The Erie, Pa. skyline (Capital-Star photo by Hannah McDonald)
ERIE — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democrats’ nominee for vice president, will wrap a two-day swing through Pennsylvania in Erie today, after Wednesday stops in Lancaster and Pittsburgh. It will be a key campaign rally for Walz, who has limited time to introduce himself to — and win over — Keystone State voters.
Erie is widely viewed as a key piece of the Pennsylvania electoral puzzle, the bellwether of the must-win battleground state. Former President Donald Trump held one of his first 2024 campaign rallies here in July 2023, and his running mate, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, spoke in Erie last week. Trump bested Hillary Clinton in Erie County in 2016 by just over 1,900 votes, a crushing loss for Democrats as the state flipped red. Clinton did not make campaign appearances in Erie during her presidential run.
“The Clinton campaign was just wholly and totally and absolutely — almost criminally — absent here in 2016,” Jeff Bloodworth, a professor of American political history at Gannon University in Erie, told the Capital-Star. “I mean, they didn’t even do yard signs.”
Acknowledging that while “yard signs don’t vote,” Bloodworth said he’d never seen anything like the physical presence of the Trump campaign, including signs, in Erie that year.
But Democrats appeared to learn from their 2016 defeat; President Joe Biden eked out a win over Trump in Erie in the 2020 election by a margin of just over 1,400 votes, or 1.03%, as Pennsylvania flipped blue again.
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“Biden, of course, took Erie seriously in ‘20,” Bloodworth said. The Erie County Democratic Party corrected many of its mistakes of 2016, he added, and even though COVID-19 hampered get-out-the-vote efforts in 2020, the party had laid the necessary groundwork coming into 2024.
“It’s hard to imagine there could be a bigger difference in Democrats between ‘16 and ‘24 – it’s like night and day,” Bloodworth said. “It’s a real, professional political operation.”
Sam Talarico, chair of the Erie County Democratic Party, said while interest in the campaign among Democrats here before Biden dropped out was somewhat muted, the mood shifted dramatically after it became clear Harris would top the ticket.
The party opened its office for the fall campaign on June 3 and was open four hours a day. “People would come in every now and then wanting a Biden sign,” he said. “I was waiting, like ‘when are people going to start paying attention to this election?’ And the polls were kind of stuck in the mud.”
After Biden bowed out, “it was like a switch was flipped,” Talarico said. “People were coming in wanting to donate money, we have over 275 people on our volunteer list, and before the switch over it was about 70. We actually got about 1,000 yard signs last Thursday and they’re gone, so when people come in asking for them we put them on a list and tell them we’ll deliver them.”
So Walz has his work cut out for him, and Talarico said the Harris-Walz campaign’s focus on “joy” should translate well in Erie. He suggested Walz shouldn’t focus on differentiating himself from Vance.
“They’re focusing on the future, and I think that’s a smart strategy,” Talarico said. He pointed to Harris’ recent CNN interview, and how she handled a question about Trump’s remark about her race. “She said ‘next question.’ It seems to only empower Trump when you make him the center of the story. So I don’t think they are going to focus a whole lot on their opponents.”
The Erie County GOP didn’t reply to a request for an interview from the Capital-Star.
While he’s in Erie, Walz should focus on being Walz, Bloodworth said. “In Erie, you just need to be a normie, and Walz is like the normie-in-chief,” he said. “That was Biden’s job, right, and why Obama picked him. And Walz is even better than Biden was on the stump. So that’s it: Just be normal. Make some jokes say ‘mind your damn business.’”
Perhaps more than Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Erie mimics Pennsylvania in terms of its rural, urban and suburban populations. Both Bloodworth and Talarico said the economy was a key issue for voters in Erie, but not just the effects of inflation on prices for everyday goods.
The city of Erie remains a Democratic stronghold, but the GOP has made gains at the county level, even as overall population continues to decline. The Harris-Walz campaign would be wise to articulate how it would address that population loss, Bloodworth said, as it’s a key problem across western Pennsylvania.
“Every other person I meet has a child or grandchild who’s moved to North Carolina, or Nashville,” he said. “People want to know, ‘what are you going to do about the cost of groceries,’ but they also want to know ‘what are you going to do so that my grandkids don’t leave once they graduate from the local university?’”
Harris, Bloodworth said, needs to offer a larger economic narrative. “Because Trump at least talks about it. I’m not sure there’s a whole lot of solutions offered in Trump recognizing that, but at least he recognized it.”
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