Pennsylvania
Pining for Pennsylvania: Trump’s Philadelphia suburban problem lingers – Washington Examiner
Pennsylvania is the ultimate battleground for 2024, with the White House, Senate, and House all poised to flip based on how voters here cast their ballots. In this series, Pining for Pennsylvania: Unlocking the crucial Keystone State, the Washington Examiner will look at the demographics, politics, and key areas that have made Pennsylvania the must-watch state of the year. Part six, below, looks at how the suburbs are a major concern for Donald Trump’s campaign.
Former President Donald Trump‘s struggles with suburban voters have plagued him throughout the 2024 primary cycle, continuing even when he is the only GOP candidate still in the race.
Trump’s trouble with the voting demographic was particularly noticeable in the Pennsylvania primary, where despite Trump winning nearly 84% of the vote, or 790,000 votes, Nikki Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, won more than 157,000 votes, or nearly 17%, roughly seven weeks after suspending her presidential campaign.
“There’s no question that there’s work that the former president has to do with suburban voters, particularly suburban women, particularly in the Philadelphia collar-county area,” Christian Nascimento, chairman of the Montgomery County Republican Committee, told the Washington Examiner.
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Philadelphia’s collar counties include Bucks, Montgomery, Chester, and Delaware counties. The “collar counties” shifted more in Democrats’ favor in 2020, with Biden significantly expanding the margins by which then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won the counties in 2016 against Trump before ultimately losing the state.
Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by just 44,000 votes, while Biden flipped the state in 2020 by over 80,000 votes. The thin margin by which the state has been won in the past two presidential cycles means that if enough Haley voters cross over to Biden in November or simply sit out the election, it could sink Trump’s chances to win the state back.
Haley’s top performances in Pennsylvania’s 2024 primaries were located in the Philadelphia collar counties, particularly in Montgomery and Chester counties, where she won 25% of the vote in both counties.
The next top two Haley strongholds were in Delaware County and Cumberland County, where she won 23% of the vote in both counties. In nearby Bucks County, Haley won 19% of the vote.
Biden won the majority of these counties, except for Cumberland, in 2020.
Democratic pollster Matt McDermott called Tuesday’s results a “major red flag for Republicans.”
Republicans, however, tempered those warnings.
Nascimento told the Washington Examiner that Tuesday’s results were due to a “sleepy primary” but that it won’t lead to dire problems for Trump.
“I think the thing that he can do to work on that is focus on his policies and really shine a light on the differences between where we were when he was in office versus where things are under President Biden,” he continued.
In Dauphin County, another place Biden won in 2020, Haley won 21% of the vote. Dauphin County also includes Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s state capital.
Haley won 20% of the vote in Erie County, another Biden 2020 county, and Lancaster County, which Trump won in 2020%.
Haley also won 19% in Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, and 19% in Centre County, both of which went for Biden in 2020.
Joe Morris, Mercyhurst University senior political analyst and chairman of the political science department, spent a decade conducting polls in Pennsylvania and is conducting in-depth interviews with voters in Erie County.
In this northwestern part of Pennsylvania, the winner of the county has gone on to win the state and presidency in several elections.
An overwhelming majority of Erie County residents told Morris they were turned off by moments when Trump threw paper towels at people in Puerto Rico devastated by Hurricane Maria.
“We are a state that has a great deal of empathy. We’re socially conservative, but we have a great deal of empathy for people who are suffering,” Morris said. “That bombastic rhetoric probably doesn’t play as well in most of Pennsylvania as it does in other places.”
Morris claimed there is a playbook that Trump could take to win the Keystone State that doesn’t involve winning Haley supporters or Biden-sympathetic Republican voters.
“If you look back to 2016, Donald Trump’s strategy was not to go to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and win votes,” Morris said. “He went to all of the other communities in Pennsylvania and really pushed turnout up really high, and that offset his performance in those other counties.”
“And if he is interested in doing as well in Pennsylvania, as he did in 2016, then I think that’s his best strategy,” he added.
Some political experts cautioned against assuming that Haley voters would abandon Trump in November.
“Some of those voters, they’re going to come home. There’s no need to win them over. They are going to be loyal to the Republican Party,” said Sam Chen, principal director of the strategy firm The Liddell Group and a former staffer to retired Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey. “This was an opportunity to put a protest up. But a lot of voters they need to be won.”
But Chen cautioned that in conservative Centre County, Trump’s margins were concerning. “That’s not a great number for Donald Trump in that part of the state,” he said referring to the northern and middle sections of the state known as the “middle T.”
“With the exception of Dauphin County, which is Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the capital, that is a very, very red, very Republican area,” Chen said. “When Sen. Toomey won statewide twice, a big part of that was claiming that middle T.”
The Biden campaign did not resist slamming Trump for continuing to hemorrhage Haley voters.
“Across the battleground states, hundreds of thousands of *Republican* voters have come out AGAINST Trump,” wrote spokesman Ammar Moussa in an email sent out Wednesday afternoon. “Even though he’s been the presumptive nominee for seven weeks, he is not building the coalition necessary to win 270 electoral votes.”
