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Harris campaign sees its path to victory in Pennsylvania running through the suburbs

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Harris campaign sees its path to victory in Pennsylvania running through the suburbs


Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign laid out what it sees as her path to victory in Pennsylvania in a memo shared exclusively with NBC News ahead of Monday night’s rally in bellwether Erie County.

The Harris team pointed to polls showing Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, having made gains in the battleground state’s suburbs — which it dubbed “our own mini ‘blue wall’” in Pennsylvania — compared with President Joe Biden’s 2020 performance there.

The campaign also emphasized that a win involves boosting its popularity among educated suburbanites, including those who have voted for Republicans in recent elections. Nearly 160,000 voters in the state cast ballots for former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in the GOP presidential primary this year — with her numbers proving stronger among suburban voters — even after she had already dropped out of the race against former President Donald Trump.

“The Harris campaign’s path to win Pennsylvania capitalizes on Trump’s unprecedented weakness in the suburbs,” reads the memo, which also highlighted the campaign’s focus on Haley voters. “We have flipped the suburbs from red to blue since Trump won them in 2020, and we have also grown our support with women and tripled our support among white college educated voters in the state.”

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The campaign cited surveys last month from The Philadelphia Inquirer/The New York Times/Siena College and Marist College that both showed Harris up 6 percentage points over Trump in the suburbs — a notable improvement from Trump’s 3-point victory over Biden among suburban Pennsylvanians in 2020, as exit polls showed. (The results in both of the surveys last month fell within their margins of error.)

Recent surveys have found the overall race in Pennsylvania to be within the margin of error for polls, with a survey from Quinnipiac University this month finding Harris up 3 points, an Inquirer/Times/Siena survey finding her up 4 points and The Wall Street Journal having Trump up 1 point.

It’s the most sought-after battleground on the map, offering the most Electoral College votes among the hotly contested states, and it is the most frequent campaign destination for both Harris and Trump.

Trump’s “weakness in the suburbs means that for him to actually win, he has to double and triple down on his base in the reddest counties in the state,” said Brendan McPhillips, a senior adviser to Harris’ Pennsylvania campaign. “And so we are going on offense and going to places where he thinks he has a strength and competing.”

The campaign highlighted events that Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have held in red counties like Johnstown, Lancaster and Rochester. It also detailed investments made in red parts of the state to “cut margins and stop Trump’s only hope of victory,” noting that 16 of its 50 statewide campaign offices are in counties Trump won by more than 10 points in 2020.

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Recent presidential elections in Pennsylvania have been exceptionally close. Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by just over 1 point. In 2016, Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by an even slimmer margin.

“With most polls showing this to be a margin of error race, we are also going on offense with rural voters to cut into Trump’s margins — a critical advantage as Trump’s team lacks the ground game capacity to conduct persuasion and mobilization campaigns simultaneously,” the Harris campaign memo reads.

McPhillips said improving on Biden’s margins in those counties by just 1 to 2 points would effectively cut off Trump’s path to flipping the state red.

“We’re eating into his margins in a way that cannot sustain a victory,” he said. “And that is how we’re going to beat him, and it’s how we’re able to play offense on so many fronts.”

The campaign highlighted that as of Sunday it had knocked on more than 1 million doors across the state, including 250,000 over the weekend, since Harris replaced Biden atop the Democratic ticket. It also referred to its 50 offices and 450 on-the-ground staff members.

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Harris has so far spent far more time in the western part of the state, including rural areas, than she has in the Philadelphia market, which McPhillips said is partly to help introduce her to voters who may be less familiar with her.

For Trump, billionaire mogul Elon Musk ramped up his political engagement in the state this month through his America PAC, which is working to turn out the vote for Trump.

McPhillips dismissed the potential impact of that effort.

“They can’t scale up to the level that we’re at,” he said. “Even with Elon Musk’s money, you can’t spend enough money to scale up an operation to match ours. It’s too late. You needed to start in March, February, January, and they’ve just been phoning it in for so long. It’s going to be close, for sure. We’ve always been planning for it to be so. But that planning manifests itself in the fact that we actually had a plan, not a concept of one.”

The Trump campaign said the Harris campaign is papering over a problem it faces in Pennsylvania cities — particularly Philadelphia, the most vote-rich locale for Democrats in the state.

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“They can point to the suburbs, but they’re losing ground in places like Philadelphia,” a Trump campaign official said. “It’s exactly why [former President Barack] Obama was just pleading to African American men to vote for her. They’ve sounded the alarms, and they know they’re losing.”

