Pennsylvania has been political ground zero in presidential elections for nearly a quarter-century, and 2024 will be no different. Joe Biden carried his birth state by almost 82,000 votes in 2020, and will need to win it again this year.
As a native Pennsylvanian, I have confidence that he can. But my confidence can be shaken. There is one person on Donald Trump’s reported shortlist of running mates who has the ability to carve a Pennsylvania-shaped slice out of the so-called blue wall of rust belt states that Democratic presidential candidates typically need to win: Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.
That sound you’re hearing is the collective explosion of heads from my friends in the Democratic Party, followed by admonitions that “Latinos do not vote as a monolith.” That’s true: Cuban, Venezuelan, Dominican and Mexican Americans, as well as Puerto Ricans, do not vote in unison.
But there is something Latino voters have in common: their Latin American roots and the pride that comes from casting a vote for someone who looks and talks like them. Mr. Rubio would break a significant cultural barrier as the first Latino on a national ticket. We’ve seen how that feeling of cultural and identity pride can marshal voters and transcend ideological and partisan preferences, and it should never be underestimated.
Seldom do running mates play an outsized role in our presidential contests, as most voters focus on the top of the ticket. But Mr. Rubio gives Mr. Trump something no other presidential candidate has offered — the chance for Latinos to vote for one of their own to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Mr. Rubio could help the ticket in Nevada, where he spent a formative chunk of his adolescence and where his parents worked as a maid and a bartender in Las Vegas, or another marginal Biden state with a large Latino population, such as Arizona.
(Fears of the 12th Amendment complicating a Rubio selection seem overblown to me. Just as Dick Cheney in July 2000 switched his residency to Wyoming since his running mate, George W. Bush, was also a Texan, Mr. Rubio could establish residency outside Florida, leaving Mr. Trump as the sole Floridian on the ticket.)
To understand just how much of a threat Mr. Rubio would pose to Democrats, let’s consider the conventional wisdom: Mr. Trump is likely to win back some Sun Belt states he lost in 2020, while Mr. Biden is holding his own in the Rust Belt. But if Mr. Biden loses Pennsylvania, it would almost certainly be curtains for his campaign.
Pennsylvania has the largest Latino population in the three critical states of the so-called blue wall — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which have favored Democrats in every election since 1992 except 2016 — and Mr. Rubio is the kind of public figure whose values, rooted in a scrappy upbringing and Catholicism, could appeal to its voters.
While Pennsylvania may not be the first state that comes to mind as having a sizable population of Hispanics and Latinos (and both campaigns are targeting them), they are the fastest growing ethnic group in the commonwealth, which is often seen as an older and whiter state. According to the last census, its total population grew only 2.4 percent from 2010 to 2020, while the Hispanic and Latino population grew by a whopping 45.8 percent. Hispanics and Latinos in Pennsylvania are highly concentrated in the media markets where elections are often won or lost, Philadelphia and the agglomeration of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. These pockets of Latino voters experienced a spike in population growth in five politically potent counties that run along the eastern side of the state: Berks, Lehigh, Luzerne, Monroe, Philadelphia.
If even a fifth of Pennsylvania’s roughly 615,000 eligible Latino voters back Mr. Trump, they could easily swing the state to the red column. Most political strategists agree that the state will be won by a slender margin in November.
This year offers Republicans a good opportunity to reclaim Pennsylvania from the Democrats. There’s evidence from recent elections of a shift among Latino voters and widespread panic inside the Democratic Party about the lack of enthusiasm from such a decisive voting constituency for Mr. Biden’ in 2020. As the Democratic strategist James Carville put it last week in an expletive-laced rant, “We’re going to lose Hispanic males.” A new poll also shows that some Black voters who supported Mr. Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020 may consider voting for a third-party candidate this year.
In 2020, Democrats broke a glass ceiling when Mr. Biden selected Ms. Harris as his running mate and cemented her place in history as the first Black woman and second person of color on a major-party ticket. There had been a public campaign to lobby Mr. Biden to pick a Black running mate to energize voters of color. It worked. According to 2020 exit poll data, support from Black women for the Biden-Harris ticket was greater than that of any other groups of female voters, and also greater than Black men. Ms. Harris’s selection likely played a role in inspiring a demographic subset of voters who propelled Mr. Biden to narrow victories over Mr. Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, especially since electoral outcomes in all three states are dependent on turnout in the urban and suburban populations of Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee.
That feeling of identity pride has inspired voters to participate when they otherwise may have sat on the sidelines. In 2016, Black voter turnout declined by seven percentage points from the presidential election four years earlier, when Barack Obama was on the ballot. That year, Hillary Clinton lost to Mr. Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than one percentage point apiece.
Whether it’s gender or race or ethnicity, there are voters who make their choice because they want to be a part of history and break ground more than, say, that they agree with the candidate, or the ticket, on specific policies. One day, they will tell their grandchildren about the role they played in progress. That kind of cultural tribute drives people to the polls. And it’s that same empowerment that could scramble the calculus for Democrats with the roughly 615,000 Latino voters in Pennsylvania this fall.
In many ways, the election this November could come down to Pennsylvania, and its proud Latino population is why Marco Rubio is the only running mate Mr. Trump could choose who scares me — and should scare my party.
Michael LaRosa is a former press secretary for Jill Biden and special assistant to President Biden and a former U.S. House and U.S. Senate communications director.
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