One day before presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris made his first campaign visit in Reading, Pennsylvania – a predominantly Latino city just an hour from Philadelphia. Donald Trump’s campaign had been reaching out to Latino voters in the Berks County city since June, when the Republican National Committee opened a Latinos for Trump office as it stepped up its appeals to Latino voters across the country. State.

When the votes were counted in Berks County, the gap between the campaigns was stark. As in 2020, Berks went for Trump again on Tuesday – this time up 4.6 percentage points to 58%. Harris received 43 percent of the vote, where President Joe Biden won 45.2 percent in 2020.

The problem was not that Berks had become a Republican stronghold, but that Democrats had ceded the territory long before Trump opened his campaign office this summer. It was a familiar story to progressive organizers across Pennsylvania, who have spent the last few campaign cycles trying to win back voters Democrats left on the table.

Pennsylvania’s Democratic consultants were caught on their heels in 2016, when Trump tipped the state into the red for the first time in three decades and won three counties that had voted twice for former President Barack Obama. When Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020, analysts and organizers attributed the victory to work done in progressive cities like Philadelphia. But it wasn’t the Biden campaign take the stepsthese were progressives and independents working in coalitions led by groups like Pennsylvania Stands Up, Make the Road Action Pennsylvania, the Working Families Party, and unions like Unite Here and Service Employees International Union.

Democrats’ reliance on progressive enclaves and grassroots organizers to bridge the gap they lost with Trump’s first victory was never clearer than at midnight before Wednesday, as Trump walked away electoral votes and that Harris’ narrow path to victory was once again falling into the hands of voters. in cities like Philadelphia.

While Biden won 13 Pennsylvania counties in 2020, Harris only won eight – with Trump flipping Bucks, Northampton, Erie, Monroe and Center counties. As the results solidified for Trump, the mainstream media and Democratic pundits turned their fire not on the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party, but in two other directions: on minority voters who had drifted, along with men and women. white women, towards Trump; and among the progressives who had either stayed home or voted for a third party on Harris’ role in the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

Such criticism was wrong, said Working Families Party national director Maurice Mitchell. Democrats, he said, lost ground to Republicans in states like Pennsylvania, even though they knew they held the only key to winning the White House.

“This coalition is fraying for a number of reasons,” Mitchell said Tuesday night at the WFP watch party at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Philadelphia.

People are asking fundamental questions of both parties, Mitchell said. “What do we gain concretely and materially in this relationship? And they deserve answers.

The fact that the race was so close raises a vital debate about Democrats’ continued failure to consolidate their power outside of the four-year election cycle, said Philadelphia City Council Minority Leader Nicolas O’Rourke. “Voting is the last thing we do in a functioning democracy. »

O’Rourke is one of two Working Families Party members on the city council. Local Democrats fought tooth and nail against the WFP, but the group’s victories ousted Republicans from the heavily blue city council for the first time in history with O’Rourke’s victory in 2023. He said the focus on the issue Whether black men had drifted away from the Harris campaign ignored the broader reason for demographic changes.

“The problem I found, more often than not, was not an interest in Trump, but a lack of interest in engagement. And that’s true beyond this election season and this election cycle,” O’Rourke said. “I continue to believe there is an opportunity to mobilize black men. They feel forgotten, not seen. They don’t see the point in voting – some of them, not all of them. … There’s a lot to be said for political party engagement that actually connects with black men before you expect them to show up.

“It’s something that all parties should pay attention to, whether it’s election time or not, because a functioning democracy would care about it.”

A few hours Before Harris made her first stop in Reading, Trump held a rally with thousands of people at the Santander Arena downtown.

While Trump made fewer stops in Pennsylvania than Harris — 22 to Harris’s 26 — Republican grassroots targeting voters in working-class Latino, black and white neighborhoods allowed him to outperform Democrats, who devoted a much of their focus on persuading affluent voters in blue strongholds.

While Latino men and women supported Biden in 59 and 69 percentTuesday’s exit polls show that 55 percent Latino men voted for Trump. Latina women still overwhelmingly support Harris, but by 6 percentage points less than in 2020.

Reading’s Latino voters are reachable — Democrats just haven’t done the job, Reading’s first Latino mayor, Eddie Morán, said. told Politico Magazine earlier this month. Morán won his 2019 primary against a Democratic incumbent by doing one thing: talking to Latino voters in neighborhoods Democrats had forgotten about.

Democratic outreach to Latinos has happened largely with the help of groups like Make the Road Action PA, which focuses on engaging black and brown voters. The group knocked on more than 560,000 doors, contacted 50,000 voters in eight counties and had 413,000 conversations with Latino voters across the state.

Issues such as cost of living and housing were at the forefront of those conversations, said Diana Robinson, co-deputy director of Make the Road Action Pennsylvania. “The rent is too high, people are struggling to pay their bills. We think it’s something that brings people together at all levels,” she said. “In Pennsylvania, the minimum wage has not increased in over 20 years.”

Kandice Cabeza, a Harris voter in Northeast Philadelphia, said she came out in favor of abortion rights but was not enthusiastic about either candidate. She is originally from Baltimore but has lived in Philadelphia for 10 years.

“What are you doing for the people? What’s changing with the cost of living, food, medical assistance and things like that, medical bills? All these things matter too,” Cabeza said. “I really haven’t heard much about it from any of them. They’re kind of arguing over who’s going to be number one. But what about us? It’s a bit like crossing our fingers that someone will look out for all of us and not just a certain group.

Independent groups are doing the work of courting working-class voters that the Democratic Party has stopped trying to reach, WFP’s Mitchell said. “It is not necessarily a drift to the right, as some political pundits say. Our approach is to take seriously meeting working class people where they are.

The working class is incredibly diverse, but a core set of issues unifies workers across ideology, Mitchell said. Three Working Families Party candidates flipped their House seats in New York, where Democratic losses in the 2022 cycle cost the party the House. John Avlon and former representative. Mondaire Jonesboth Democratic candidates in New York who pivoted to the center, lost in swing neighborhoods. representative Pat RyanDN.Y., faced an AIPAC-backed Republican challenger in the Catskills and mid-Hudson Valley. Ryan campaigned alongside progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., in October. He won by 1 percentage point.

“Basically, it’s a class war, right? There’s a reason Democrats sometimes talk about taxing billionaires. Because it’s extremely popular. We just think they need to say a lot more,” Mitchell said. “This group of working-class voters of all races who have either given up on politics in general and are extremely skeptical of politics, or are looking for other policies and discovering populist politics, and that sometimes leads them to the populist right. »

In a statement On Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, IV.T., blamed Harris’ defeat on the party’s neglect of working-class voters. “It’s no surprise that a Democratic Party that has abandoned working people would find that the working class has abandoned them. At first it was the white working class, and now it’s also the Latino and black workers,” Sanders said. “Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas on how we can confront the increasingly powerful oligarchy that possesses so much economic and political power? Probably not.

It’s not surprising to see increases in minority support for Trump, Mitchell said. “When black people mobilize for Democrats, it is not unbridled, unconditional support for a political party. “It’s a strategic decision,” he said. “I want more black voters to ask questions and for political parties to recognize that there is a growing component of the black electorate that is compelling.”

The trends themselves are not concerning, Mitchell said. “I think how you respond to these trends is key. So if the Democratic Party doesn’t take these trends seriously, I think they’ll be in trouble. We take them seriously.