Pennsylvania is slipping from Donald Trump’s grasp. By Edward Luce

Edward Luce in Allentown, Pennsylvania

The Financial Times, Aug. 18th

Read time: 6 minutes

Asked why he had robbed a bank, William Sutton, one of the FBI’s most wanted postwar criminals, replied, “because that’s where the money is”. If Sutton had been running for president in 2024 he would have plotted a raid on Pennsylvania’s Hispanic vote.

The path to the White House runs through Pennsylvania — America’s largest must-win swing state. Yet Donald Trump’s campaign is so far making no discernible effort to woo its fastest-growing demographic.

Numbering roughly 600,000 adults in a state that was settled by margins of less than 100,000 votes in the past two elections, Pennsylvania’s Hispanics are where the votes are.

“We seem to be committing an unforced error,” said Albert Eisenberg, a Philadelphia-based Republican consultant. “Hispanics could be the deciding factor.”

Joe Biden’s campaign started early and in earnest, running Spanish-language commercials in Pennsylvania in March, eight months before November’s presidential election. Kamala Harris, who replaced him in July, this week booked a new round of ads.

“I have never seen a campaign start as early as Biden — usually it would be in September,” said Victor Martinez, owner of Pennsylvania’s largest Spanish-language radio network and the anchor of his own morning show from Allentown, the state’s third-largest city.

“What confuses me is why the Trump campaign is not even trying to reach Spanish speakers. As a businessman, I would go bankrupt if I ignored my fastest-growing audience.” Harris has also done a phone-in interview with Martinez in English.

Victor Martinez, creator and broadcaster of the El Relajo de la Mañana morning show, poses at his radio studio in Allentown, Pennsylvania

Victor Martinez: ‘As a businessman, I would go bankrupt if I ignored my fastest-growing audience’ © Jennifer Huxta/FT

The Trump campaign’s apparent indifference may partly stem from complacency. Until Biden stepped down in late July, Trump was regularly leading the Pennsylvania polls without offering so much as a buenos dias.

His narrow escape last month from assassination in Butler, a city north of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania’s west, also appeared to give the Republican candidate more polling momentum.

But since Harris replaced Biden almost a month ago, the energy in Pennsylvania has shifted dramatically.

“A few weeks before he stepped down I attended a Biden campaign event and maybe five people showed up, including me and a Trump opposition researcher,” said Lindsay Weber, political reporter for The Morning Call, Allentown’s local paper. “When the Harris campaign rebranded the campaign office, it was packed with new volunteers.”

The latest sampling by the Cook Political Report, a veteran forecasting outfit, puts Harris, who will be officially confirmed as the Democratic party’s nominee next week in Chicago, five points ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania.

In contrast to Florida’s Republicans, who had no choice but to embrace Spanish given the state’s non-Anglo character, Pennsylvania’s habits die harder.

“Some party officials say to me: ‘America is an English-speaking country. Why would we talk to voters in Spanish?,’” said one frustrated Republican. “I reply, ‘Because we want to win?’”

The Trump campaign’s complacency may also owe something to the fact that most of the state’s Hispanics are Puerto Rican, which makes them US citizens. Unlike the big central American communities in northern Virginia and Maryland, or undocumented Venezuelans in the US’s border states and Florida, Puerto Ricans are not directly menaced by Trump’s vow to carry out sweeping deportations of illegal immigrants. This makes them more open to his economic message, which blames Biden for inflation and unaffordable housing.

Yet Trump is having trouble sticking to the script. His campaign regularly vows that he is about to pivot to policy; their nominee keeps making headlines with personal attacks on Harris.

“The party that will win in November is the one that avoids doing and saying outrageous things,” said Maria Montero, a Republican lawyer based in Allentown and Spanish speaker. “For Latino voters it boils down to the economy.”

