Battleground Pennsylvania: eve of the election in the crucial swing state that could turn explosive

It was Saturday and the crowd was getting restless. Directions hadn’t been clear, so many had ended up tramping a few miles round the boundary of the small airport in Reading, Pennsylvania, just to get in. People weren’t sure when it was supposed to start – but they were sure he was late and the weather was cold. Still, what looked like thousands waited and when Air Force One swept down they cheered. Donald Trump arrived to Macho Man, the smash hit from Village People, which blared out before switching to God Bless the USA as Trump himself came out to talk.

Meanwhile, in nearby Philadelphia, Black Lives Matters protesters were marching to protest the police shooting of another black man, Walter Wallace Jr, earlier last week. Thankfully, the protests remained peaceful. Earlier demonstrations had descended into riots and looting, leaving thirty police officers injured. Still, locals, while unequivocal in their condemnation of the riots, had little truck with Trump who was busy proclaiming himself a champion of “law and order” just 60 miles away.

Welcome to the State that in 2016 gave the election to Trump by just 44,292 votes, and which will likely be the tipping point battleground this year.

In many ways the state seems to be a microcosm of the rest of the country. Culturally and geographically, it encompasses the East Coast, the mid-West, and even a touch of the South in its Appalachian areas. Even before 2016, this reliably Democratic state had a conservative streak in the rural stretch running through the heart of the state. As James Carville, Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign manager, once pithily put it: “Between Paoli and Penn Hills, Pennsylvania is Alabama without the blacks.”

Since then, like in the rest of the country, the urban-rural gap seems only to have widened. The cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with their booming high-tech knowledge economies stand alongside a multitude of hollowed out Rust Belt towns.

The latter have trended red, flipping to give Trump the election in 2016. The former have stayed blue off the back of young and minority voters. If the Democrats want to win this year, it will mean adding the increasingly socially liberal suburbs to their coalition of voters – a group which they started to win in 2018.

Indeed, heading into the election, Carville himself seemed bullish when I spoke to him on the phone: “Democrats are wetting the bed. The only people who are going into a contest thinking they’re going to lose is this damn party.” Still, even he admitted another upset was not out of the realms of possibility.

Pennsylvania is also shaping up to be at the centre of a more worrying national trend in this election: fights over ballot counting. Vitally, most of the 2.4 million ballots that have been cast by mail, about 40% of 2016 total turnout, are kept separately and counted after in-person votes, which are expected to slant towards the Republicans.

The potential for chaos is clear. Trump has spent months attacking mail-in ballots as a source of fraud. When he falsely claimed at his rally in Reading that experts were saying it was necessary to allow a margin of at least 5% for cheating, a wave of angry jeers filled the crowd. If rumours that Trump plans to declare victory pre-emptively if he has a big early lead in key states prove to be true, then this would surely add fuel to the fire.

There is the potential for Supreme Court adjudication. The Court has struck down Republican efforts to prevent mail-in ballots that arrive after 3 November, but there might be scope to revisit the matter post-election.

Still, it is hard to imagine Democrats accepting this. Biden, who held a car rally on Philadelphia on Sunday, devoted much of his speech to instructing citizens to make sure their vote is counted – and defying Trump to stop this from happening.

Indeed, almost everyone I spoke to here – Democrat and Republican alike – seems to feel something explosive might be in the offing.

As Trump accused Democrats of plotting to steal the election at his Reading rally, crowd-members next to me muttered that they would take to the streets if that happened – and the whole crowd let out an almighty roar when Trump declared the importance of gun rights.

In a city that saw riots just days ago, the Philadelphia residents I spoke to didn’t find it hard to imagine their recurrence.  

How seriously this needs to be taken is unclear. There has always been an element of hysteria in US politics. It’s all part of the performance, the ritual. Yet, even Carville, so robustly convinced of an incoming Democratic victory, admitted to being worried about this. As he saw it, Trump would want to secure an exit that left him immune from attempted prosecutions: “Trump’s biggest card is that he can incite violence, and he’s utterly without conscience so he’d do it.”

In some ways it is symbolically fitting that an election that increasingly feels existential might be settled in Pennsylvania. It was in Philadelphia that the US constitution took shape, and the tensions that would define the new nation emerged. In what been the first state to abolish slavery delegates agreed to accommodate the Southern States and not push for its universal abolition, cementing the racial divide at the founding of the new American Republic. A little over a decade later, the State was the home of the Whiskey Rebellion, where the libertarian, anti-authority sensibilities of the revolution that were still strong in rural areas and ran up against the demands of the new, more urban-centred Federal Government.

Now as the old tensions bubble to the surface once more, there is unease. One way or another, things look likely to come to a head in Pennsylvania once again in 2020.

Joseph Rachman is reporting from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania