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Former President Donald Trump is scheduled to speak in North Philadelphia on Saturday, the next stop in his unconventional but highly effective strategy for the 2024 presidential election.
Like many things in life, it all started with a trip to a New York City liquor store, but now it’s become a staple of the former president’s third White House campaign.
In April, as he was about to begin a criminal trial that would limit his campaigning for several weeks, Donald Trump showed up after the trial at a small, locally owned store in Harlem and held a small, impromptu, almost spontaneous rally.
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Within minutes, social media was flooded with images of diverse crowds chanting Trump’s name with a kind of celebrity appeal not seen in a politician since Barack Obama.
Trump will next perform a show on the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey’s deep blue countryside, before taking part in a rally in the Bronx, an event at a black church in Detroit and speaking in North Philadelphia on Saturday.
Voters want to be heard and they don’t want to be ignored, which is why simply showing up to the polls has proven so effective for Trump.
For those of you who don’t know much about North Philadelphia, it’s one of the roughest neighborhoods in the roughest city in the U.S. Most of the residents are black and Hispanic, and they’ve struggled with crime, drugs, and poverty for generations under Democratic leadership.
But it’s also a place that Republicans are afraid to go in, or simply won’t go in, because they don’t believe they can actually win there.
Donald Trump may not win a majority of voters in North Philadelphia or the Bronx, but that’s not the point. What’s important is that Trump is on the campaign trail, he’s listening, and he’s offering disaffected Democrats a real alternative.
Frankly, the timing couldn’t be better: After all, it’s poor urban residents who are suffering the most under Joe Biden’s struggling economy, all the while watching the president’s policies give undocumented immigrants hotel rooms, food, and even cash cards.
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Trump doesn’t need to win in these places, and polls already show that if he can swing votes in battleground states, especially Philadelphia, Atlanta and Detroit, Biden’s path to a second term would be as narrow as a pinhole.
Another advantage Trump has in campaigning in this Democratic district is that, as has been the case for much of this election, Joe Biden cannot even replicate it.
Joe Biden can’t just travel to small ruby-red towns and hold events — first, he’s made it clear that he views most of those voters as dangerous MAGA extremists, and second, he clearly can’t stand the rigors of such a rally.
Biden’s only real appeal to minority voters, beyond the claim that “if you don’t vote Democrat, you’re not black,” is that Trump is a terrible racist, but even this hackneyed claim has lost any persuasive force it may have once had.
Voters want to be heard and they don’t want to be ignored, which is why simply showing up to the polls has proven so effective for Trump.
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Other Republicans might learn a lesson here: Perhaps the great old party has a tendency to give too much away to minority and urban voters, or perhaps Democratic dominance in these places is finally being recognized as a decades-long disaster.
If Trump’s rise to power in a once-stiff and straitlaced Republican Party indicates anything, it’s that the fundamentals of American politics are shifting. Things that were once impossible are starting to happen. And as long as the Democratic Party continues to slide crazily left, anything really is possible.
It is widely known that the last Republican presidential candidate to show up in the Bronx before Donald Trump was Ronald Reagan, another politician with the power to redraw well-worn political maps.
That was in 1984, but four years earlier, during a debate with Jimmy Carter, Zipper had introduced a new question into American political vocabulary when he asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
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Today in North Philadelphia, Trump will be asking the assembled crowd that very same question, but there is growing evidence that for many there, the answer is a resounding “no.”
Win or lose, Trump should be celebrated for reaching out to all Americans — after all, that’s the only thing that can bring our divided society back together.
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