Matt Tuerk, the mayor of Allentown, right, talks to a resident of the town

Matt Tuerk, the mayor of Allentown, right, talks to a resident. He is trying to set up a direct flight between San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital and Allentown © Jennifer Huxta/FT

In 2000, Hispanics — a term used for Spanish-speakers, while “Latino” includes those with a heritage in all Latin American countries — accounted for less than a quarter of Allentown’s population. Now the city is majority Hispanic, chiefly Puerto Rican and Dominican. With similar alacrity, the nearby city of Reading turned 70 per cent Hispanic.

On a walk through a heavily Puerto Rican neighbourhood, Matt Tuerk, Allentown’s mayor, was greeted every few yards by residents lounging on the stoops of neighbourhood bodegas. Tuerk, a bicycling mayor who speaks fluent Spanish, is trying to set up a direct flight between San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital, and Allentown. He and Susan Wild, the Democratic congresswoman for the area, recently slept on the floor of San Juan’s airport.

“Hispanics won’t automatically vote for either party — and many won’t vote at all,” Tuerk said. “But you won’t get anywhere unless you meet them halfway.”

The Harris campaign has 15 campaign offices across the state. Trump has just one, in northern Philadelphia.

“Trump doesn’t seem to be making a serious effort,” said Charlie Dent, a former Republican congressman who until 2018 represented the district that includes Allentown. “The focus is still all about Maga [Make America Great Again]. But I’m sceptical that the Maga base will be large enough to win.” Dent adds that Trump is on his own version of “a Grateful Dead tour” — replaying his big hits from the glory years.

Trump may also be drawing confidence from his victory in Pennsylvania in 2016 after a campaign in which he routinely denigrated Hispanic people. He defeated Hillary Clinton in the state by 45,000 votes — a margin of just 0.72 per cent.

The eight years since then have seen rapid population change. Large numbers of Hispanics have arrived to work in the booming logistics hub of the Lehigh Valley, which is close enough to East Coast metropolises like New York and Philadelphia to put 100mn Amazon and Walmart customers one truck shift away. Many affluent New Yorkers, who tend to be Democrats, also relocated to the area during the pandemic.

With its German and Czech-Moravian settler roots, the Lehigh Valley county of Northampton was once described by an eminent historian as the most conservative region in America. Now it is a mosaic. Trump was the first Republican to win Pennsylvania since George HW Bush in 1988. In historic terms, his win may have been a fluke.

Could Trump pull off another shock? Only in spite of himself, said Christopher Borick, a pollster at Allentown’s Muhlenberg College. Borick concedes that polling has not fully caught up with anecdotal evidence of Harris’s lightning switch in momentum. A month ago, polls showed Biden also losing Wisconsin and Michigan, the other two must-win swing states. The surge in enthusiasm for Harris has brought new states, including North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia back into play.

A registered independent, Borick lives in Nazareth, a few miles from Allentown, and one of the most hotly contested townships in America. A reminder of the region’s bible-suffused early days, Nazareth is 10 miles down the road from Bethlehem, a former steel hub. In 2020, Biden won Borick’s ward, with its population of 1,000, by just three votes. This time he and his neighbours have been bombarded by Democratic door-knocking and campaign mail. “The Trump campaign is so far missing in action,” said Borick.

By the conventional calendar, Trump has 80 days to make up for lost ground in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. But in practice, early voting starts in mid-September. Roughly a third of Pennsylvanians are expected to vote by mail. If the 2022 midterm elections are any guide, these will veer strongly Democratic.

Here again, Trump is trampling on his campaign’s priorities. Republicans are trying to educate their voters about the benefits of the mail-in ballot. On the stump, however, Trump often repeats his claim that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election via mail-in fraud. In the next 30 days Republicans must somehow enthuse their foot soldiers to vote early without contradicting their leader’s stolen election theory — and his warning that 2024 will also be rigged.

For true believers, this requires semantic acrobatics. Traditional Republicans can put it more bluntly. “That’s malarkey,” Montero, the lawyer based in Allentown, tells conservative voters when they express suspicion of postal votes. “We can only win by voting.”