Victory in Pennsylvania might be a bigger lift for Vice President Kamala Harris than she and her supporters would have us believe. On Sunday, Fox News reported that Harris needs to reach “Obama-like” numbers in Philadelphia to make up for deficits in other parts of the state.
Former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who served from 2008 to 2016, told the Columbia Institute of Global Politics last week that “in Philadelphia, this is all about turnout.”
Nutter said, “Pretty much the same in 2008 with Barack Obama. So it’s my general view that Vice President Harris needs to walk out of Philadelphia with a net 600,000 vote margin to offset what is going on in other parts of the Commonwealth.” [Emphasis added.]
To put this number into perspective, President Joe Biden won more than 604,000 votes (81% of the total votes cast in Philadelphia in 2020).
Former President Trump received nearly 133,000 votes, 17.90% of the total votes, an improvement from 2016 when he won 108,748 votes or 15.37% of the votes.
The margin between Biden and Trump was 471,000 votes. If Nutter is correct, Harris needs approximately 130,000 more votes than Biden received (28% more), to bring her total to a net margin of 600,000.
And that’s if Trump’s performance in 2024 remains unchanged from 2020. Given that Trump is currently attracting more minority support than he did four years ago, there is reason to believe he will outperform his 2020 showing. Obviously, that means Harris will need more votes to get to “Obama numbers” in the city.
Although it’s not impossible for Harris to achieve this goal, it is obviously a very heavy lift. As we all know, Harris is no Barack Obama.
And she really is no Joe Biden either. As I see it, Biden, with his Scranton roots, likely appealed more to Pennsylvania voters than Harris, a far-Left San Francisco liberal.
At any rate, reporting from the City of Brotherly Love on Sunday, Fox News correspondent Bryan Llenas reminded viewers that “the Trump campaign knows they’re not going to win Philadelphia.” But, he said, if Trump can win a few thousand more votes in the city, he could win the state and even the election.
Llenas spoke to Philadelphia Republican Ward Chairman Vincent Fenerty, Jr., who said, if Trump can win “20[000], maybe 30,000 more votes, we’re going to win the state of Pennsylvania.”
Elon Musk has been focusing on a Trump victory in the Keystone State, and he’s extremely optimistic about his chances. In a recent post on X, Musk wrote: “The 2024 Pennsylvania Republican vs Democrat vote is now over 500k better than the same day in 2020, when Biden’s victory margin was only 80k! Moreover, yesterday there were more Republican early votes than Democrat. Pennsylvania will be a decisive Republican victory.”
On Sunday, Musk posted even better news: “The gap between 2024 and 2020 is now over 600k, which almost 10% of the entire electorate!
Although Democrats, by and large, have remained upbeat about Harris’s chances, they’ve also been hedging their bets.
As I see it, Republicans have appeared far more confident that their candidate will win. One of the most optimistic reads I’ve heard yet came from American Greatness writer Roger Kimball. He wrote: “We keep hearing that the race will be close. I think it will be like Patton’s Third Army racing across France in 1944.”
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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