The Trump campaign also pointed to Republicans’ having significantly cut into the Democratic voter registration advantage in the state while flipping Bucks, Luzerne and Beaver counties to Republican registration edges. It further highlighted reports that working-class voters in Philadelphia have embraced Trump.

Kush Desai, the Trump campaign’s Pennsylvania spokesperson, highlighted Obama’s visit as a sign the Harris team was scrambling. “An Obama visit isn’t going to convince Pennsylvanians to vote for another four years of open borders, rising prices, and disaster at home and abroad,” Desai said in a statement.

In its memo, the Harris campaign said it believes it will be able to “at least match” Biden’s support in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia in his victory in those cities four years ago. It went into greater detail about its efforts to reach Black voters in the state, including the staff members it has dedicated to outreach and engagement and its events focused on Black voters.

Last week, Obama offered unscripted remarks during a Pittsburgh campaign stop in which he said his understanding of the race is that “we have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running. … [T]hat seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.”

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Seeking to speak directly to Black men, he pushed for undecideds to get behind Harris, saying her record deserves their support.

“This is excellence on display, and it needs to be rewarded,” Obama said.

State Sen. Vincent Hughes told NBC News he could “understand the frustration” Obama expressed.

“Maybe the tone should have been a little bit different,” he said. “But let’s be real clear about this. Let’s get to the substance of what he said. There’s nothing in Donald Trump’s background, career, anything that should lead any citizen, let alone Black men, to vote for him. He’s not a successful businessman. … He was sued for discrimination in housing.”

Hughes said the Harris campaign is going to hit its targets among both Black men and voters in Philadelphia, adding that he has seen a flood of campaign activity there recently that has outpaced what Democrats were doing in 2020 during the worst of the Covid pandemic.

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“It’s going in the right way for the vice president,” he said. “Look, for a woman and for a Black woman, it’s always harder. It’s not fair, it’s not right, but it’s always harder. Maybe if we break through with this election, we can finally smash that glass ceiling and not make it so hard for the next one.”



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Pennsylvania State Police investigating incident in Salisbury Township

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Pennsylvania State Police investigating incident in Salisbury Township


Pennsylvania State Police is investigating an incident in Salisbury Township on Saturday.

Lancaster County dispatch confirmed that troopers were called to the 4900 block of Strasburg Road for an incident that was reported around 11 a.m.

Fire and EMS was called to the area but have since been cleared, dispatch said.

This is a developing story. CBS 21 is working to learn more.

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What’s old is new again in Pennsylvania as the Penguins and Flyers renew a long-simmering rivalry

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What’s old is new again in Pennsylvania as the Penguins and Flyers renew a long-simmering rivalry


PITTSBURGH, Pa. — Sidney Crosby would not take the bait, even though the smile on his face and the gleam in his eye hinted that maybe the Pittsburgh Penguins captain kind of wanted to.

Told that Philadelphia Flyers coach Rick Tocchet – an assistant with the Penguins when Pittsburgh won back-to-back Stanley Cups in 2016 and 2017 – knew his current team was going to have to “get after” Crosby and longtime running mates Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang when the cross-state rivals open their first-round series on Saturday night, Crosby just grinned.

“I mean, to be expected, what else can you expect me to say?” the 38-year-old future Hall of Famer said with a small laugh. “We’re all out there competing. We all are after the same thing. That’s how it works.”

Technically, that’s how it always seems to work whenever the Flyers and Penguins get together, regardless of circumstance. Things only figure to be ramped up considerably during the eighth – and perhaps most unlikely – playoff meeting between two teams separated by 300 miles geographically and considerably more in terms of postseason success.

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The three Cups that Crosby has won during his 21-year career are one more than the Flyers have in the franchise’s nearly six-decade history, and yes some are still keeping track of Philadelphia’s long nuclear winter since its last championships.

The chances of either club being the last one standing when NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman hands the Cup to the victors in early June are slim. Oddsmakers put the resurgent Penguins in the middle of the pack to win it all, while the Flyers – who needed a 14-4-1 sprint to the finish to return to the postseason for the first time since 2020 – are among the longest shots in the 16-team field.

Not that any of that will matter when the puck is dropped and the venom that has long defined the contentious relationship between the clubs bubbles back up to the surface.

