Democratic turnout in Philly has been soft. Will the Harris campaign's amped-up ground game reverse the trend?
The star power being deployed in the city in the final two weeks before Election Day, which includes Harris herself, isn’t just for show. The most well-known surrogates motivate campaign volunteers — and often attract new ones.
It’s part of a multipronged strategy the campaign has launched to boost turnout in the largest city in a critical battleground state. Much of its get-out-the-vote program relies on volunteers who knock on doors, make phone calls, and send text messages.he effort is accelerating. Between the end of July and early October, Harris campaign staff and volunteers knocked on 1 million doors across Pennsylvania. They hit 400,000 over just two days last week and expect to get to 1 million per week in the lead-up to Election Day. (Pennsylvania has about 9 million registered voters.)
“We’re putting up incredible numbers on the doors and on the phones,” said Brendan McPhillips, Harris’ senior adviser for Pennsylvania, who also ran President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign in Pennsylvania. “As we’re heading into the home stretch … you’ll see us doubling down on that.”
Get-out-the-vote operations can be decisive in any campaign. This year, a turnout increase of a few percentage points could yield Harris thousands of additional votes in a state where polls show the race is virtually tied.
But Democrats have expressed concern about turnout in Philadelphia over the last several years — in 2020, the party saw a bigger drop in its vote share here than in any other county in the state. Biden won the city handily, but his margin of victory was smaller than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. The biggest declines were in working-class neighborhoods with majorities of Black and Latino residents.
https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/kamala-harris-campaign-voter-turnout-philadelphia-20241028.html