MERCER, Pa. — Mercer County has been solid Trump country for the past two elections
Donald Trump won this area in rural northwest Pennsylvania by 25 percentage points in 2016, and by 26 points in 2020.
Yet Democrats here think they’ve got what it takes to trim those margins and play a big role in keeping Pennsylvania blue. In conversations with Democratic activists and volunteers, many noted how they’ve had more on-the-ground support this time around.
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On the one hand, they believe they’ve made inroads with voters who are now quietly backing Harris, or with soft Republicans who have reached their end point with Trump. On the other, they’ve never had so much luck in the Trump era in getting their neighbors to put up yard signs for a Democratic presidential nominee as they have this fall.
“The fear is gone,” Judy Hines, the Mercer County Democratic Party chair, told NBC News.
Traveling through rural Pennsylvania, particularly in the northwest, there’s little doubt of Trump’s dominance. Trump signs are everywhere, though there is a noticeable amount of signage for Vice President Kamala Harris too. But national and state Democrats have placed renewed emphasis on turning out the vote in these sorts of rural areas, especially in Pennsylvania, as there are signs the former president could eat into the Democratic advantage in Philadelphia.
This strategy has resulted in trips to rural Pennsylvania from both Harris, who made a stop in Johnstown in September, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, as well as a bevy of visits from prominent Democratic surrogates.
“For a long time, national Democrats just kind of wrote those communities off and ignored them,” Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro said. “She’s showing up, and we appreciate that. And I think those communities, even though we’re a big state, they’re still retail areas. And we got to have candidates show up there. We got to make sure that they are getting the chance to meet local folks, and local folks ask them questions, kind of kick the tires a little bit.”
Chief among the surrogates is Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who has campaigned in 11 red counties in western Pennsylvania alone, including Mercer. Democrats and Republicans in the state pointed to Fetterman’s effort as notable, even if Republicans doubted it would make much of a difference in the presidential race.
In an interview, Fetterman explained his rural campaign schedule by saying he’s “always been committed” to leaving no stone unturned in the state, though he added that “any credit” for gains in rural parts of the state belongs to “all of these small red-county Dems, because those are the kinds of heroes throughout all of this.”
In 2022, Fetterman and Shapiro both pushed Democrats in red counties to put up their yard signs as a signal to others that it was acceptable to back the party’s candidates. In Mercer County, both were able to cut into Republican margins, as Fetterman lost by 22 points and Shapiro lost by 18 — both an improvement over Trump’s results two years prior.
But Republicans aren’t worried about any such rural slippage this time around. They believe that anyone who would have abandoned Trump after previously voting for him already did so before the 2020 vote.
They also see an especially receptive audience to Trump’s pitch about the dangers of large-scale immigration and rising prices. And they’ve been encouraged by voter registration and early vote trends in places like Mercer County, where Republicans have outvoted Democrats ahead of Election Day while bolstering their voter registration numbers.
State Rep. Josh Kail, who heads the Republican state House campaign committee, told NBC News that Democrats had a “smart strategy” even if he doubted it would work.
“But just showing up isn’t going to do it,” he added. “You have to have an appeal. You have to have a message that’s going to resonate. And I just don’t see it.”
A Trump campaign official said the Democratic rural outreach effort amounts to nothing more than “a nice bunch of nice headlines and some earned media.”
“Just because [rural voters] get a door-knock or a piece of mail or see 50 million TV ads, it’s not like someone’s going to say, ‘Oh, you know what? Maybe I’m OK with [a wave of undocumented immigration]. Or maybe I’m OK with inflation,’” this person said. “That’s not how this works.”
‘Beating a dead horse’
Just down the road from Mercer in neighboring Lawrence County, a bus filled with Trump surrogates rolled through in late October to speak to a crowd of roughly 100 supporters. The message was hammered home over and over: vote early.
At one point, David Bossie, a Republican National Committee member from Maryland who was a top official on Trump’s 2016 campaign, told attendees who said they had not yet voted: “Shame on you!”
Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official and key ally, pushed voters to have “uncomfortable” conversations with acquaintances who might not be voting for Trump, adding that whether or not Trump wins could come down to Lawrence County.
When it was her turn to speak, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem asked the crowd: “How many of you could think of somebody right now that you know that isn’t going to vote for President Trump?”
