Inside the Fight for Pennsylvania

ALL SUMMER LONG, JOE BIDEN SURROGATES in Pennsylvania lived in fear of a rerun of 2016’s Nightmare on Election Night, when the Democratic candidate for president, after leading in the polls for weeks, lost the state to Donald Trump by less than one percentage point, clearing his path to the White House. Their biggest concern was tactical: By avoiding in-person campaigning during the pandemic, Biden insiders worried, the former VP was ceding a big advantage to Trump, who, coronavirus be damned, was holding boisterous rallies across the Keystone State and, by proxy, knocking on millions of doors, just as he’d successfully done four years before. Fast forward to early fall, though, and suddenly Biden was everywhere—on a tour of western Pennsylvania with whistle stops in Pittsburgh, Latrobe, Greensburg and Johnstown; delivering a unity speech in Gettysburg; and authorizing door-to-door canvassing to drum up support and get out the vote, not just in PA but across other battleground states as well.

What convinced “Basement Biden,” as Trump mockingly refers to his opponent, to so dramatically reverse course—ironically, just before the president was forced by his COVID-19 diagnosis to pull back from the campaign trail? In a word: Pennsylvania.

The tipping point, sources within the campaign say, was a September 26 ABC News/ poll showing much softer support among the state’s Biden voters than among those backing Trump. Echoing the campaign’s own disquieting internal data, the survey found that, despite an overall nine-point lead for the former VP, only 51 percent of Biden backers were “very enthusiastic” about their candidate vs. 71 percent