(Bloomberg) -- Sitting outside her house in North Philadelphia, Bettie Poplar embodies both the opportunity and the challenge facing Kamala Harris, who must resoundingly take this city to win Pennsylvania, and with it the presidency.
Poplar is Black and so plugged into the electoral process that she worked at a polling place in the last election – exactly the sort of voter Harris needs to turn out in droves. But Poplar has other ideas.
“I might not even vote,” Poplar told Erin Dohony, a canvasser who was out wrangling votes for Harris on a warm autumn evening. Then Poplar twisted the knife. “If I vote, I would vote for him, I’m not going to lie.”
Party enthusiasm surged when Harris replaced Joe Biden atop the ticket, bringing a wave of donations and new volunteers just as the Democrats shifted focus to voter turnout.
Polls show the election could be the closest in a generation, with relatively few undecided voters left for campaigns to sway. That means the race is likely to be won or lost by the parties’ ability to get as many of their existing supporters to show up and cast their votes as possible. The campaigns are fighting street by street for advantage in the battleground states that are likely to decide the outcome.
Democrats and their progressive allies are relying on traditional party organizing and labor-union supporters to get the word out. Donald Trump’s campaign is gambling that outside groups - including one funded by billionaire Elon Musk - will be able to use vast spending to reach potential supporters who don’t usually vote but can be talked into coming to the polls this time.
“The ground game is always underestimated in every election, because it doesn’t show up in polling,” said Ed Rendell, a former Pennsylvania governor and chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “But in a close race, it can be dispositive.”
Harris backers in Michigan are hand-writing postcards to prospective voters. In Arizona, outside groups working on Trump’s behalf say they’ve identified 58,000 people in one conservative district alone who didn’t vote in 2020, more than five times the margin by which Trump lost the state then. Musk’s PAC is offering $47 per signature for people who can identify sympathetic registered voters across the swing states. He’s channeled $75 million into the group he formed to turn out voters for Trump in key swing states, including Pennsylvania.
But there are signs the Trump campaign’s outside groups are off to a slow start in some areas. Hastily hired, paid canvassing operations can be less effective than volunteer appeals from organizations like labor unions, said a senior Republican operative close to the Trump campaign, asking not to be identified questioning strategy.
“We get some very mixed views on whether we can rely on them,” said Jason Roe, a veteran Republican consultant in Michigan. Grassroots enthusiasm for the party took a hit when Harris replaced Biden on the ticket, he said. “We are struggling to get volunteers to show up and do any of the work,” he said.
Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point Action, one of the external organizations working to organize Trump voters, said, “We know our methodology is working.” The group says it’s found tens of thousands of potential voters in Arizona and Wisconsin who can be mobilized to vote for Trump and swing the states back into his column.
Democrats are relying on old-school party machines like Philadelphia’s to prove they can still organize and deliver a massive turnout of the party’s traditional base, including union workers and residents of the city’s majority-Black voting districts – where Biden was struggling when the campaign began. A progressive group is also offering people up to $400 in incentives to train as "voting ambassadors" and refer friends and acquaintances in key swing states to come out and cast their ballots.
Pennsylvania is critical to nearly any path for Harris to win the presidency. The Harris campaign said volunteers and workers had knocked on 250,000 doors in the state last weekend alone; they plan to increase the pace as election day approaches.
Paid canvassers as well as volunteers organized by the city Democratic Party and independent progressive groups are fanning out across Philadelphia, with lists of voter names and addresses loaded into MiniVAN, a canvassing app. Dohony works for the Working Families Party, a third party aligned with the labor movement that supports Harris for president.
Democrats must turn out enough voters in the city to provide a massive margin of victory for Harris. Combined with support in critical ‘collar counties’ outside the state’s two biggest cities, that might give the vice president enough of a counterweight to Trump’s dominance in rural areas to win the state.
“There are as many people that have failed to vote in our communities as there are people living in Pittsburgh,” state Senator Sharif Street, chairman of the state Democratic Party, told a crowd of party faithful at a South Philly sports bar in late September. “If we can come out in big enough numbers, Philadelphia has the ability to save the world.”
The event was aimed specifically at revving up Black Democratic leaders. Street reminded attendees of the low turnout that helped doom Hillary Clinton’s chances in 2016, as well as polls showing Harris’ continuing struggles to win over Black men.
Some progressive activists worry the party is neglecting core urban supporters as it targets suburban and rural voters.
“I think they are focusing on the wrong people” said state Representative Chris Rabb.
Democrats hold a slight plurality among Pennsylvania’s 9 million registered voters, according to state records, but the margin’s been shrinking. More than 61,000 registered Democrats switched their affiliation to Republican so far in 2024, state records show, more than double the number who went the other way.
In most of Philadelphia, there was little evidence of a Republican turnout operation, party leaders said, though in the hard-fought suburban counties waves of red Trump lawn signs clash with Harris’ blue ones.
Leslie Lewis-McGirth, a Democrat from Yeadon in suburban Delaware County, said she has seen lots of Trump lawn signs, but hasn’t encountered canvassers working for the Republican ticket as she has knocked on doors.
Dohony, the Working Families canvasser, has been knocking on doors for the Harris campaign since July. She said the profound dissatisfaction with Biden of her early encounters has been replaced - sometimes - by excitement for Harris.
"It felt like the Democratic establishment finally listened to voters who were screaming for a change," she said. Now, she sees signs of exhaustion. "Voters and non-voters alike are burnt out," she said.
One recent weekend afternoon, she was knocking near a party office on the edge of the Fairmount neighborhood, where century-old brick rowhouses in varied states of repair sit among newly built apartment buildings and occasional vacant lots.
Longtime resident John Giles told her he wasn’t sure about voting for the first female president.
Seeking any motivator to get Giles to the polls, where he would be a better bet to vote for Harris than Trump, Dohony mentioned a local Working Families Party council member and her efforts to shield city renters from discrimination.
Giles, who has one leg, shifted himself on his threshold, and Dohony asked if he would vote by mail, or might need assistance getting out to vote in person.
“Maybe,” Giles flashed a broad smile. Dohony made a note to follow up, and moved on. A few blocks away, Dohony met Bettie Poplar, who had been watching her approach, door-by-door.
Poplar said she doesn’t fear Trump. “He’s not going to destroy the world like everybody says.”
The summer sun was fading on Swain Street and Dohony kept the conversation going as long as she could. Poplar had been put off by Biden’s age, but doubted Trump’s capacity too. She was skeptical of Harris’ abilities to drive change, but agreed to let Dohony leave her with a Working Families Party flier showing the Democratic ticket and directions to the office, just around the corner.
“I’m going to come by and visit with y’all,” she called, as Dohony waved, and moved on down the block.
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