Democrats are banking on ground game advantage in Pennsylvania

MMost of the people on Elana Hunter’s list didn’t answer the door. It was a sleepy Sunday morning in Southwest Philadelphia, and Hunter had left her teenage children and ailing mother to spend her morning searching for Vice President Kamala Harris. House after silent house, Hunter, a 52-year-old HR consultant from Philly, was undeterred. “My daughter has fewer rights than I do. What the hell was I doing on the sidelines? she says. “Later in life she’ll remember me doing this.” She and her partner Ikethia Daniels, who traveled from Georgia, spent hours knocking on doors and delivering Harris literature when no one answered.

Finally someone did that. The woman at the door said she supported Harris but was confused by Pennsylvania’s early voting rules. Hunter walked her through the process and gave her the address of her polling place. As she trotted down the stairs, Hunter smiled. She believed she had turned a Harris supporter into a Harris voter.

Hunter is here because of Women Wednesdays for Harris, a weekly online gathering that grew out of the many massive Zoom consortia brought together to support Harris when President Joe Biden announced he was leaving the Democratic ticket in July. Hunter liked the Women Wednesdays calls because they were “practical and tactical.” So she stepped up to form a local activist group in Philadelphia. The weekly calls, organized in part by the Democratic grassroots group Indivisible Action, were intended to “make it easy for someone like me who cares a lot but doesn’t have a lot of time.”

In a tight election, Democrats hope a ground game driven by people like Hunter will make the difference. While Republican Donald Trump has ceded control of the Republican National Committee to his daughter-in-law and is partly dependent on well-funded but untested groups like Elon Musk’s America PAC to raise support, Harris’ campaign is leaning toward the tried-and-true real ground game mechanics that have fueled political campaigns for decades. Nowhere will it be more important than in Pennsylvania, which is seen by both parties as the most crucial of the seven battleground states.

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The race will come down to a “field margin,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro says as he addresses a kickoff event for about 100 people in all-important Bucks County. “Of course the polls will show it’s close,” Shapiro, a Democrat, told reporters after the event. “What we have are the people you saw in the other room: an army of people going out to knock on doors, make phone calls, throw a sign on the lawn and give permission. We have a better ground game, we have a better captain in Kamala Harris and we are feeling really good.”

After Shapiro’s canvass kicks off, Democratic Congressional candidate Ashley Ehasz heads off to knock on doors in her Bucks County district. In a small suburb of neat, closely spaced houses, she meets Christine Kahler, a two-time Trump voter who says she is now undecided. “I don’t know how other countries will deal with us having a female president,” explained Kahler, 50, who works at an after-school program. Still, she adds, “Trump is joking with himself.” She says she is 88% certain she will vote for Harris.

“We’re hearing so much more of that: someone who was for Trump before, but he just burned them like that,” said Ehasz, a military veteran who is trying for the second time to unseat Republican incumbent Brian Fitzpatrick. WHO leads in the polls. “The gap in enthusiasm is very real.”

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Donna Petrecco’s home in Bucks County is a small speck in a sea of ​​pro-Trump signs. Her neighbors have installed blow-up Trumps on their lawn and a “Lets Go Brandon” sign pointed at her kitchen window. But for several weekends in a row, Petrecco has been hosting canvas launches for Harris from her home, allowing the campaign to use it as a home base for whatever it needs. Dozens of volunteers have stopped by, many from out of state, all in an effort to steer Pennsylvania’s swingiest county toward Harris. Her home is decorated with political memorabilia, including a vintage suffragist button and a photo of Barack Obama. She has Hillary Clinton’s concession speech printed on her mantle. Harris must win, she says, gesturing to her cloak, “because there is no room left for another concession speech.”

A good ground game can help you win races with a margin of error, like this one, and even Republicans admit that Democrats have the edge. According to a campaign official, the Harris campaign has knocked on doors of more than 700,000 people in Pennsylvania in the past week — and that doesn’t include thousands of others knocked on doors by Democratic groups not affiliated with the campaign. “We thought this was going to be really close, and it is,” said a Harris campaign official. “But we have the basic game to win a very close race and Trump doesn’t.”

Harris’ ground game strategy is at once obvious and sophisticated. Harris has more than 2,500 employees and 358 field offices in battleground states, including more than 475 paid staffers in Pennsylvania. Since July, more than 110,000 people have volunteered for the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania, and those volunteers knocked on nearly 2 million doors in October alone. A third of Pennsylvania field offices are in rural counties that Trump owned by double digits in 2020, and where Harris’ goal is to keep Trump’s margins low. At the same time, the campaign seeks to lock down bases in urban areas in the long term relational organizing aimed at voters who are difficult to reach. The campaign realizes that Democrats have long taken the votes of black and Latino people for granted. Now the campaign is treating them as both persuasion and mobilization targets. And she believes the path to victory is through the suburbs, where they hope voters and college-educated women can propel the VP to victory.

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Part of the Democratic ground game advantage comes from the anti-Trump grassroots infrastructure built over the last eight years. Since Trump’s victory in 2016 and the Women’s March that followed, Democrats — mostly women, often suburban, mostly operating outside a traditional campaign — have spent seven years building a volunteer network that is both remarkably effective and surprising has proven to be flexible. These local organizers helped Democrats win the House of Representatives in 2018, joined the 2020 campaign to help Biden win, and helped blunt the expected “red wave” in 2022. Along the way, they helped flip seats in the state legislature and oust local officials. Their enthusiasm has fluctuated through events — many of these activists were less enthusiastic about a Biden re-election — but the infrastructure has remained intact throughout. Now, in the final stretch of a final campaign against Trump, the grassroots volunteers who fought him for nearly a decade are the ones who can help Harris win the purple parts of Pennsylvania, and with it, perhaps, the election.

One of them is Deb Paul, an organizer from Massachusetts who brought twelve volunteers to Philadelphia to knock on doors for Harris. Paul became engaged with the Democratic grassroots group Indivisible after the 2017 Charlottesville rally; seven years later, she’s still at it. For her, Indivisible has become both a social group and a political calling. “It went from an organization to a movement, and a community was built through activism,” said Paul, 67, a former CEO of a health care company. “We are doing something. We are not just complaining.”