Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) is emerging as a key campaign surrogate for Vice President Kamala Harris in the closing days of the 2024 presidential election. She hopes to head off President Donald J. Trump’s surging support among blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania, and her campaign believes deploying Fetterman to rally voters in rural Pennsylvania counties will push the Democratic Vice President’s margins higher than President Joe Biden’s during the 2020 election.
Trump’s strong showing in the critical swing state looms large in the mind of the Harris campaign. Despite losing Pennsylvania to Biden in 2020, Trump saw a significant increase in his margins in the state’s more rural counties compared to his 2016 numbers. In rural Somerset County—about an hour outside Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania—Trump carried the vote by 55 points in 2016. He defeated Biden by an even greater margin in the county during the 2020 election.
Hoping to narrow the margin in places like Somerset, the Harris campaign has dispatched Fetterman, the state’s junior Democratic Senator who has sometimes bucked the national party and has populist appeal. Over the final weeks before Election Day, Fetterman will host over a half dozen events across rural Pennsylvania, with an appeal to union voters and legacy Democrats being the primary focus.
Data released by the Teamsters Union in September suggests Trump is winning union households by a two-to-one margin over Harris. The labor union, with over one million members, has declined to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in 28 years.
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