Living at the center of the political hurricane of 2024

I have the strange privilege and burden of living in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. This city is not only in a swing state, but also in one of the swingiest regions. Barack Obama won Luzerne County by about five percentage points in 2012, then Donald Trump won by nearly 20 percentage points in 2016, and then Joe Biden narrowed that lead to about 14 percentage points.

This is undoubtedly why both Trump and Kamala Harris have visited Wilkes-Barre in recent weeks, even though the town has a modest population of about 45,000. Trump appeared at a local arena last month (in neighboring Wilkes-Barre Township, to be exact) and Harris last week at Wilkes University, a private school right in the middle of downtown. This is also why my wife and I have received a flood of mail from both campaigns. A friend down the street – who is not a Republican – has been getting pro-Trump mail literally every day for weeks.

I wasn't able to go to the Trump rally, where he went on one of his typical, confused tirades that turned at least one of his supporters against him. But I did make it to the Harris rally to test the mood among Harris supporters and see how her campaign is shaping up.

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As I approached the security checkpoint on Friday afternoon, I encountered a handful of pro-Palestinian protesters with drums and megaphones. While I fully support their cause, their decision to insult the rally attendees by shouting that Harris supports genocide and that by supporting her they are doing the same, did not seem to be intended to garner support or even sympathy for the Palestinians. It felt more like trolling than anything else. (I unfortunately did not interview them as I was too late.)

The rally attendees I asked about Gaza also sided with the Palestinians and thought Kamala agreed with them. “This war has to stop everywhere,” said Martha Ellis, a black resident of Wilkes-Barre. “It's senseless.” “I agree with Kamala: We need a two-state solution,” added her friend Beverly Astwood, also black.

Of course, her support for a ceasefire and a two-state solution is a comfortable position for Harris, who is not yet president and has little influence on American foreign policy, let alone Israeli policy. She can advocate for the obviously right solution without having the responsibility to implement it. But for now, the friends of the Gazan people can only offer hope.

Wilkes-Barre is not only located in a swing state, but also in one of the swingiest regions.

For many attendees, abortion was the top priority. “My main issue is reproductive rights,” said Kellie Smith, who drove two and a half hours from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with her mother, Kathie. Others praised Harris' family policies. President Biden's reinstatement of the child tax credit (which for the first time included the poorest) “is what pro-life is all about,” joked Jan Robinson of neighboring Pittston. “That was the biggest reduction in child poverty and hunger in years,” said Dave Harvey, who traveled from Honesdale wearing a “White Dudes for Harris” cap. “The kids were fed, man.”

The event was well organized. Entry was smooth; volunteers were on hand with signs, water bottles, and snacks; and behind and to the side of the lectern there were large letters spelling out “KAMALA” for the cameras to see. I mention this last part because at Trump events this basic aspect of the prep work has somehow been botched.

Opening acts included local mayor George Brown, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and Senator Bob Casey, whose re-election this year is crucial for Democrats to keep control of the Senate. By far the best speaker was Shapiro, despite his worn-out voice and the fact that he sounds eerily like a 51-year-old white guy trying to imitate Barack Obama (because, let's be honest, that's what he is). He quickly developed an easy rapport with the crowd and easily improvised several applause lines, demonstrating Obama's talent for building and releasing the crowd's energy. His speech also had a nice theme around freedom, ending with a cheesy anecdote about Ben Franklin that went down well.

The second to last speaker was a Scranton nurse named Marygrace Vadala, which made for an interesting summary of one of Harris' campaign strategies. When Vadala mentioned that she had been a lifelong Republican, boos broke out. But these were gradually drowned out by cheers and applause when she clarified that she was supporting Harris this time. By the end of her speech, when she talked about her mother, another Trump supporter, dying of COVID-19 during the pandemic because Trump had grossly botched the response, she had the full sympathy of the crowd.

Her speech illustrated Harris's way of dealing with conservative supporters. After all, neither Vadala nor Dick Cheney make political demands in return for their votes. Republicans are welcome on the anti-Trump bus, as long as they don't think they have the right to drive it.