Nearly everyone in attendance raised their hand.
Ahead of that event, Joel D’Alessandro, a Trump supporter from neighboring Beaver County, said he sees Republicans more involved and having a “heightened sense of civic engagement” than in past cycles. But he thinks ultimately flipping any votes at this stage of the game is virtually impossible, particularly with how inundated Pennsylvania has been, receiving the most spending on behalf of both major-party candidates as well as the most visits from each.
“I would challenge anybody to find an undecided vote,” he said, adding: “Short of one of the candidates committing a federal crime in public, out in the open — that might not even — but short of murder on camera by one of them, it’s like they’re [dug in]. I don’t know any undecideds. At this point, why bother? It’s beating a dead horse.”
D’Alessandro said he had backed Democrats until 2006 and recalled voting for Bill Clinton. Seeking to reach voters like D’Alessandro, Democrats dispatched Clinton to travel through western Pennsylvania last week, where the former president made stops in Johnstown, Greensburg and Butler — all in red counties.
During his stop in Johnstown, Clinton promoted Harris’ promise to make “explicit outreach to people who don’t even agree with her,” discussed falling birth rates and how rising home prices in Nevada explained rising housing costs nationwide. He lambasted Trump’s economic plan as costing far more than Harris’ in part because he would be giving wealthy Americans — “including me,” he noted — a substantial tax cut.
“I hate the idea of doing that,” he said.
He also spoke on immigration, promoting the bipartisan effort Harris and President Joe Biden agreed to with Republicans in an effort to solve some of those issues.
“Donald Trump said you can’t do that. ‘My whole deal is based on division. I need problems. I don’t need solutions. I need people torn up and upset,’” Clinton said, channeling Trump.
Standing on the side of his rally, a man approached the railing and expressed awe at a president standing in the middle of his small town.
“Amazing seeing a president standing there,” the man said before leaving. “That’s crazy.”
But on immigration, Democratic efforts to pin blame on Trump for the failure of the bipartisan border bill have fallen flat. In Mercer County, at a roundtable discussion with more than a half-dozen Democratic activists and volunteers, each person offered the same answer when asked if that pitch was breaking through: “No.”
“Doesn’t even ring a bell,” one said of the response they get when raising the episode.
‘Quietly getting it done’
Yet even as some interactions have been dispiriting, these Democrats haven’t lost hope. Charles Baldoff, a veteran and a Democratic activist in the county, recalled almost being run over in a parking lot as he and others were promoting the party’s candidates. At the same time, though, he said he hasn’t been able to keep up with demand for signs that read “Veterans for Harris.”
“I feel a lot better than I did last time,” he said.
Jennifer Valenti, a Democratic activist in Mercer County, became involved in this cycle after the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and has shared her story of being sexually assaulted as a preteen and receiving an abortion after learning she was pregnant months later. She said her conversations around abortion rights have been particularly impactful in her immediate circle, which does include some Republicans.
“I think a lot of the Democrats, we’re looking at both sides,” she said. “We’re looking at Trump’s policies, we’re looking at her policies, and we’re saying it’s not just because she’s a woman or just because she’s Black, it’s because of her policies.”
Mercer County went Democratic in all but one presidential election between 1976 and 2000, but hasn’t been carried by a Democratic nominee in the years since. (Barack Obama came close in 2008 and 2012.)
Ginny Richardson, the Mercer County GOP chair, gave a simple “no” when asked if she was concerned Democrats may be able to trim Trump’s margins there. She said that on the Republican side as well, it’s been much easier to recruit volunteers for local campaign work than it had been in recent cycles. And she noted Republicans had reversed Democrats’ voter registration edge over the past three decades.
“The country people will put Trump in,” she said. “Even though he won so big last time, we want to win even bigger this time.”
At the roundtable discussion, David Henderson, a Mercer County Democrat, predicted that for all the Republican chest-thumping about the election in his community, the right would be in for a shellacking on Tuesday.
“They’re going to lose it,” he said. “We’re quietly getting it done. I think it’s going to be a landslide in Pennsylvania and around the country. We’ve been quiet because we know that we raise all kinds of hell for Democrats, that we’re just going to bring in a bad light into an election. There’s enough bad in this election. There’s enough hate in the election, and if they’re going to bark at us, bark away. But in the end, we’re going to get it done.”
