One day before the presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris made her first campaign visit to Reading, Pennsylvania — a majority Latino city just an hour outside of Philadelphia. Donald Trump’s campaign had been running outreach to Latino voters in the Berks County city since June, when the Republican National Committee opened a Latino Americans for Trump office as it ramped up its appeals to Latino voters across the state.
When votes were counted in Berks County, the gap between the campaigns was stark. As in 2020, Berks again went for Trump on Tuesday — this time up 4.6 percentage points to 58 percent. Harris received 43 percent of the vote, where President Joe Biden had won 45.2 percent in 2020.
The problem was not that Berks had become a Republican stronghold, but that Democrats had ceded the territory long before Trump opened his campaign office this summer. It was a familiar story to progressive organizers across Pennsylvania, who have spent the last several campaign cycles trying to claw back voters Democrats have left on the table.
Democratic consultants in Pennsylvania had been caught on their heels in 2016, when Trump flipped the state red for the first time in three decades and won three counties that had voted twice for former President Barack Obama. When Biden won Pennsylvania back in 2020, analysts and organizers attributed the win to the work done in progressive cities like Philadelphia. But it wasn’t the Biden campaign doing the legwork, it was progressives and independents working within coalitions led by groups like Pennsylvania Stands Up, Make the Road Action Pennsylvania, the Working Families Party, and unions like Unite Here and Service Employees International Union.
Democrats’ reliance on progressive enclaves and local organizers to fill the gap they lost with Trump’s first win was never more clear than in the midnight hours heading into Wednesday, as Trump pulled away with electoral votes and Harris’s narrowing path to victory fell once again to voters in cities like Philadelphia.
While Biden won 13 Pennsylvania counties in 2020, Harris won just eight — with Trump flipping the counties of Bucks, Northampton, Erie, Monroe, and Centre. As the results solidified for Trump, mainstream media and Democratic pundits turned their fire not at the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party but in two other directions — at minority voters who had drifted, along with white men and women, toward Trump; and at progressives who had either stayed home or voted third party over Harris’s role in the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
Such criticism was misguided, said Working Families Party National Director Maurice Mitchell. Democrats, he said, had ceded turf to Republicans in states like Pennsylvania despite knowing they held the only key to winning the White House.
“That coalition is fraying at the margin for a number of reasons,” Mitchell said Tuesday night at WFP’s watch party at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Philadelphia.
People are asking basic questions of both parties, Mitchell said. “What concretely and materially are we gaining from this relationship? And they deserve answers.”
That the race was so close is raising a vital conversation about Democrats’ continued failure to build power outside of the four-year election cycle, said Philadelphia City Council minority whip Nicolas O’Rourke. “Voting is the last thing that we do in a functioning democracy.”
O’Rourke is one of two Working Families Party members on the city council. Local Democrats fought tooth and nail against the WFP, but the group’s wins ousted Republicans from the council in the heavily blue city for the first time in history with O’Rourke’s 2023 win. He said the focus on whether Black men had strayed from the Harris campaign missed the larger reason for demographic shifts.
“The issue that I found, more often than not, was not an interest in Trump, it was a lack of interest in engagement. And that has been true beyond just this election season and cycle,” O’Rourke said. “I continue to believe that there is an opportunity to engage Black men. They feel forgotten, not seen. They don’t see the value in voting — some of them, not all. … There’s a lot to be said about engagement from the political parties actually connecting with Black men before you’re expecting them to turn out.”
“That is something that every party should be paying attention to, whether it’s election season or not, because a functioning democracy would care about that.”
A few hours before Harris made her first stop in Reading, Trump held a rally with thousands of people at the city’s downtown Santander Arena.
While Trump made fewer stops in Pennsylvania than Harris — 22 to Harris’s 26 — Republican groundwork targeting voters in Latino, Black, and white working-class neighborhoods allowed him to outperform Democrats, who put much of their focus into persuading affluent voters in blue strongholds.
While Latino men and women supported Biden by 59 and 69 percent, exit polls from Tuesday show that 55 percent of Latino men voted for Trump. Latino women still overwhelmingly supported Harris, but by 6 percentage points less than they had in 2020.
Latino voters in Reading are reachable — Democrats just haven’t put in the work, Reading’s first Latino mayor, Eddie Morán, told Politico Magazine earlier this month. Morán won his 2019 primary against a Democratic incumbent by doing one thing: talking to Latino voters in neighborhoods Democrats had forgotten.
Democratic outreach to Latinos happened largely with the help of groups like Make the Road Action PA, which focuses on engaging Black and brown voters. The group knocked on more than 560,000 doors, made contact with 50,000 voters in eight counties, and had 413,000 conversations with Latino voters across the state.
“In Pennsylvania, the minimum wage hasn’t gone up in 20+ years.”
Issues like the cost of living and housing were prominent across those conversations, said Diana Robinson, co-deputy director of Make the Road Action Pennsylvania. “The rent is too high, people are struggling to pay their bills. That is something we think is unifying to folks across the board,” she said.
“In Pennsylvania, the minimum wage has remained stagnant for over two decades.
Kandice Cabeza, a voter from Harris in Northeast Philadelphia, expressed her support for abortion rights but voiced her disappointment in both candidates. Originally from Baltimore, she has been residing in Philadelphia for a decade.
Cabeza emphasized the importance of addressing issues such as the cost of living, food, medical assistance, and healthcare bills. She felt that neither candidate was adequately addressing these concerns, focusing instead on their personal rivalry. She hoped that someone would prioritize the needs of all citizens, not just a specific group.
According to WFP’s Mitchell, independent groups are actively reaching out to working-class voters who feel neglected by the Democratic Party. Rather than moving towards the right, these groups aim to connect with working-class individuals on a personal level.
Mitchell highlighted the diversity within the working class but noted that certain core issues unite them across ideological lines. In New York, three Working Families Party candidates successfully won House seats, countering Democratic losses in the 2022 cycle.
The class divide in politics was underscored by Mitchell, who emphasized the popularity of taxing billionaires among working-class voters. He believed that Democrats should advocate for this more openly to appeal to a broader base.
Sen. Bernie Sanders attributed Harris’s loss to the Democratic Party’s failure to prioritize working-class voters. He criticized the party for neglecting this demographic, leading to a decline in support from various racial groups.
The shift in minority support towards Trump was seen as a strategic decision by Mitchell, rather than blind loyalty to a political party. He encouraged more critical thinking among Black voters and urged political parties to recognize their evolving preferences.
Mitchell stressed the importance of acknowledging and responding to these political trends. He warned that failure to address these shifts could spell trouble for the Democratic Party, while emphasizing the Working Families Party’s commitment to engaging with these changes.”
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