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In 2008, Barack Obama and his new running mate, Joe Biden, kicked off their general-election campaign in Beaver County, Pa., a culturally conservative area northwest of Pittsburgh where the shuttering of steel mills years earlier still stung.
In 2020, Mr. Biden was in Beaver County hours before Election Day to make his closing argument. And in August, the first stop for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on a Western Pennsylvania bus tour was in Beaver County.
Each time, the Democrats were angling for the loyalties of the working-class, predominantly white voters who live in Beaver County and similar areas across Western Pennsylvania and the industrial Midwest. Each time, the party faced more skepticism and suspicion.
No longer dreaming of winning in such places, Democrats are simply trying to avoid the kinds of staggering losses that helped doom Hillary Clinton in 2016, and to keep pace with Mr. Biden’s slightly improved 2020 margins.
Their goal in white working-class areas sounds modest but in reality is enormously complicated: lose by less.
“The race is really close,” said Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Pennsylvania Democrat who managed to win Beaver County in his 2022 run for governor and, along with other top Democrats, has campaigned for Ms. Harris in tough blue-collar and rural territory. “Four, five, six hundred more votes in a place like Beaver County could be a real difference maker.”
In more than 30 interviews across Beaver and neighboring areas this week, where Republican voter registration is booming, the resistance to Ms. Harris was obvious as voters vented concerns about inflation and immigration. Residents blanketed their yards with Trump signs, and at least one flag cursed Ms. Harris.
It is entirely possible, Democrats acknowledge, that Ms. Harris could end up doing worse with these voters than the Scranton-born Mr. Biden did, especially among men.
But there were also glimmers of evidence that among some swing voters who backed Mr. Biden in 2020, she might be holding the line — even if they don’t want to say so too loudly in a place where former President Donald J. Trump’s supporters are proudly vocal.
“There were people that were supposedly secret Trump voters,” said Kevin Kerr, 52, a political independent from Monaca, Pa. “Now you have people that will paint their whole houses like Trump.”
Mr. Kerr, who voted Republican in 2008 and 2012 and Libertarian in 2016 before backing Mr. Biden in 2020, said he considered Ms. Harris “barely passable.” But he plans to support her — and predicted that others might quietly do the same.
“There’s an undercurrent of people that feel that way about Kamala, that don’t want to admit that they will vote for her, but they will,” said Mr. Kerr, who owns a tattoo shop. “They just don’t want to get into it with their neighbors.”
Is the cookie poll underestimating Harris?
Cindy Thompson, 73, was not planning to discuss politics with anyone when she walked into Kretchmar’s Bakery, an institution in Beaver, Pa., that Mr. Obama visited in 2012.
Then she noticed the store’s locally famous cookie poll, and its highly unscientific findings: Mr. Trump was trouncing Ms. Harris in sales of cookies featuring their respective images.
“I looked at the cookies, and I said, ‘Oh, gosh, I’m going to have to buy 100 of these Harris cookies,’” Ms. Thompson, a retired teacher and typically a Democrat, recalled afterward. “I usually don’t make my opinion out loud, but I kind of couldn’t help it.”
During the 2016 election, she and her husband, Allan Thompson, 73, both of nearby Westmoreland County, were on opposite sides. Mr. Thompson, who retired from a salaried job in the steel industry, supported Mr. Trump.
“I argued with my New York City son, who told me, ‘Don’t do that, you’re crazy,’” Mr. Thompson said outside Kretchmar’s. “I find out I should listen to my son once in a while.”
He voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 and will support Ms. Harris, he said, in part because “I don’t want Trump. He’s threatening our government, our way of life, and I’m really concerned about what happens should he win.”
“I don’t like the fact that abortion is even something that is talked about in our government,” he added.
Widespread doubts about Democrats
Roman Kozak, the chairman of the Republican Committee of Beaver County and a candidate for state representative, acknowledges Democratic enthusiasm. He has even met a few two-time Trump voters who are now supporting Ms. Harris, he said in an interview.
But among the small group of voters considering a change from their 2020 choice, he said, he more often encountered reluctant Biden voters now leaning the other way.
“I do hear that, at some doors, ‘I don’t like, really, either of them, but at least under Donald Trump we had affordability,’” Mr. Kozak said.
