The Democratic Party’s nominee for vice president is set to visit Pittsburgh on Tuesday — his sixth trip to Pennsylvania as politicians court voters in a swing state some pundits say will tip the scales on who wins the 2024 presidential race.
Vice presidential hopeful Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will kick off Tuesday with a 1 p.m. campaign event in Volant, his campaign announced Sunday. The sparsely populated Lawrence County borough — about 125 people lived there in 2022, census data showed — is 55 miles north of Downtown Pittsburgh.
Walz then will travel to Butler County for a political event, followed by a campaign rally in Pittsburgh, the campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris and Walz said.
A location for the latter event has not been made public.
Walz will end his third Western Pennsylvania visit since joining Harris’ ticket Aug. 5 by speaking during a Harris Victory Fund reception, the campaign said.
Trump visit planned
Pennsylvania Republicans said Sunday that former President Donald J. Trump is planning “a rally next week” in Allegheny County.
Both Allegheny County Councilman Sam DeMarco, the chair of council’s GOP caucus, and John Schnaedter, executive director of the county’s Republican committee, told TribLive they had no specific information to share yet about the visit.
Harris and Walz hold a four-point lead in Pennsylvania in a head-to-head matchup against former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released Saturday.
That poll showed Trump with a six-point edge over Harris in Arizona, another key swing state that President Joe Biden won in 2020. Since 1976, the only other time Arizona voters backed a Democrat for the country’s highest office was for former President Bill Clinton in 1996.
Harris and Walz plan to spend the coming week crisscrossing Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the trio of battleground states that are key to their path to the White House.
The Democratic ticket is turning its attention to the “Blue Wall” battleground states for a round of campaigning in the relative calm before it ramps up get-out-the-vote activities in the final two weeks before Election Day.
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Polls suggest the race is close in all three states, which Donald Trump won in 2016 and President Joe Biden took in 2020.
“It is a tight race. It is a margin-of-error race,” Harris told reporters Saturday as she prepared to travel to North Carolina. But, she added, “the choice is clear.”
Amid signs that her support among Black voters — especially men — is weaker than it’s been for other recent Democratic presidential nominees, Harris is in a four-day wave of outreach to them.
She met with Black elected, faith and community leaders at a barbecue restaurant in Raleigh, N.C., on Saturday night. Harris planned to spend Sunday morning at a church in Greenville, just as her campaign launched its “Souls to the Polls” push to encourage Black churchgoers to cast ballots.
Harris’ support among Black likely voters stood at 78% in the national New York Times/Siena College poll released Saturday, less than the roughly nine out of 10 who had voted for the past few Democratic nominees.
Advertising blitz
The importance of winning the Keystone State in the Nov. 5 election has been underscored locally with floods of presidential and vice presidential visits, not to mention a flurry of campaign ads.
Four Pennsylvania markets, in fact, are among the top 10 highest ad spends from September through Election Day, the trade publication AdImpact reported.
Philadelphia boasted $124.6 million in future ad reservations through Nov. 5, followed by Phoenix with $107.1 million, AdImpact said. Pittsburgh, Wilkes-Barre-Scranton and Harrisburg also helped top the list.
Pennsylvania was the only state with multiple entries in the top 10.
Harris and Walz barnstormed Western Pennsylvania in an August bus tour that drummed up momentum for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
The candidates and their spouses arrived Aug. 18 at the Pittsburgh International Airport, then traveled the Ohio Valley region.
On the same day, Trump held a rally in Wilkes-Barre and campaigned in York. Vance held a campaign event with veterans in Lower Burrell three days earlier.
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The Associated Press contributed to this story.