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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

Trump beat Hillary Clinton by more than 40,000 votes in Pennsylvania on his way to winning the presidency in 2016, but native Scrantonian Joe Biden edged Trump by about 80,000 votes in the state four years ago.

Harris will be holding a rally in Erie, a Democratic majority city of about 94,000 people bordered by suburbs and rural areas with significant numbers of Republicans. Erie County is often cited as one of the state’s reliable bellwether regions, where the electorate has a decidedly moderate voting record. Trump visited Erie on Sept. 29.

Trump plans a town hall Monday at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center and Fairgrounds in suburban Oaks, hoping to drive up turnout among his supporters.

Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes, the most of any swing state, have long made it a center of presidential electioneering. Democrats have won three straight elections for governor and both current U.S. senators are Democrats, but its legislature is closely divided and both parties have had recent success in statewide contests.

HARRISBURG — Companies have yet to claim a single dollar from a $2.6 billion tax credit package Pennsylvania enacted in 2022 to encourage natural gas use, hydrogen production, milk processing, and more.

Now, the Shapiro administration is floating a union-backed rewrite that would subsidize energy production and lower the bar to claim the credits. However, the legislature appears unlikely to take up such proposals before the end of the year.

The package includes four credits that would give tax breaks to companies if they reach certain investment and job creation benchmarks. One encourages the use of Pennsylvania milk to make dairy products, another incentivizes the production of hydrogen within the commonwealth, and a third promotes the making of semiconductors or conducting biomedical research.

The largest aims to reward companies for using Pennsylvania natural gas for manufacturing. First passed in 2020 and expanded in 2022, the credit authorizes up to $1.4 billion in tax breaks over 25 years to companies that use methane — a primary component of natural gas — to produce fertilizer or fuel. Texas-based Nacero announced such a facility for Luzerne County in 2021, but the company has repeatedly delayed the start of construction.

Without any takers for the credits, the Shapiro administration has circulated draft legislation that would convert the natural gas subsidy into one encouraging electricity production, according to a version of the bill viewed by Spotlight PA.

The new credit offers a power plant up to $100 million annually for three years. Facilities get less money if their prices exceed the average cost of energy as determined by PJM, the regional grid operator that serves Pennsylvania.

The proposed language does not restrict what type of fuel a power plant could use while claiming the credit. However, it says the energy produced should meet specific clean energy standards. These would likely include nuclear energy; renewables such as hydroelectric, solar, and wind; or, for fossil fuel-powered plants, the use of carbon capture to reduce emissions.

Rob Bair, president of the Pennsylvania State Building & Construction Trades Council, supports the concept.

The council represents tens of thousands of unionized electricians, carpenters, painters, and other construction workers who benefit from new projects, and holds considerable political sway, especially in an election year. Its constituent unions annually give millions of dollars to candidates and political committees.

Bair told Spotlight PA that he has pushed lawmakers to rewrite the program to encourage the growth of Pennsylvania’s energy industry, including nuclear, small-scale coal, and low-carbon hydrogen production. Doing so, he argued, could offset the loss of electricity generation and jobs caused by the shutdown of coal and gas plants.

“Let’s take the [tax credit] and let’s utilize it in a way that we incentivize electrical energy production in a clean, safe, environmentally friendly way,” Bair told Spotlight PA.

Backers of the original tax credit package included Bair, who argued the program would help Pennsylvania land several projects it was wooing at that time, including the Nacero plant to turn fracked methane into fertilizer, and a dairy processing facility.

Two years on, none of the projected facilities have landed in the commonwealth. Some went to other states, while others never materialized.

In a news conference last year, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro discussed lessons from a failed attempt to use the tax credits to attract dairy brand Fairlife. He named shorter permitting times and better financial incentives for companies as areas where he thinks the state could improve.

Shapiro underscored this goal in his 2024 budget address when he said he was “sick and tired of losing to friggin’ Ohio,” and argued Pennsylvania needs to cut red tape and develop shovel-ready sites for new projects.

Shapiro got both in the most recent state budget. The legislature gave the OK for Pennsylvania to borrow $500 million to provide grants or loans to encourage industrial development. It also approved a streamlined permitting process that allows companies to hire state-approved third-party reviewers in certain cases.

The draft bill circulated by the Shapiro admin would make it easier for companies in target industries to claim tax breaks by lowering the amount of money the businesses have to invest and the number of long-term jobs their projects must create.

Shapiro hasn’t said much publicly about his push to change the tax credits. During a news conference earlier this month, he said the “law is something that we … are considering how best to use for the benefit of Pennsylvania.”

A spokesperson for Shapiro told Spotlight PA the governor is “open to repurposing these tax credits to ensure they can be used effectively to create more jobs and opportunity.”

Other Democrats have largely stayed quiet on any brewing policy shifts, although some senior lawmakers have floated changes that acknowledge the credits must be rewritten to be useful.

State Rep. Rob Matzie (D., Beaver) proposed adding a subsidy that would support sustainable aviation fuel production, with a tax credit of up to $30 million each year. His ideas carry weight because he chairs the state House’s influential Consumer Protection, Technology, and Utilities Committee, through which major energy bills have passed in the past year.

Similarly, state Rep. Steve Samuelson (D., Northampton), who chairs the state House’s tax policy-focused Finance Committee, recently introduced a bill that would make the semiconductor manufacturing credit easier to claim.

State House Democratic spokesperson Elizabeth Rementer didn’t comment on whether chamber leaders would support a rewrite of the tax credits, but did say that the caucus is “constantly evaluating tax credit programs to ensure they’re being used properly and creating jobs.”

“If the … program is being underutilized it will be examined more closely,” she said.

Rewriting the program will likely be a harder sell in the GOP-controlled state Senate.

Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) said he hasn’t seen enough from Shapiro to be sold on the proposal.

“The administration spent a significant amount of time talking to outside interested parties on that issue … and spent no time talking to me or my team about what such a proposal would look like,” Pittman told Spotlight PA in August.

Pittman has personally been open to state programs to encourage energy production, repeatedly saying that he is interested in expanding small-scale nuclear reactors. He has also voiced concerns about the state’s long-term ability to produce enough energy for itself.

Other state Republicans are less inclined to hear Shapiro and the trades out.

State Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill (R., York) voted against the original deal and said her skepticism of government handouts remains in place.

According to federal data, Pennsylvania is the second largest net supplier of energy to other states in the country. The excess energy goes to neighbors in Maryland and New York.

Those states, she’s argued, have allowed their fossil-fuel-powered plants to close while approving new data centers and other electricity-heavy industries powered by Pennsylvania.

As such, she argued that any subsidies offered by Pennsylvania would only subsidize other state’s “failed energy policies.”

“I just don’t see the benefit to Pennsylvanians,” said Phillips-Hill. “Am I going to support something that is going to continue to take Pennsylvania taxpayer dollars to subsidize the folly and irresponsibility of other states? Absolutely not.”

The Commonwealth Foundation, a conservative advocacy organization, recently put out an energy platform that echoes Phillips-Hill’s position, saying that it would not support any such tax credits or other state subsidies.

André Béliveau, the energy policy director at the Commonwealth Foundation, said that he understands the underlying impulse to bolster the industry and production. But he argues the legislature should do so by stripping back regulations and mandating that any changes to energy production maintain or improve grid reliability.

“We want to make sure we have reliable and affordable energy,” said Beliveau. “Subsidies are not the way to get there.”

BEFORE YOU GO… If you learned something from this article, pay it forward and contribute to Spotlight PA at spotlightpa.org/donate. Spotlight PA is funded by foundations and readers like you who are committed to accountability journalism that gets results.