Trump campaign targets Pennsylvania as state that holds key to White House

Donald Trump and his campaign remain laser-focused on Pennsylvania as the key swing state they have to win to beat Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, according to people familiar with the matter. The former president is preparing to hold a rally in Wilkes-Barre on Saturday afternoon.

The Trump campaign believes it still holds the advantage in the electoral college and has the easier paths to victory, despite a torrid month that has seen Harris ride a wave of Democratic enthusiasm and draw roughly level in several polls.

In the most straightforward path to victory, as briefed to senior advisers on the Trump campaign , Trump needs to flip Pennsylvania and Georgia – both of which he won in 2016 but lost in 2020 – while holding on to North Carolina.

Related: Trump adds five new campaign advisers as he attempts to find attack lines against Harris

The Trump campaign also sees other combinations in play, such as Trump winning Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona, which he also won in 2016. But the vast majority of the permutations require him to win the Keystone state, the people said.

Almost all of the roads lead through Pennsylvania. To that end, Trump has scheduled a rally in the state on Saturday to follow his rally in Harrisburg at the end of July. He has also promised to return to Butler county – where he survived an assassination attempt last month – in October.

The states the Trump campaign believes will decide the outcome of the election are the same as before Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris. “The fundamentals are still the same,” a Trump adviser recently said of how they viewed the electoral map unfolding.

The Trump campaign privately concedes Harris has made gains with certain demographics, including some Black men. But their greater concern is the potential inroads Harris has made with white men, who were crucial to Trump’s victory in 2016 and defeat in 2020.

The white male vote, in particular, is considered so important to Trump it informs why the campaign is happy with the choice of JD Vance as the running mate, even as his past derogatory comments about childless women have dogged him in recent weeks. At least part of the rationale, in addition to support for him from Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr, is that Vance could help turn out white male voters in November.

The Trump campaign is also trying to reach what it calls “target persuadables” – perhaps the last group of truly sway-able voters in the US – which make up about 11% of voters, and are defined as mostly men, moderate in ideology, under 50 and non-white, the people said.

The target persuadables demographic is considered particularly hard to reach because they are not traditional consumers of media, either through newspapers or cable news, instead getting most of their information from other online sources and podcasts, the people said.

Still, skepticism is building among some Trump operatives who have increasingly questioned whether the internal polling is off-kilter. One firm contracted to help with polling for a Republican political action committee has seen weakening support for Trump in North Carolina, which he has to hold.