250 years later, it all boils down to where it all began: Pennsylvania
Today in Pennsylvania, men and women, Whites and Blacks and Hispanics and Asian-Americans, will shape the practice of American democracy
WASHINGTON: When Donald Trump flipped Pennsylvania in 2016, he delivered a shock to the Democrats. The party had won the electoral college votes from the state for close to three decades in a row, before the state turned against Hillary Clinton and delivered Trump a win that perhaps even he had not anticipated. The margin, however, was telling - out of the total 6.1 million votes cast, Trump won the state by less than 45,000 votes.
When Joe Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020, he wrested back the state where he had spent his childhood; Biden refers to both Pennsylvania’s Scranton and Delaware’s Wilmington as home. It was a state where the veteran former Senator and vice president’s connect with the White working class played well, and where Biden had set up a center after his stint as VP at the University of Pennsylvania. The state’s electoral college votes returned to Democrats. The margin, again, was telling — out of the total 6.9 million votes cast, Biden won the state by just over 80,000 votes. Follow US election LIVE updates here.
And when Kamala Harris had to decide where to spend the last day of her campaign this week, she narrowed down on the state which she knows is almost indispensable for her pathway to 270 votes in the electoral college. On Monday, in a span of 12 hours, Harris visited Scranton, Allentown, and Pittsburgh before ending her campaign with a mass rally in the historic city of Philadelphia. Her rival, Trump, too made a stop in the state to make a final pitch to voters.
It is perhaps only historically apt that the battle for the very future of American constitutionalism and democracy and the imagination of what the US should represent in the world — and make no mistake, all of this is at stake in this election — is being fought in the state where it all began.
The next American president will preside over the 250th anniversary celebrations of the Declaration of Independence, which was adopted on July 4, 1776, by delegates at the Second Continental Congress, and serves as a foundational document of American nationhood. Guess where it was adopted: Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia.
The 47th American president will also be in the White House during the 240th anniversary of the drafting of the US Constitution, written in 1787, which doesn’t just serve as the basis for governing America but has been a model for democracies elsewhere, despite its egregious foundational contradiction of recognising both equality of men but treating a Black as three-fifth of a person and disregarding women altogether. Guess where it was written: Philadelphia’s Independence Day Hall in Pennsylvania.
The US has come a long way from those smoke-filled rooms where White men came together to determine the architecture of American democracy in Pennsylvania, one of the original thirteen states of the Union.
Today, in Pennsylvania’s cities and towns and rural counties, men and women, Whites and Blacks and Hispanics and Asian-Americans, will shape the practice of American democracy by choosing between a Black woman of Indian heritage and a White businessman turned politician.
For Harris, the best case rests on sweeping all the urban centres and suburbs by margins that offset what will be Trump’s sweep across rural America, in what is a fundamental geographical divide in the state. For Harris, the best case represents winning an overwhelming number of women votes in the state, to offset what does appear to be an across-the-board increase in votes of men for Trump, in what is emerging as a fundamental gender divide in the state and the country.
For Harris, the best case represents winning the majority of votes of all minority communities, to ensure that Trump’s inroads among Blacks and Hispanics in particular remain limited, in what remains a fundamental racial divide in the state. For Harris, the best case represents keeping a big fraction of the working class votes that Biden won in the state that depends on industry and fracking, to offset Trump’s clear inroads in this very constituency that gave him the 2016 win, in what represents a class divide in the state. And for Harris, the best case represents winning not just a majority of votes of college graduates but also making inroads among those who didn’t go to college and reducing Trump’s lead in what has become his natural constituency, in what is the fundamental educational divide in the state.
For Trump, the best case represents keeping Harris’s advantages on all these fronts to the minimum while consolidating his Republican voters - White, men, non-college educated, working class — and retaining the support of newer constituencies — Black and Hispanic men.
It is in Erie County and Northampton County and Lehigh Valley, in and around Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, in Allegheny County and Bucks County, and countless such counties and precincts of Pennsylvania that the future of America will be decided, as history comes a full circle.