BROOKLINE, Pa. – Hundreds of rural Pennsylvania Democratic voters spent the weekend at Demstock. Think Woodstock in 1969, some attendees camped out at the venue, but instead of performances by the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix, it was all about politics. Attendees said they felt isolated in their largely Republican community and hoped to “increase the margins” in a battleground matchup between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
U.S. Sen. John Fetterman and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, who is running for auditor general, wowed the crowd at a “Demstock Dinner” where Fetterman joked about stolen yard signs — a fitting occasion for the many rural Democrats in the room — and called. rural Democrats “unsung heroes”.
“The secret is you,” Fetterman said, adding, “The real power is in the red areas with all of you.”
Fetterman told NBC News that Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walsh, know that winning Pennsylvania results in “rooms like this.”
“You have red-district Dems, and they’re doing hard work, and it’s not necessarily sexy work, but they’re committed,” he said. “They’re true believers, and that’s why you can fill a room like that, because they all believe in the Harris and Waltz ticket.”
It all happened in Jefferson County Trump won About 60 percentage points in 2020. A few years ago, some of the original founders started Demstock PA, a registered political action committee in Pennsylvania that supports rural candidates in local elections and college Democratic caucuses. Now in its sixth year, the event began as a small backyard pig roast, originally called Swinestock, and has grown in importance this election cycle given the state’s slim margins in presidential elections.
Both presidential campaigns have spread across the state, hoping to clear the way to the 270 electoral votes through Pennsylvania. Democrats at the event said they don’t expect to flip red districts for Democrats, but aim to reduce the Trump campaign’s margins in the state.
Those hopes are reflected in the Harris-Walz campaign, which is taking steps to invest in rural voters in Pennsylvania. It has opened 36 coordinated offices across the state, nine of which are in rural districts. It carried Trump by double digits in 2020. The Harris-Walz campaign for Pennsylvania said it has placed about 300 workers in the state.
“This is a campaign that invests in rural organizing,” said Kenyatta, who is on the Harris-Walz national advisory board. “And it sounds small, but sometimes it’s easy to say, ‘You’re in Columbia County.’ I don’t need to buy you signs [literature]. We will not be able to win there.” That is not the purpose of this campaign. They emerge, make critical investments.”
Fetterman said, “They’re not in this business to, say, turn a dark red county blue.” The goal, he added, was to “mix things up” to “soften the kinds of margins that allowed Trump to partially win Pennsylvania.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s Pennsylvania campaign said key issues this election cycle, such as inflation and the border, are “getting real traction” in rural areas.
“Rural Pennsylvanians have an easy choice this November: four more years of historic inflation and an open-borders policy that destroys Pennsylvania communities with crime and drugs, or a return to the prosperity and peace of the Trump administration under the leadership of Kamala Harris,” said Trump’s Pennsylvania representative. spokesperson, Kush Desai. “Kamala’s record and Tim Walz’s blasting of rural America as ‘mostly cows and rocks’ will be an absolutely critical asset to the Harris campaign in losing rural Pennsylvania by a record margin.”
Thin margins defined presidential races in Pennsylvania; Trump previously won 0.7 points in 2016 Joe Biden won Just over 1 point in 2020.
Part of its success in 2016 is attributed to its strong performance in rural areas of the state. In Pennsylvania, Trump won villages and small towns 71%, Hillary Clinton’s 26%; By comparison, Mitt Romney won 59% to 40% for President Barack Obama in 2012. In 2020, Biden narrowed these differences and won 30% of the vote in rural Pennsylvania, compared to Trump’s 69%.
State Sen. Sharif Streit, chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, said a big part of Trump’s 2016 victory was that Democrats “didn’t get their message across to rural Pennsylvania, so we’re determined to do that.”
Street said Democrats have a multi-pronged approach that includes energizing urban bases and suburban voters and making sure “rural residents feel the love and know we’re here for them.”
On the Sunday before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Harris and Walz visited small towns in western Pennsylvania during a bus tour, hitting both Allegheny and Beaver counties.
Trump won Beaver County by about 18 points in 2020. Before Harris rose to the top of the Democratic ticket, the Biden-Harris campaign invested in a coordinated field office there in May. During the bus tour, Harris, Walz and their spouses made phone calls to volunteers in Rochester and stopped at a fire station in Aliquippa.
Democratic officials in Demstock say they all share the same belief: The road to the White House runs through rural Pennsylvania.
Demstock Chairman Phil Heasley told NBC News, “There’s nothing more important than an engaged, rural electorate, especially in Pennsylvania.” “If we don’t get the rural electorate in the middle of the state, the Democrats can’t win.”
Heasley said Demstock was created to bring politicians to areas that typically don’t get as much attention as big cities like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
“We’ve got to make sure we maximize every last margin, because that vote could either be the person who registers here or the person who comes out and decides, ‘You know, I’m energized.’ The vote that determines our election,” he said.
But ruby-red states haven’t deterred rural Democrats from working to narrow the margins.
After a night of dancing, roasting marshmallows and watching fireworks in Demstock, 24-year-old Andrew Muth woke up in a tent in Jefferson County and spent much of Saturday galvanizing voters for the Kenyatta campaign and sharing the latest efforts from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. College Democrats.
“Rural Democrats need to be bold,” Muth told NBC News. “Rural Democrats who grew up in these red areas know that they need to talk to every single voter. You have to knock on every door to get rural Democrats out to vote.”