Harris, Trump battle for the biggest of the battlegrounds: 'It's clearly ground zero'

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Harris starts her latest stop in the Keystone State with a conversation with Erie area Black men at a locally owned small business, as part of her efforts to court a group of voters traditionally loyal to the Democratic Party.

The vice president will then headline a rally at the Erie Insurance Arena. Democratic Sen. John Fetterman is also scheduled to speak.

“At the rally, the Vice President will highlight her vision for a New Way Forward, while encouraging Pennsylvanians to vote early or return their mail ballot,” the Harris campaign said.

Erie is a Democratic-dominated city of roughly 94,000 people that’s surrounded by suburban and rural areas with significant numbers of Republican voters. Erie County has long been considered one of the state’s handful of bellwether counties. 

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Trump, who was last in Erie on Sept. 29, is scheduled to hold a town hall at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center and Fairgrounds in Oaks, in suburban Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania, along with Michigan and Wisconsin, are the three Rust Belt states that make up the Democrats’ so-called “Blue Wall.”

The party reliably won all three states for a quarter-century before Trump narrowly captured them in the 2016 election to win the White House.

Four years later, in 2020, Biden carried all three states by razor-thin margins to put them back in the Democrats’ column and defeated Trump.

Mark Harris, a Pittsburgh-based longtime Republican national strategist and ad maker, told Fox News that Pennsylvania is “the one state that it’s hard to see someone losing and then still winning the presidential race.”

Harris, a veteran of multiple GOP presidential campaigns, emphasized that “it’s clearly ground zero.”

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