That venom on Philadelphia’s side has long been targeted at Crosby, who has beaten the Flyers three times in four playoff meetings, with the one loss coming during a frantic six-game series in 2012. Almost all the faces from those teams are gone.

Except, of course, for perhaps the most important one. Crosby, the only player in NHL history to average a point a game in 21 straight years, remains a threat and highly motivated by the return to the playoffs following a three-year absence.

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“We have a ton of respect for Sid,” Tocchet said. “He’s an unbelievable person and player. But we’ve got to get him in the ditches right? We’ve got to make it hard on him.”

A long-awaited debut

Rasmus Ristolainen’s agonizing wait to feel the vibe of playoff hockey is over.

The Flyers defenseman will make the first postseason appearance of his 13-year, 820-game career when he hops over the boards at PPG Paints Arena on Saturday night.

Ristolainen’s wait before his playoff debut is the third-longest in NHL history. The 31-year-old even played in the Olympics before a postseason game. He won a bronze medal in February while playing for Team Finland at the 2026 Milan Cortina Games.

“Just really excited to play meaningful games this time of year,” said Ristolainen, who played in just 44 games this season while battling elbow injuries. “It’s been a really, really fun last month or so.”

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Skinner or Silovs?

First-year Pittsburgh coach Dan Muse has flip-flopped between goaltenders Stuart Skinner and Arturs Silovs since the Penguins acquired Skinner in a trade with Edmonton in December.

Whether that will continue in the postseason is anybody’s guess. Skinner has a decided advantage over Silovs in playoff experience, having backstopped Edmonton to consecutive Cup appearances in 2024 and 2025.

Yet Muse has kept his thoughts close to the vest, and statistically speaking, Silovs and Skinner posted nearly identical numbers, none of them particularly great. Silovs finished the year with a .887 save percentage and a 3.07 goals against average while Skinner had a slightly worse save percentage (.885) and a slightly better goals against (2.99).

“We’re looking at all factors,” Muse said. “As I’ve said multiple times, I think both guys have been great for us. Both guys are a big part of why we’re here today preparing for Game 1.”

What’s old is new again

Philadelphia forward Sean Couturier has played for the Flyers for so long that he was actually teammates with his boss, general manager Danny Briere.

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Couturier was once a key cog during a previous rebuilding phase in Philadelphia, back when he was the eighth overall pick in the 2011 draft. Couturier made his debut that season and has largely remained a steady presence in the lineup – save for back injuries that cost him the 2022-2023 season – and is the only Flyer still around from the franchise’s last home playoff series victory against, yes, the Penguins in 2012.

Couturier, Travis Sanheim and Travis Konecny are the only three Flyers on the roster to have played in a home playoff game, back in 2018.

“We were for a lot of years kind of in the middle, competing hard,” said Courtier, who had 12 goals and 24 assists this season. “We had some good teams. Just always missing a little something to get to the next step. I think it was maybe time to take a step back and rebuild. I’m just glad with how everything’s gone, honestly.”

___

AP Sports Writer Dan Gelston in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

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Copyright © 2026 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.



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Western Pennsylvania man takes Terrible Towel to Mount Everest as tribute to late friend

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Western Pennsylvania man takes Terrible Towel to Mount Everest as tribute to late friend



The Pittsburgh Steelers’ Terrible Towel is a symbol of celebration known around the world, but it was recently taken to new heights.

Allen Dean, a Steelers fan from Sewickley, recently took a Terrible Towel with him as he climbed Mt. Everest.

“I had to show myself that I can do whatever I set my mind to,” says Dean, who spoke with KDKA-TV’s Barry Pintar after his climb from Pokhara, Nepal, near Mt. Everest. “By doing that, I was an example to my kids that, through all the hardships our family has gone through, if you put your mind to something, you can do it, and if it is something as big as Everest, whatever it is, that if you put your mind to it, you can do it.”

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Allen says a man called “Big Mike” was a long-time father figure who died a few months ago. His window gave Allen Big Mike’s Terrible Towel. It was then, by way of tribute, that an idea was born.

“She asked me, ‘Allen, would you be able to take the terrible towel to Everest if you make it?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, for Big Mike, anything,’” Dean recalled. “Big Mike was like my last father figure that I had around, so it meant a lot to me to just bring peace. It just meant a lot to me to finalize the loss of such a male role model in my life.”

Allen says he trained vigorously for this climb, often spending weekends taking his kids to hike just about every regional state park imaginable.



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