Will Harris’ visit to Pennsylvania’s coal country be a success?

She says the issues that matter most to her are shared with her friends and family.

“The cost of everything is outrageous,” Held said. “Going grocery shopping, filling up my car with gas, even doing the simple local activities that young people like to do are often out of reach, and I work all the time.”

Held’s father owns a small business in town and she says he has similar concerns.

“They’ve really struggled the last four years. It costs more to run a business. What do you do? Pass the cost on to your customers,” Held continued, clearly wise beyond her years.

Held is also concerned about the increase in uncontrolled illegal immigrants with ties to cartels.

“What are their intentions?” she said. “What about the increased drug trafficking that comes from some people smuggling it here and then killing or addicting people in the community?

“Too much chaos,” Held said, adding, “Too much uncertainty.”

Hero is voting for former President Donald Trump. Ten years ago, maybe even eight, she probably would have voted Democrat. This is, or at least was, coal country, and almost everyone was a registered Democrat with some connection to coal or manufacturing.

In 2008, when Barack Obama ran as the candidate of hope and change, he won Cambria County from Republican John McCain. In 2012, Obama didn’t just lose Cambria County — he lost it by a whopping 18 percentage points.

Why?

This was largely because Obama had given up hope and change and wanted to restructure the Democratic Party by throwing out the New Deal Democrats.

“If someone wants to build a coal plant, they can,” Obama said at the time. “But it will just bankrupt them.”

In Cambria County, coal is, or at least used to be, king. While climate change regulations, cultural disdain and the rise of natural gas have decimated the industry, coal is still the identity of the people who live there.

Head to Ebensburg, the capital of Cambria, and you can get some great beers at Coal Country Brewery on Ben Franklin Highway. There’s the Pick and Shovel, a German Altbier; Sulphur Crick, a deliciously hazy IPA; and Acid Mine Drainage, a West Coast IPA.

Early Welsh settlers found coal in abundance in the 1790s, and the county was named after the nation of Wales. Fifty years later, coal, originally used by blacksmiths for forging, had grown into a powerful industry alongside the iron and steel industries in Johnstown.

By the end of the 19th century, the mines here produced more than 1 million tons of coal.

In 1901, there were over 130 commercially viable active coal mines in the county. Eighty years later, the coal market began to decline.

Today, Rosebud is the only operating mine and the largest employer is a private, for-profit hospital network called Duke LifePoint.

Obama’s margin of victory in Pennsylvania in that 2012 election shrank from just under 10 percentage points in 2008 to 5 points, a decline largely driven by losses in counties such as Cambria.

In fact, there were five districts that went for Obama in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. If more Democrats had paid attention to these losses, they might have seen Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

While most elections focus on Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, there are about 54 other counties like Cambria that could change the outcome this election cycle, swinging to Trump in 2016 and back to Biden in 2020.

In 2016, Clinton made a rare visit to Cambria, where she toured a wire factory, where she and her team quickly discovered that her policies on trade and climate were unpopular. Despite the pouring rain that day, I remember covering the event and seeing people outside the factory protesting her visit.

Since 2016, Trump has intuitively understood that you go to Cambria to ask for voter support. I remember the Washington Post headline in October 2016 that read, “Why Did Donald Trump Campaign in Johnstown, Pa.?” And I remember thinking the question was shortsighted.

On Friday, after spending five days in Pittsburgh, shopping once and walking through a military airport complex 17 miles from the city once, Harris will return to Pennsylvania three more times. She will debate Trump in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, then attend 9/11 events at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville and then come here to stop at a coffee shop before an event.

She then heads to Luzerne County for another stop. Both counties are very important to winning the state. Whatever message Harris brings to these stops is just as important as showing up.

You can’t win Pennsylvania without holding onto your numbers in Cambria County. Yes, Cambria County. You can’t win Pennsylvania without holding onto your numbers in Luzerne County either. But you have to earn that support. So far, only Trump has bothered to earn it.

Clinton was seen by voters here as an elite candidate, and in many ways that is the danger Harris faces here. She has never had to convince a conservative Democratic, independent or Republican voter because all her elections have been in California, where there are no Republican candidates.

That’s why her message is being viewed with skepticism. Does she oppose fracking? If so, why hasn’t she lifted the ban on liquefied natural gas her administration imposed in January? Does she still support taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained illegal immigrants, decriminalization of drug possession, and drastic cuts to Immigration and Customs Enforcement?

The last one New York TimesA Siena College poll found that 31% of people say they need to know more about Harris, and 63% of those people say they want to know more about her policies and plans.

Voters just don’t know who she is. Her new policy page, which she posted Monday, did little to distance herself from Joe Biden, a president whose policies grew increasingly unpopular before he left office in late July.

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The same poll found that more than 60% of likely voters said the next president should represent a major change from Biden. However, only 25% said the vice president represented that change, while 53% said Trump did.

To win Pennsylvania, Harris will have to stay competitive here, and that means meaningful interaction with voters, not tightly controlled shutdowns. The same goes for Luzerne, Erie, Bucks and Northampton counties. Those are the places where Pennsylvania is won.