#Pennsylvania – The Media Pub News (TM)

2020 Election live updates: In campaign’s final weekend, both candidates focus on Pennsylvania

President Trump plans four stops in Pennsylvania on Saturday, and Joe Biden will give a speech in Philadelphia on Sunday.

The President will hold four rallies across Pennsylvania on Saturday and his wife, Melania, will host a fifth event in the swing state, as both the president and his Democratic challenger, Joseph R. Biden Jr., zero in on what could be a linchpin in the race for the White House.

Mr. Trump prevailed in Pennsylvania in 2016 by less than 45,000 votes, and his itinerary on Saturday suggests some of the key demographic and geographic ingredients that he hopes to combine to create another surprise victory.

His first stop is in suburban Bucks County, where Hillary Clinton prevailed in 2016 by less than one percentage point. He will hold two events outside the major media markets, in Reading and in tiny Montoursville (population around 4,400), as he seeks to drive up turnout among the white, working-class and rural voters who overwhelmingly supported him four years ago.

He will also campaign in Butler, in western Pennsylvania, where he hopes his unabashed pro-fracking message holds sway. Melania Trump, meanwhile, will appear in Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania, a historically Democratic region that Mr. Trump flipped into the Republican column in 2016.

The Trumps will hardly have the state to themselves in the last days before Tuesday.

On Sunday, Mr. Biden will deliver one of his final speeches of the campaign in Philadelphia, the state’s biggest media market. And on Monday, both Mr. Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, will “fan out across all four corners of the state” with their spouses on the last full day of campaigning before voters head to the polls, according to the Biden campaign.

Mr. Biden, who represented neighboring Delaware in the Senate for decades, has long considered Pennsylvania something of a second home state, given the media market overlap and his own often-cited roots in Scranton, where he was born. He delivered his campaign kickoff speech in Philadelphia in May 2019; coming full circle, his Sunday speech, which his campaign says will be about “bringing Americans together to address the crises facing the country,” will occur in the same city.

Mr. Trump will return to Pennsylvania on Monday for an event near Scranton, with other stops in North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan.

In 2016, Mr. Trump flipped three Rust Belt states that had been reliably Democratic by fewer than 80,000 votes in total: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. And while polls have him trailing Mr. Biden in all three states, Pennsylvania has been the least Democratic-leaning in surveys this year, and its 20 Electoral College votes make it the biggest prize of the three.

— Shane Goldmacher

— NYT: Top Stories

Donald Trump made them furious, and organized. Now is the big test.

For a group of women in western Pennsylvania, 2016 was a shock and a reason to get politically involved for the first time. “Forget about taking no for an answer, they’re not even asking for permission.”

Carolyn Gibbs puts on the striped pants first, then the striped jacket. The hat is the final touch. That’s if it’s an Uncle Sam day. For Statue of Liberty, it’s a mint green dress, a foam halo and a political sign, usually, standing in as the torch.

Before Donald Trump became president, Ms. Gibbs, 59, rarely dressed up for Halloween, only occasionally for a costume party.

But for the better part of four years, she has shown up to rallies in shopping centers of suburban Pittsburgh in elaborate costumes, ready for the role of playful protester.

“I’m willing to make a fool of myself for democracy,” is how she often puts it.

Yet for all her playfulness — and it is boundless — Ms. Gibbs is driven by a sense of anger and residual shock. How could so many of her neighbors in western Pennsylvania vote for a man she saw as a threat? She still finds herself stuck on the question.

“I had begun to think we were including and serving everybody in this country,” Ms. Gibbs said. “But that’s totally not true anymore.”

For the past four years, Ms. Gibbs and half a dozen women (along with one man) have poured countless hours into Progress PA, a political group they created to get Democratic candidates elected in western Pennsylvania, a part of the state that helped fuel Mr. Trump’s victory last time. Joseph R. Biden Jr. is counting on voters like them — older, suburban dwellers — to win back Pennsylvania, where polls show him ahead. But their work is less about their enthusiasm for the former vice president than their revulsion at the current occupant of the White House.

— New York Times: Top Stories