New Tripoli, Pennsylvania
CNN
—
Michael Pesce is conservative in the truest sense of the word.
He speaks with an economy of words. He holds himself to a high standard but prefers not to judge others. He gets through tasks methodically, wasting no time or energy – even when enjoying his hobbies.
Pesce is a hunter, and Pennsylvania deer season overlaps with election season. Archery hunting is open now, with a rifle hunting period set to open in November. So Pesce stopped by the ranges at a state park recently to check his gear.
“Hunting season is starting,” Pesce said. “That’s more important than any election for a lot of people.”
First, several shots at the archery targets, where Pesce at one point used a dime to adjust his bow sight. Once satisfied, it was down to the nearby firearm area. Pesce set his target 100 yards down range, and set his .30-6 hunting rifle on its stand.
A few stalls down, two men were firing AR-15-style assault rifles. Dozens of shots, the empty shells piling up at their feet. Pesce quietly made note of how loud it was, then got about his business: just three shots to adjust his rifle scope, then two more to allow a visitor to test his aim and get a feel for the rifle.
Then time to pack up, taking even the empty shells Pesce recycles for new bullets. A Coast Guard veteran. A Reagan Republican. A Nikki Haley voter in the April GOP primary who will be a Kamala Harris voter a week from Tuesday.
Pesce’s conservative principles tell him he can never vote for Donald Trump. And they tell him he has to vote for Harris, to try to keep Trump out of the White House, even though Pesce doesn’t like surprises and does not believe the vice president has clearly laid out a governing vision.
“That’s the scary part,” Pesce said. “I am not voting for a candidate. I’m not voting for a policy. I’m voting against a candidate and policies, and not even all the policies. Just, you know, the unstableness. Some of the things he says are truly scary.”
Pesce is part of our All Over The Map project, an effort to track the 2024 campaign through the eyes and experiences of voters who live in key battlegrounds and are part of potentially decisive voting blocs.
In Pesce’s case, he’s one of the Republicans in the counties that surround Philadelphia who supported Haley in the primary even though the former South Carolina governor had exited the race weeks before. They’re voters who view Trump as anything but conservative or principled. In many cases, they believe Trump must be defeated again to shake their party out of his spell.
“If Trump loses, then I think Republicans will start coming back to what they were,” Pesce said. “Because they won’t have that radical right side. They won’t have the craziness and instability.”
It was our third visit in five months, and Pesce, true to his conservatism, has been consistent: He said in May he would vote for President Joe Biden even as he raised concerns about his age and took issue with some of his agenda. In conversations since the switch to Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket, Pesce has made clear he sees a duty to try to block Trump.
He recently traveled West through several states that are reliably Republican. Turning on the TV or the radio was different. He returned to Pennsylvania even more mindful that he lives in the biggest of the presidential battleground prizes.
“No one’s ever been through anything like this,” he said of the 2024 campaign. “Is this an election for Americans, or is this for those seven states?”
It is important to remember our project is anecdotal reporting; the voters we are tracking, in this case Haley primary supporters, are not necessarily representative of the full universe of such voters. Yet they still provide us with valuable and sometimes telling insights. And they live in places that will be critical to the final math of who wins Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes.
This time, we met Pesce at a state range in New Tripoli, which is in blue-collar Lehigh County. He lives a few miles away in Bucks County, which in recent elections has been the most competitive of the suburban collar counties that surround Philadelphia.
Those collar counties represent one of the crucial 2024 math tests: Can Harris hold or build on Biden’s 2020 suburban strength or will Trump claw back at least to his 2016 performance, when he lost the Philadelphia suburbs but by a smaller margin than in 2020? In a state so competitive, tiny shifts can make the difference.
‘American first, conservative second and Republican third’
Joan London and Berks County offer another glimpse at the battlegrounds within the battlegrounds.
Berks is still red when you look at election maps, and it is too far out to be considered a Philadelphia suburb. But as the suburbs grow and change, often the exurbs do, too. Still farmland, but more given up to homes and services. Still plenty of Trump signs, but in some pockets surprising competition.
