Lev Radin/Sipa USA via AP Images
Vice President Kamala Harris campaigns at Wilkes University’s McHale Athletic Center in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, September 13, 2024.
I have the odd privilege and burden of happening to live in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Not only is this city in a swing state, but it’s in one of its swingiest regions. Barack Obama won Luzerne County by about five points in 2012, then Donald Trump won it by almost 20 points in 2016, and then Joe Biden narrowed that margin to about 14 points.
This is no doubt why both Trump and Kamala Harris have visited Wilkes-Barre in the past few weeks, despite its modest population of about 45,000. Trump appeared last month at a local arena (technically in neighboring Wilkes-Barre Township), and Harris last week at Wilkes University, a private school right in downtown. It’s also why my wife and I have been getting a flood of mailers from both campaigns. A friend down the street—who is not a Republican—has been getting pro-Trump mailers literally every day for weeks.
I could not make it to the Trump rally, where he went on one of his signature rambling incoherent tirades that turned at least one supporter against him. But I did make it to the Harris rally to take the temperature of Harris supporters and see how her campaign is shaping up.
On Friday afternoon, as I approached the security checkpoint, I encountered a tiny handful of pro-Palestine protesters with a drum and a bullhorn. While I am wholly in sympathy with their cause, their choice to insult the rally attendees by shouting that Harris supports genocide, and by supporting her so did they, did not seem calculated to win any support, or even sympathy, for Palestinians. It felt more like trolling than anything else. (I did not interview them, alas, as I was running late.)
The rally attendees I asked about Gaza were also on the side of Palestinians, and thought Kamala agreed with them. “This war needs to stop, everywhere,” said Martha Ellis, a Black resident of Wilkes-Barre. “It’s senseless.” “I agree with Kamala: We need a two-state solution,” added her friend Beverly Astwood, also Black.
To be sure, her support for a cease-fire and a two-state solution is a convenient stance for Harris, who after all is not the president yet and has little influence over American foreign policy and still less over Israeli policy. She can advocate for the obviously correct solution without having the responsibility to carry it out. But for the moment, all any friend of Gazans can muster is hope.
Not only is Wilkes-Barre in a swing state, but it’s in one of its swingiest regions.
Abortion was the top priority among many attendees. “My main issue is reproductive rights,” said Kellie Smith, who had driven with her mother Kathie for two and a half hours from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Others praised Harris’s family policy. Bringing back President Biden’s Child Tax Credit (which included the very poor for the first time) “is what pro-life is all about,” joked Jan Robinson, from neighboring Pittston. “That was the largest reduction in child poverty and hunger in years,” said Dave Harvey, who came in from Honesdale sporting a “White Dudes for Harris” cap. “Kids were getting fed, man.”
The event was well organized. The entrance process was smooth; volunteers were on hand with signs, water bottles, and snacks, and big letters spelling out “KAMALA” behind and to the side of the lectern so the camera feeds could see them. I mention this last part in particular because Trump events have somehow botched this elementary aspect of advance work.
The warm-up acts included local mayor George Brown, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, and Sen. Bob Casey, whose re-election this year is critical for Democrats to maintain control of the Senate. The best speaker by a mile was Shapiro, despite his voice being worn out, and the fact that he sounds eerily like a 51-year-old white dude doing a Barack Obama impression (because, frankly, that’s what he is). He quickly developed an easy rapport with the crowd and smoothly improvised several applause lines, evincing Obama’s knack for building and releasing the crowd’s energy. His speech had a nice theme around freedom as well, ending with a cornball anecdote about Ben Franklin that went over well.
The penultimate speaker was a nurse from Scranton named Marygrace Vadala, which led to an interesting encapsulation of one of Harris’s campaign strategies. When Vadala mentioned that she was a lifelong Republican, boos erupted. But these were gradually drowned out by cheers and applause as she clarified she is supporting Harris this time. By the end of her speech, when she talked about how her mother, another Trump supporter, had died of COVID-19 during the pandemic because of Trump’s egregious bungling of the response, she had the crowd’s full sympathy.
