It may not be as pithy as “Florida, Florida, Florida,” but if you were asked to describe the key to the 2024 race in just three words, you could do a lot worse than “Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania.” According to Nate Silver, both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have an over 90% chance of winning the election as a whole if they claim the Keystone State, the “core” swing state with the most electoral votes and, if recent polling is any indication, one of the closest as well.  

One of the reasons why Pennsylvania has cropped up as such a close contest, as well as such an important one, is that it contains multitudes. Unlike most other swing states, which can be firmly slotted into one region, Pennsylvania is much more geographically and culturally diverse, stretching from the Mid-Atlantic Philadelphia area to the more Midwestern Pittsburgh area, with a vast rural expanse in-between. In other words, both campaigns will have to find a way to appeal to left-shifting suburbanites in the Delaware Valley, swingy Rust Belt communities like Erie, two large metropolitan areas about 300 miles apart, and rural voters in what’s not-so-affectionately referred to as “Pennsyltucky.” Success in Pennsylvania requires candidates to strike a delicate balancing act with all of its various interests and demographics, a task whose difficulty is only eclipsed by its electoral importance. 

Post-2016, Democrats have more or less had success striking that balance, winning every Senate and gubernatorial election held in the commonwealth since Trump took office in 2017. They’ve also managed to hold onto swingy congressional districts like the Allentown and Bethlehem-based seventh and the Scranton based eighth, and even flipped control of the state house of representatives in 2022. But the recent victories of Josh Shapiro, John Fetterman, and the like did come with some warnings for Democrats. In 2022, turnout in deep blue Philadelphia, a city and county that Harris will need to squeeze every possible vote out of to win, fell relative to the rest of the state, particularly in majority Black and Latino precincts, signaling a level of disillusionment with what are two of the Democrats’ key demographics. And it’s not just Philadelphia that presents a math problem for Democrats: since 2020, Biden-won counties have post net population decreases while Trump-won counties have seen net increases. Granted, some of that may be the result of COVID-era migration of liberal urban voters to the suburbs, but even if that is the case, that will only raise the importance of Democrats continuing to make inroads in Pennsylvania’s many suburban counties, reach a point of parity in its Rust Belt areas, and decreasing Republican margins in its rural communities. 

Another obstacle for Democrats to overcome will be the absence of a native Pennslyvanian on the ticket. Sure, some people may have scoffed at Joe Biden’s constant invocation of Scranton, especially considering that he lived in Delaware for most of his life, but reporting suggests that he held genuine sway in the city of his birth and other similar working class, union-heavy communities in the Northeastern part of the state. It may be tough for a lawyer from San Francisco to generate the same level of appeal with these groups, to say nothing of the unfortunate race and gender dynamics at play. 

In terms of policy issues, Harris will have to be particularly delicate with her approach to energy. She’s been hammered by the Trump campaign for statements she made in 2019 in support of banning fracking, a position she’s since reversed on, presumably to assuage the fears of Pennsylvanians who may rely on the gas extraction process to make a living (this isn’t mere rhetorical flip-flopping, though – in 2022, she cast the tie-breaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened up new fracking leases). Despite drawing the ire of climate change groups like the Sunrise Movement, Harris has begun to triangulate on energy in general, embracing an “all of the above” approach that touts investments in green energy sources while also seeking to ensure skeptical Americans that they won’t have to be trading in their gas powered cars anytime soon. Whether this pivot will prove effective or get overshadowed by Republican fearmongering about a Green New Deal will become evident as Pennsylvania tallies its votes. 

It’s not all upside for Trump, though. Despite making gains in 2022, Pennsylvania Democrats have yet to pass any major post-Dobbs abortion protections or ballot measures a la Michigan or Kansas, which means that the presidential election will be something of a proxy war between pro-life and pro-choice forces, a war that the latter group seems to have been winning as of late. Trump’s isolationist and Russophillic rhetoric may come back to bite him as well – not only does Pennsylvania have the largest percentage of Ukrainian Americans in the country, it’s also home to over 800,000 Polish Americans, a community that Harris actively courted in her debate against Trump by framing the invasion of Ukraine as a mere prelude to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s designs on the rest of Europe. Trump didn’t exactly do himself many favors in this regard when, in the very same debate, he said that Putin would be “much happier than he is right now” if he were still president.

Two other major factors that may affect the result in Pennsylvania concern things that didn’t happen. The first is the apparent lack of a bump in popularity for Trump after his failed assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania. While it resulted in a now iconic photograph and a few days of discourse, Biden’s subsequent withdrawal from the race and a lack of a clear political motive for the shooter has made it difficult for Republicans to make political hay out of the tragedy, which left firefighter Corey Comperatore dead. Perhaps this is a blessing in disguise to Trump – given his unique lack of tact, it’s easy to imagine a world where campaigning explicitly on his close brush with death would strain the boundaries of good taste – but the nation, and one might assume the state’s, evident disinterest in turning him into a martyr must be a source of frustration for his campaign.

The second is Harris’ choice to pass up on selecting Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate in favor of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Popular and eloquent, Shapiro was pegged as presidential material after his roaring win in 2022, and many observers thought that it would be political malpractice for Harris to not select the leader of perhaps the most important state on the 2024 map as her second in command. But, evidently, their personalities simply didn’t gel, and concerns about a sexual assault allegation in his office, his handling of a controversial murder investigation, and past comments he made about Palestinians threw up enough red flags for Harris to go with Walz instead. It seems unlikely that many Pennsylvanians will actively punish the vice president for not selecting their governor as her running mate (and there seem to be few hard feelings between the two – Shapiro has emerged as a key Harris campaign surrogate), but if a few thousand votes in the commonwealth end up being the difference between a Harris Administration and a Trump Administration, many Democrats will be left wondering what could have been.

If some of these factors feel a little granular and nit-picky, that’s kind of the point – in a state that figures to be as close as Pennsylvania, nearly every decision that the campaign makes will have some impact on the outcome, and nearly every special interest or demographic subgroup is key to victory. That’s also what makes it so difficult to determine who has the current advantage in the commonwealth – recent electoral performance suggests Democrats may have cracked some sort of code, but the policy debate and fundamentals could quickly swing in Republicans’ favor. Either way, don’t be surprised if, in the days and weeks after Election Day, the three most common words you read and hear will be “Pennsylvania,” “Pennsylvania,” and “Pennsylvania.”