After all that, Harris' speech was something of an anticlimax. It lasted only about 20 minutes, and despite the almost hysterical cheering when she entered, it failed to connect Shapiro with the crowd. One problem was that the speech was a bit unfocused. In one section, she recited her accomplishments as a prosecutor, including her crackdown on Mexican drug traffickers, which sounded a bit bland. Then she went into a grab bag of proposed policies that ranged from pretty silly (a $50,000 tax deduction for new small businesses) to pretty good (help build more housing in cities) to very good (a massive expansion of federal child benefits).

The proposal to create better career opportunities beyond the traditional four-year college degree through technical programs or vocational training resonated particularly well with the Wilkes-Barre audience, given the city's history of job and population losses. But overall, the politics portion still felt like a laundry list and didn't generate much enthusiasm, perhaps because Harris's political theme of “opportunity” is one of the oldest cliches in the book.

The crowd's energy returned when Harris sharply criticized Trump on the abortion issue, pointing out that “more than 20 states have abortion bans, many with no exceptions for rape or incest,” which drew thunderous boos. The following section, in which she promised to restore freedoms that Trump and the conservative movement had restricted, such as voting rights, LGBT rights, union rights and the “freedom to be safe from gun violence,” went down well.

The proposal to create better career opportunities through technical courses or vocational training beyond the traditional four-year university degree was particularly well received.

In fairness to Harris, part of her oratorical problem was that she was repeatedly interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters who continued to shout even after she responded to them by saying, “Now is the time to negotiate a hostage deal and a ceasefire. I—we—have been working around the clock to get this done.” But she didn’t improvise other responses on the fly, nor did she use any of the classic comedian techniques for dealing with hecklers, nor did she try to tie the disruption to one of her themes. After the initial back-and-forth, she stuck strictly to her prepared remarks, speaking slurred over the shouting as her security personnel pushed the protesters out. As my colleague Robert Kuttner notes, we saw a similar performance during the debate, with Harris launching numerous well-prepared and effective attacks on Trump but mostly failing to strike when Trump made himself vulnerable with an insane statement.

This seems to be the approach the Harris campaign has settled on. Like the Clinton campaign in 2016, it is conservative with a small C in the sense that it has agreed on a strategy and is sticking to it. Unlike the Clinton campaign, this strategy seems much more likely to work. Harris has a political instinct for almost everyone in the Democratic coalition (except the Cheneys), even if they don't make a coherent whole when put together. And her strongest attack on Trump – that he is responsible for the Dobbs decision and would ban abortion nationwide if he could – was not available to Clinton in 2016. Harris could perhaps do with loosening up a bit on the campaign trail, but that carries its own risks. Overall, I can't find much fault with the strategy.

So that's what it's like when your vote for president counts in this country, and I have to say, I'm not a fan of it. It's practically for the Outlook and I that presidential politics focuses so much attention on the random little town I happen to live in. But it is simply a crime against democracy for Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania, of all places, is getting so much attention. The Electoral College means that only about half a dozen states matter in presidential elections, while almost all other states can be safely ignored – and if the polls are to be believed, Pennsylvania is the next big winner. My vote counts at least a thousand times more than the people of Wyoming, California or Kentucky. Not only is that wrong, it undermines the legitimacy of our entire constitutional structure. It is dangerous when perhaps 80 percent of Americans are effectively disenfranchised in presidential elections.

And frankly, it's pretty annoying for those of us who live where our votes count. Every campaign rally means several streets are closed by police for hours; every resident is inundated with political emails, almost all of which go straight into the trash; every cell phone is constantly ringing and beeping with pollsters, fundraisers, and campaign communications; and every email inbox is filled with political garbage on a daily basis. Personally, I would like to have exactly the same voting rights as the other 240 million eligible voters. That seems to be the bare minimum for America to claim that power depends on the consent of the governed.