It will all come down to the swing states. In Pennsylvania—where nearly a million people had already voted as of Monday—the Harris campaign has 50 coordinated offices, nearly 400 staff on the ground, and thousands of people knocking on doors. This is "the largest and most sophisticated operation in Pennsylvania history," according to Harris's national campaign manager. But is this campaign as special as her team insists? Micah Sifry warns that it might not be, laying out three reasons why the Harris ground game may not be up to the task. (Luckily, Sifry writes, "the Trump-Vance get-out-the-vote operation, which has been largely outsourced to independent groups, is a complete mess.")
Meanwhile, Van Gosse of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, is having flashbacks to 2016 and 2020. While Biden won 70 percent of the college town of Lewisburg in the last election, its county, Union, has a "town-versus-country divide," which one could say of the state as a whole—though that doesn't mean central Pennsylvania is homogeneous. Canvassing across Union left Gosse with a "deep appreciation for the Democratic base, underneath the party's layers of consultants, bureaucrats, fundraisers, pundits, and elected officials feeding at the trough of institutional power." His guess on who wins the state is as good as anyone's: The most Gosse hopes for is that in his town, "everyone opposed to Trump gets to the polls." But, he concludes, "no one is backing down."
Nationwide, Faith Branch writes that Harris is using the "KHive" to make inroads with "the young, online, and restless." Some younger people, of course, remain suspicious of her—particularly regarding her potential Israel-Palestine policy. But even these young Harris skeptics would probably agree that there is nobody worse than Trump and the GOP, many of whose members, Ben Schwartz writes, can't stop talking about killing pets.
–Alana Pockros
Engagement Editor, The Nation
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