“This neighborhood is becoming a lot like the Philadelphia suburbs,” said London, an attorney who was born closer to Philly, in Montgomery County. “This is a primarily Republican leaning borough, always has been. But when it comes to national elections, I do see more and more support for Democratic candidates.”
A walk down London’s leafy street in Wyomissing proves her point. No Trump signs but Harris signs on several of the lawns on her block.
Not her house. London’s lawn has one sign supporting a Republican legislative candidate.
But London is voting for Harris – the first time she will vote Democrat for president.
“Sometimes you have to say American first, conservative second and Republican third,” London said.
Her decision is a shift from when we first met in May. Then, London told us she voted in the GOP primary for Haley but then switched her registration to independent because she opposes Trump and what she sees as his dangerous populism.
But back then she said she would write in a conservative because she could not support Biden. She was even more firm in that belief just after Harris took over the ticket because she views the vice president as more liberal than Biden.
She had settled on Pat Toomey, a conservative former senator from Pennsylvania, as her write-in choice. Then she watched the Trump-Harris debate, and it stirred why, back at the age of 18, she chose to be a Reagan Republican.
“The last straw was what he said about the Ukraine,” London said. “When he said we have to have a negotiated settlement. … For someone who claims to be a conservative to say that was, in my opinion, outrageous. It’s appeasement. It’s dangerous.”
She slept on what that debate answer stirred in her. And she awoke a Harris voter because, like Pesce, she believes the only way to get her party back is for Trump to be defeated.
“I needed to vote against allowing him to become president again,” London said. She knows the polling in Pennsylvania and other swing states is tight and that Trump could well win.
“I don’t want it on my conscience that I contributed in some way to that,” London said.
London is reluctant to speak for others but believes she may have company among at least some fellow local conservatives.
“I was surprised by how many people came up to me and kind of whispered, ‘I feel the same way as you do,’” she said. “So I have a feeling there are quite a few private conversations that are occurring behind the scenes in Republican and conservative circles.”
It could matter if London has company. Hillary Clinton lost Berks County by 18,189 votes. Biden lost it, too, but by a slightly smaller margin: 16,841.
That 1,348 vote difference seems tiny, maybe insignificant, when you note that Pennsylvania has more than 9 million registered voters.
But ‘every vote counts’ is not a cliché in the battlegrounds: Trump’s winning margin here in 2016 was just 44,292; Biden’s in 2020 was 81,660.
Never Trump, but not yet Harris
Cynthia Sabatini is another Haley voter who now factors into the battleground math.
She lives in Media, in suburban Delaware County.
Sabatini is a registered Republican but she has never voted for Trump. And she says she never will.
“Trump is a non starter for me,” she said in a recent interview at home.
But she is not sold on Harris, either, and her questions track what we hear from a lot of voters in our travels, even committed supporters of the vice president.
“I don’t know who she is,” Sabatini said. “I really don’t. Because she had different positions than she does now. But she continues to say they are within her value system. So connect the dots for me.”
What can Harris do to win her vote in these final days?
“You need to answer questions on point,” Sabatini said. “You need to provide more details about your economic plan. You need to provide more details about your vision for this country.”
Sabatini wrote in a Republican senator in 2016 when Trump won Pennsylvania. She voted for Biden in 2020. She is well aware of the 2024 math, and friends voting for Harris aren’t shy about reminding her how critical it is for the vice president to get big margins in the suburbs.
“I don’t care what they personally think about that,” Sabatini said. “I don’t want to be forced into making a decision between one of the two.”
She meditates frequently, sometimes twice a day, and says it can clear the mind for tough choices.
As she ponders hers, she shares this: “I think Trump is going to win.” That, she said, is based on betting lines, not the polls.
Sabatini does not want Trump back in the White House. She has a mail-in ballot and plans to drop it off on Election Day. Her decision could come as late as that morning.
She will make it according to her beliefs: Either Harris will win her over or she will cast another write in, with Haley her leading choice if it comes to that.
“The lion’s share of my friends are Democrats,” she said. “They think at the 11th hour people will have such reservations about Trump that it will cause them to vote for Harris. I don’t see it that way.”