By Jarrett Renshaw
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) – Former U.S. President Donald Trump heads to the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Saturday for a rally and fundraiser just days before his trial in New York over an alleged hush-hush scheme.
He will be followed closely by President Joe Biden, who will make three stops in Pennsylvania next week, speaking first in his hometown of Scranton about his push to reform the U.S. tax code.
With 19 electoral votes – one of the highest counts among all 50 states – and voters who swing between support for Democrats like Biden and Republicans like Trump, Pennsylvania is one of the early prizes in the 2024 presidential election and is likely to see many more visits in the coming months.
Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020 by less than 1.5%, or about 80,000 votes, after Trump beat Hillary Clinton by fewer than 45,000 votes in 2016. State polls conducted in March range from showing Biden with a lead of 10 percentage points to Trump up 4 points, election data site FiveThirtyEight shows.
Democrats are betting on strong turnout in Philadelphia and its surrounding suburbs, a region that accounts for 33% of all voter registrations, to offset losses in much of the rest of the state. Trump and Republicans are trying to amass huge margins in less populous, largely white counties to make up for urban votes.
Biden, who has been to Pennsylvania four times this year, will also travel to the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia area for three days, the White House said Friday.
Trump is expected to be in Manhattan on Monday for the start of his first criminal trial, a case involving hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. The process could last several weeks.
Trump’s Saturday rally at the Schnecksville Fire Hall targets the Lehigh Valley, a mix of Rust Belt cities, sprawling suburbs and rural towns. It includes Northampton County, one of two counties flipped by Biden in 2020, which has long been a reliable indicator of statewide success.
“If you win Northampton County, you’ll probably win the state. It’s such an important place,” Chris Borick, a political science professor at Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg University, said of Trump’s rally.
The former president will attend a fundraiser before his rally in Bucks County, another major region that Biden narrowly won in 2020. The event is hosted by Jim Worthington, a wealthy gym owner who has made pressure on Trump to stop criticizing mail-in voting. About 200 people are expected and the event is expected to generate several million dollars, according to two sources close to the event.
It will be a “hair-thin race,” Borick predicted.
SENATE RACE, POPULATION DECLINES
Pennsylvania is a sprawling and politically complex place where voters have historically often elevated consensus-oriented candidates statewide, a history that could influence the closely watched U.S. Senate race.
Incumbent Bob Casey, a Democrat, will face Republican Dave McCormick (NYSE:), a wealthy former hedge fund executive, one of the few races in 2024 that will decide who controls the Senate.
Population shifts could also affect the breed. Pennsylvania’s population topped 13 million in 2021, but declined over the next two years, finishing at 12.96 million people last year. According to an analysis by Franklin & Marshall College, the declines from 2020 came from counties won by Biden.
According to state voter data, Democrats continue to lose their lead in voter registration in the state due to defections from rural and blue-collar voters, who join Republicans or register as unaffiliated.
In 2020, Democrats had an advantage in registering voters by about 700,000, but this year the advantage shrunk to 400,000 as Democratic voters swung to the unaffiliated.
The defections are due to voters who supported Republican candidates but who until now never bothered to change their party status, some political analysts believe.