against his enemies.”
Republican response
The Republican National Committee issued a statement ahead of Harris’ rally in Erie, attacking her specifically on energy policy.
“The Keystone State will reject another four years of Kamala Harris’ dangerously liberal policies because Pennsylvanians trust President Trump to unleash American energy and provide economic relief,” read a statement from RNC Chairman Michael Whatley.
The Trump campaign attacked the vice president on two fronts in its daily press release Monday. The campaign accused her of being on an “anti-fracking crusade” and of failing “to deliver to Black voters.”
Harris earlier Monday unveiled an “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” that would legalize recreational marijuana and introduce a “regulatory framework for cryptocurrency,” according to a release from the Harris campaign.