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“We won Pennsylvania, we won everything.” Whether Donald Trump’s claim is true remains to be seen, but it certainly reflects the importance of the Keystone State in what has been called the battle for America’s soul. The president’s election campaign invested heavily in this shaky state, Swing State, in American electoral grammar, because it is aware of its decisive weight in the 2016 victory. On Monday, Trump held not one, but three election events in the state, fireproof. out of a desperate need for votes to be discarded even in extremis. Also because Pennsylvania is, along with North Carolina, one of the states in which the Supreme Court – in the new composition at 9 o’clock, after the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett – is called to express itself on the request of the Republicans not to count the postcards arrived later. Election day.
Every vote here really counts, in the fight to capture the top 20 voters who are the biggest bets among the states on the scale after Florida. The polls, which carry the stigma of bankruptcy four years ago, give Joe Biden a solid national advantage: According to a Financial Times analysis of RealClearPolitics poll averages, the Democratic candidate is ahead nationally with average of 8.5 points. Yet Trump still has a path ahead of him for re-election – a path that, according to the Financial Times, almost inevitably passes through Pennsylvania. Biden’s lead, in fact, shrinks in this Swing state to just over 5% – an error in the polls, a late move toward president, or both could help Trump score another surprise victory like the one in 2016.
Biden also made far more visits to Pennsylvania than any other state on hold. The last one just yesterday, when the media aggression of his rival – who accused him of wanting to abolish the oil industry and therefore an avalanche of jobs – should have pushed him to a change of plans. Former Obama deputy appeared by surprise at a Chester polling place: “The big difference between them and us – he said – is that we don’t have overcast rallies.”
The fact is that, by its characteristics, Pennsylvania is a state that has something to offer both candidates. “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh separated from Alabama” is how a state characterized by the presence of two large cities with a democratic tendency, which straddling mostly conservative rural areas, has been described. If in the rural areas of the center the main concern is that no one touches fracking – a hydraulic fracturing technique for the extraction of natural gas and oil – a city like Philadelphia was the destination chosen by Barack Obama to deliver his shock to the liberals. sloth from America.
Not only. In recent hours, Philadelphia has also become the new epicenter of protests against police abuses of power against African-American citizens, following the murder of 27-year-old Walter Wallace. The officers said he had been ordered “several times” to throw the knife to the ground but that he continued to “move towards” them. Only at this point would they open fire, firing “multiple times” and hitting him in the chest and shoulder. Wallace was pronounced dead in the hospital shortly after, when the protest broke out in the city: some thirty officers wounded, ten arrested and several stores looted, the balance of the night. The victim’s father, Walter Wallace Sr., speaking with the Inquirer said the son was being treated and had mental health problems.
However, the episode, unfortunately similar to many others, does not seem destined to have much impact on the electoral contest. Trump’s goal, in fact, is to maintain or regain the trust that the (former) Democratic working class placed in him four years ago. There hasn’t been a Republican in Pennsylvania since George HW Bush in 1988. Biden, who was born there in Pennsylvania, Scranton, argued in the primaries that his roots in the working class would help him win back the Democrats who dropped out. Trump’s party.
The president has repeatedly tried to undermine this argument, portraying the rival as an enemy of the working class. “Joe Biden is an uncompromising globalist who wiped out his steelworks, shut down his factories, wiped out his coal jobs. . . and it has supported all the horrible, terrible and ridiculous trade deals in the course of half a century, ”he told Lititz, a small town in central Pennsylvania. The Republican also tried to take advantage of a comment Biden made in last week’s debate, when the Democrat said he would ditch fossil fuels, before clarifying his statement later. And he played an edited video of Biden saying he opposes fracking, which is important to the state’s economy. “Joe Biden wants to destroy Pennsylvania’s economy with an economic death sentence,” reads the caption.
Looking at its history, on the other hand, it is not surprising that Pennsylvania is so central to the future of American history. Theater of many firsts, from the signing of the Constitution in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall (it was on September 17, 1787) to the construction of the first oil well in history (on August 27, 1859, in the small town of Titusville ), the state of Keystone well deserves its nickname. : “Keystone” to get out, whatever, of the long uncertainty.
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