Her talk illustrated Harris’s way of treating conservative endorsements. After all, neither Vadala nor Dick Cheney are making policy demands in return for their votes. Republicans are welcome aboard the anti-Trump bus so long as they don’t think they get to steer it.
After all that, Harris’s speech was something of an anticlimax. It lasted only about 20 minutes, and despite nearly hysterical cheering as she entered, she didn’t manage to establish Shapiro’s level of connection with the crowd. One problem was that the speech was somewhat unfocused. One section had a recitation of her record as a prosecutor, including how she had gone after Mexican drug traffickers, which fell somewhat flat. Then she went through a grab bag of proposed policies ranging from the fairly silly (a $50,000 tax deduction for new small businesses) to the pretty good (helping cities build more housing) to the very good (a massive expansion of federal child benefits).
A proposal to create better career tracks outside of the traditional four-year college degree, through technical programs or apprenticeships, went over particularly well with the Wilkes-Barre audience, given its history of job and population loss. But as a whole, the policy section still felt like a laundry list and didn’t inspire much enthusiasm, perhaps because Harris’s policy theme of “opportunity” is one of the oldest clichés in the book.
The crowd’s energy returned when Harris hammered Trump on abortion, pointing out that “more than 20 states have an abortion ban, many with no exceptions for rape or incest,” leading to thunderous boos. The following section promising to restore freedoms that Trump and the conservative movement have abridged, like voting rights, LGBT rights, union rights, and the “freedom to be safe from gun violence,” went over well.
A proposal to create better career tracks outside of the traditional four-year college degree, through technical programs or apprenticeships, went over particularly well.
In fairness to Harris, part of her oratorical problem was that she was repeatedly interrupted by pro-Palestine protesters, who kept shouting even after she responded to them, saying: “Now is the time to get a hostage deal and cease-fire. I—we—have been working around the clock to get that done.” But she didn’t improvise any other responses on the fly, or use any of the classic comedian techniques for dealing with hecklers, or try to tie the disruption into any of her themes. After the initial back-and-forth, she stuck firmly to her prepared remarks, talking indistinctly over the shouting as her security hustled the protesters out. As my colleague Robert Kuttner points out, we saw a similar performance during the debate, where Harris had numerous tightly prepared and effective attacks for Trump, but largely did not throw a punch when Trump opened himself up by saying something insane.
This seems to be the approach the Harris campaign has settled on. Like the Clinton campaign in 2016, it’s small-c conservative in the sense that they have settled on a strategy and are sticking to it. Unlike the Clinton campaign, the strategy seems much more likely to work. Harris has a policy bone for just about everyone in the Democratic coalition (except the Cheneys), even if taken together they don’t make much of a coherent meal. And her strongest attack against Trump—that he is responsible for the Dobbs decision and would ban abortion nationally if he could—was not available to Clinton in 2016. Harris could maybe stand to loosen up a little on the stump, but that carries its own risks. On the whole, I can’t find much fault with the strategy.
So that’s what it’s like for your vote for president to matter in this country, and I have to say I’m not a fan. It is handy for the Prospect and me that presidential politics pays so much attention to the random smallish city where I happen to live. But it is simply a crime against democracy for Wilkes-Barre of all places to get this much attention. The Electoral College means that only about a half-dozen states matter in presidential elections, while just about everyplace else can be safely ignored—and if the polls are any judge, Pennsylvania is the closest big prize on the table. My vote matters at least a thousand times more than that of people in Wyoming, California, or Kentucky. That is not only wrong, it saps the legitimacy of our entire constitutional structure. It is dangerous for perhaps 80 percent of Americans to be effectively disenfranchised in presidential elections.
And, frankly, it’s annoying to those of us who live where our votes do matter, a lot. Every campaign event means multiple streets get shut down by the cops for hours; every resident gets deluged with political mailers, almost all of which go directly into the trash; every cellphone is ringing and pinging constantly from pollsters and donation requests and campaign comms; and every email inbox is stuffed daily with political crap. Personally, I would like to be enfranchised at precisely the same level as the other 240 million eligible voters. That seems like the bare minimum for America to be able to claim that power is derived from the consent of the governed.
