Trouble for Harris and Walz in Pennsylvania?

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With less than two weeks until November 5, voters are already casting ballots in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania. Almost a million had voted as of Monday, October 21, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. Last weekend, thousands of volunteers from across the Northeast streamed into the state to knock on doors. But will this gigantic last-minute effort be enough to lift the Harris-Walz ticket to victory?

If you ask the professionals at the top of the pyramidic structure that makes up the official Democratic push in PA—or poll the equally important coalition of outside groups focused on getting out the vote—you will get nothing but sunshine. “Our campaign is running the largest and most sophisticated operation in Pennsylvania history,” Harris national campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez told Politico last week. She noted that they have 50 coordinated offices and nearly 400 staff on the ground and had been buying advertising aimed at Black and Latino voters for over a year already. “We have now spent more than any previous presidential campaign on outreach to these communities,” she claimed, adding, “We are leaving no stone unturned.”

“Our coalition is running a powerhouse field operation,” Ravi Mangla, the national press secretary of the Working Families Party, said to me Friday. Data he shared showed that between the WFP, One PA, SEIU, Make the Road Action, Unite Here, Asian Pacific Islanders of Pennsylvania, Free the Ballot/Straight Ahead, and PA United, paid and volunteer canvassers had already knocked on 3,173,000 doors. Their goal is to reach another million by election day with a focus on so-called low-propensity voters—the people who don’t reliably vote in every election, but who are critical this year. Other groups, like Pennsylvania Stands Up, Sister District, and Field Team 6 were doing similar work in the purple suburbs north and west of Philadelphia and around Pittsburgh. Rest assured, the right voters were being reached with the right messages, I was told.

Well, maybe. It’s impossible to fact-check global statements about either the quantity or quality of political organizing being done in a state as big as Pennsylvania in just a few days. So what follows are some cautionary notes based on my years of close observation of (and occasional participation in) Democratic and progressive campaigning. And I see three clouds hanging over Harris’s Pennsylvania prospects—plus one silver lining.

First, the Harris campaign is actually just the Biden campaign infrastructure with a different (and better) candidate. But that infrastructure was not built to scale a mass mobilization campaign. Prior to Biden’s dropping out, his field operation was handling a trickle of volunteers. Now it has struggled to manage the flood unleashed by Harris. Many pop-up entities flowered after Biden bowed out, starting with Win With Black Women and spreading to dozens of similar “Xers for Harris” groups who attracted hundreds of thousands of participants to mass Zoom meetings in early August. But leaders of those groups tell me they have had little success figuring out how to best funnel the people they’ve attracted into the Harris campaign machinery.

Of course, no one has ever built a full-blown presidential campaign in such a short time. By necessity, the Harris campaign is partially relying on the Democratic National Committee’s organizing infrastructure. But that means it has also inherited the DNC approach, which is very top-down and media-centric. Sri Kulkarni is a former Texas congressional candidate who was an early developer of the concept of relational organizing, where voters are encouraged to match their contact lists against the Democratic voter file and then try to personally engage with voters they actually know. This is called “friendbanking.” He is now working triple time to help scale up the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s relational effort to help candidates across the country, including in Pennsylvania.

Kulkarni tells me that more than 50,000 people have signed up for the DNC’s relational campaign, which, like the DCCC, uses the Reach app to help people activate their personal networks. Among those are at least 7,000 in Pennsylvania, he says. But so far the Harris campaign is primarily using the DNC’s Reach tool to prompt its users to share social media content, rather than to actually friendbank. This seems unwise. In theory, when Democrats hit the final weekend before Election Day and everyone is scrambling to move voters who still haven’t cast their ballots, a robust friendbanking operation could give campaigners access to a list of activists who actually know these missing potential voters. Each of those 7,000 Pennsylvanians on Reach could also potentially activate another voter or two on their own. Such a strategy worked for Jon Ossoff in the special runoff election in Georgia in 2020—helping his Senate campaign identify 40,000 people who had actually skipped the general election. While many independent groups are trying relational organizing this year, including the WFP in Pennsylvania, where it has roughly 20,000 supporters on Reach, it appears it has yet to be adopted by the top of the Democratic hierarchy.