Yet the Trump campaign dismissed the attacks in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
“President Trump continued his winning streak and delivered a resounding primary win in Pennsylvania,” said Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign.
“More importantly, President Trump continues to dominate Feeble Joe Biden in every battleground state poll including his home state,” Leavitt continued. “The Dishonest Biden campaign has spent millions in Pennsylvania gaslighting voters, but it is not enough to make everyone ignore Bidenflation and rising costs, Biden’s border bloodbath, and his war on American energy.”
A Republican National Committee spokesperson referred the Washington Examiner to polls showing voter dissatisfaction with Biden’s handling of the economy, the border crisis, and foreign policy.
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All of which Nascimento said Trump should highlight to Pennsylvania voters in the lead-up to the November election.
“He should talk about the Abraham accords and talk about what he did in the Middle East and how this type of situation that we have now, several situations, wasn’t happening under his watch,” Nascimento said of how Trump should discuss the multiple conflicts currently happening including the battle between Israel and Hamas.
Pennsylvania
Runaway steel drum from western Pennsylvania construction site kills woman
A steel drum weighing thousands of pounds somehow rolled out of a construction site in Pittsburgh and eventually struck and killed a woman who was walking on a nearby sidewalk, police said.
The accident occurred around 10:40 a.m. Friday in the city’s Oakland neighborhood, where the University of Pittsburgh’s new sports performance center is being built.
The drum was either knocked over or dislodged from a piece of heavy equipment, police said. It then rolled several hundred feet as it went down a hill, through a fence and onto the sidewalk where the woman was walking with co-workers from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Western Psychiatric Hospital. The drum then went across a road before it came to rest against a pickup truck.
The woman, who suffered a head injury, was pronounced dead at the scene a short time later. Her name has not been released, and no other injuries were reported in the accident, which remains under investigation.
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Pennsylvania
Video of Pennsylvania State Police chase ending in crash puts pursuit policy under scrutiny
DREXEL HILL, Pa. (CBS) – Video obtained exclusively by CBS News Philadelphia of a Pennsylvania State Police chase that ended with two troopers crashing in Delaware County puts the agency’s pursuit policies under scrutiny and raises questions as to why the pursuit began in the first place.
The video showed state troopers chasing a Ford Taurus through a bustling Township Line Shopping Center parking lot in Drexel Hill around lunchtime Tuesday.
Earlier this week, eyewitnesses described what they saw and explained their concerns.
“It’s crazy because there’s a school zone and it’s been a work zone for the past week,” Allison Murtaugh, who works at a nearby restaurant, said. “Kids get out of school. It’s a church. Like I said, it’s a work zone, 15 mph on top of the school zone. They could’ve killed somebody on top of themselves.”
The video showed the car’s bumper dragging and the rear window gone. The car and its two occupants then exited the shopping center, making a right onto Burmont Road.
Investigators said the driver got away from police.
How did the chase start?
According to an internal police patrol alert we obtained, Upper Providence Township police claimed they spotted that Ford Taurus, believed to be connected to some unspecified thefts, many hours earlier on Monday night in Springfield, Delaware County.
The Taurus had a Delaware temporary tag partially covered by a black trash bag, according to the alert.
The driver’s head, according to the document, did not come above the seat headrest.
Police attempted to stop the car at Route 352 and Gradyville Road when the pursuit began.
Police chased the car for miles, eventually reaching Route 1, where eyewitness Evan Gross of Robbinsville, Mercer County, was driving at the time.
“I’ve never seen a police chase before, but it seemed to be kind of reckless the way they were chasing him,” Gross said. “I didn’t expect to hear the suspect got away and two police cars crashed.”
The police chase eventually made its way to Rolling Road and Route 1 in Springfield, at which time a state police spokesperson said, “Two Pennsylvania State Police vehicles that were assisting were involved in a collision between each other.”
However according to the alert, “The pursuit was terminated in the area of North State Road and West Rolling Road due to the operator driving in the opposing traffic lanes. The vehicle was last seen traveling on North State Road missing its rear bumper.”
The pursuit was terminated in the area of North State and West Rolling roads due to the operator driving in the opposing traffic lanes. The vehicle was last seen traveling on North State Road missing its rear bumper.
But a PSP lieutenant spokesperson said while their investigation into the state police collision is ongoing, he wouldn’t comment on the contents of the alert and why surveillance video showed the chase continuing a mile farther down the road, where the second crashed state police cruiser came to a rest.
Chase raises questions about state police pursuit policy
The latest chase happened less than a week after three adults and a pregnant teenager died in a fiery crash as police pursued their vehicle in connection with retail thefts in Concord Township, according to investigators.
Law enforcement sources said speeds in that chase reached 110 MPH.
More questions are now raised about Pennsylvania State Police pursuit policies.
We asked for a copy. A state police spokesperson said, “For public safety and officer safety reasons, our pursuit policy is confidential.”
A message seeking comment from the North Providence Township police chief, where the chase Tuesday began, was not returned.
Neither trooper involved in Tuesday’s crash was injured.
Police are still looking for the people who were inside the Ford Taurus.
Pennsylvania
Day 9 of pro-Palestinian encampment at University of Pennsylvania
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