That is the calculation that Megan Stanislow, 45, is making this year.
“I do not like him as a person generally,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I don’t think the way he talks about women is cool.” She also firmly supports abortion rights.
But Ms. Stanislow, of Beaver, intends to vote for him after not voting in 2020, she said. She cited concerns about the cost of living and expressed impatience with Ms. Harris’s mentions of growing up middle-class (a line the vice president repeats so often that “Saturday Night Live” made fun of it). Ms. Harris, she said, simply offered “word salad.”
“They’ve had the last four years,” she said of Democrats. “We’re barely making it month to month.”
Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for Ms. Harris, said in a statement that she would move to “bring down the cost of groceries, prescriptions and housing,” and was focused on helping the middle class.
There are also Pennsylvania-specific challenges for Ms. Harris, including her past support, now rescinded, for a ban on fracking.
But more broadly, polls show that skepticism of her is especially acute among men, across different racial and age demographics, despite signs that she is making some gains among white women.
“There’s no way in hell, to be honest with you, I want Donald Trump back — but then again, listening to Kamala speak, I’m really not too excited about her either,” said Garland Buffaloe, 52, a roofer who supported Mr. Biden in 2020 but was “50-50” on whether to support Ms. Harris — or to vote at all.
“It’d be nice to have a woman, and I don’t care about her color,” added Mr. Buffaloe, a Black man who agreed with Mr. Trump on tough border policies, but said the former president could be offensive in how he talks about race.
“I don’t trust none of them,” he added.
‘She’s fighting as hard as she can for every vote’
The Harris campaign is working to win over more male voters, betting big on an extensive field operation and ramping up its outreach, with targeted efforts for white, Black and Latino men. The campaign recently started an affinity group for hunters, and is seeking to reach men with ads on sports talk radio and on television during major sporting events.
Mr. Walz is playing a crucial role in those efforts, particularly with rural Americans.
On Tuesday afternoon, he was on a muddy farm in Volant, Pa. — population 126 — north of Beaver County.
Decked out in flannel, Mr. Walz highlighted his shooting skills and delved deep into agriculture policy before a modest but enthusiastic crowd.
“They’re showing up in these areas that really matter,” Mr. Shapiro said. “You’ve got to show up, you’ve got to treat people with respect, you’ve got to ask them for their vote. She’s doing that.”
Yet former Representative Conor Lamb, a Pennsylvania Democrat whose district included Beaver County, said that while Ms. Harris was campaigning strategically in such areas, “it might not be visible until the very end, but I can’t say I’m seeing the progress yet.”
Asked if there was a risk that Ms. Harris would lose by more among white working-class voters than previous Democrats did, he acknowledged that there was.
“She’s fighting as hard as she can for every vote,” he said. “If it turns out that people are just so mad about inflation, or, you know, whatever issue it is, it certainly could go the other direction.”
Several voters supporting Ms. Harris suspected other issues at play.
“Biden was generally well-liked here,” said Kylie Fitzgerald, 35, an occupational therapist who is excited about Ms. Harris, but knows Biden voters who are wary of her. Because she is “a woman and a woman of color, they’re probably a little bit apprehensive, if I’m being honest.”
He’s outnumbered, but his Harris sign is 90 feet wide.
If the fight in battleground states is a game of inches — wring a few more Democratic votes out of the suburbs here, find some new Republican voters in the cities there — in places like Beaver County, it is more like a game of centimeters.
For Democrats following the race closely, every anguished aside from an undecided voter, every unexpected emoji reaction on a social media post, every change in yard sign, takes on outsize meaning.
But Donald Rea, 64, of Brighton Township, Pa., was not going for subtlety when he used lawn paint to create a 36-foot-tall, 90-foot-wide Harris sign on land he owns overlooking the Ohio and Beaver Rivers.
“People were scared to put out signs because all the rhetoric and all the crazy,” said Mr. Rea, who is retired from a career in remodeling. “I decided one day, I’m just not going to be scared, I’m going to do this.”
The reaction, he said, was not what he expected.
“Since we put our sign up, talking to different people in the community, I’m surprised how many of them came out of the closet, how many Kamala Harris people are out there,” he said. “There are a lot here.”
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