- Trump is scheduled to headline a rally Saturday at Temple University in Philadelphia, a heavily Democratic city.
- The former president is hoping to win the support of black voters, Biden’s base.
- Trump has focused his campaign message on the economy, but Biden maintains deep ties to New York City.
For former President Donald Trump, few states solidify his path back to the White House more than Pennsylvania.
The former president narrowly won the Keystone State in the 2016 election, beating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but lost to Biden by 1 percentage point in the 2020 election.
And a big reason Biden won in 2020 was that his large margin of votes in the Philadelphia area (the city and its affluent suburbs) offset the large advantage enjoyed by Trump.
But Biden has struggled over the past year to reinvigorate the liberal-leaning coalition that put him in the White House four years ago, and his support among Black and Hispanic voters has been especially shaky.
That’s one reason why Trump will speak at Temple University in Philadelphia on Saturday, hoping to garner support from voters who previously hadn’t considered him but who may find him a key issue in the November election. Also attending will be David McCormick, the Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate who is facing veteran Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr. in the fall.
Here’s how Trump plans to win over these voters and the big challenges he faces in doing so.
It’s all about economics…
Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate stood at 3.4% for the eighth consecutive month as of May 2024, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry.
This is lower than the current U.S. unemployment rate of 4%.
But like most national polls, Trump leads Biden on the question of which candidate would do a better job of handling the economy. The most recent New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena College poll, conducted in late April and early May, gave Trump a 12-point lead over Biden among registered voters on the issue. Also, just 21% of respondents described the U.S. economy as “good” or “very good,” while 78% described it as “fair” or “poor.”
Trump is hoping that many Democratic voters, whose main concerns are inflation and rising housing costs, will boost him in Philadelphia, where 81% of voters went to Biden in 2020.
In 2020, Biden won Pennsylvania by roughly 80,000 votes out of more than 6.9 million cast, and more than 604,000 of those votes for Biden came from Philadelphia voters, so any slight swing toward Trump, especially among Biden’s black base in the city, could dramatically affect the statewide outcome.
…But Biden’s ties to Philadelphia run deep
Outside of Delaware, there is perhaps no city Biden likes to visit more than Philadelphia.
Before and during his presidency, he showed great dedication to the City of Brotherly Love, especially its black voters and union members. As a senator from Delaware, he lived in Wilmington, just a few miles from Pennsylvania’s largest city.
That gives him a natural rapport with many Democrats and labor leaders, and he could easily find an audience in the city’s many black churches with loyal older black voters who overwhelmingly support his bid for a second term.
Biden failed to win over young black voters on issues like the Gaza conflict and student loan debt relief, and many of those voters are largely unaware of his work on climate change. But Biden would need to see major electoral shifts before he’s in serious danger of losing much of his Philadelphia base, and that often takes several election cycles to happen.
So far, many lower-ranking Democratic Senate candidates like Casey have outperformed their Republican opponents in key races around the country — something the Trump campaign is sure to take note of as it tries to retake Pennsylvania.
The statewide race is now extremely close, and Philadelphia will once again have a say in the outcome.
