It came down to the wire, as it was always going to. And it came down to Western Pennsylvania, as everyone knew it would. Which is why Donald Trump and Kamala Harris came here, too, on Monday night, on the eve of the 2024 election.
Even for those who somehow missed all of their other appearances in the region, or those of running mates JD Vance and Tim Walz, even if you missed the advertisements, the entire race was there in split-screen. There at PPG Paints Arena was Donald Trump, the candidate who seemingly can’t stop talking. And there at the Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic Landmark site in Swissvale was Kamala Harris, a candidate often accused of not saying enough.
“Americans have suffered one catastrophic failure, betrayal and humiliation after another,” said Trump at the outset of a speech that, when combined with some guest remarks, lasted nearly two hours.
And it mixed stratospheric promises — “Your communities will be richer, and your future will be brighter than ever before” — with such gutter insults as deriding U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff with “scum” and “Watermelon Head” (“He’s got the largest head and the smallest neck.”)
By contrast, Harris spoke for less than 10 minutes, to a festive crowd that waited hours to hear her. And in what seemed an effort to reach out to moderate, and potentially Republican voters who had grown weary of Trump’s combativeness, she pledged to “be a president for all Americans."
“We have an opportunity in this election to finally turn the page on a decade of politics driven by fear and division,” she said.
But she barely touched on policy, with one exception: abortion. Her campaign, she said, was about fighting for freedom, and in particular “the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have government tell her what to do."
In fact, shout-outs to female empowerment and the election’s stakes for women were sprinkled throughout the Harris event. Harris was accompanied by musical performances from Andra Day and Katy Perry, who told the crowd that she backed Harris because “She’ll protect my daughter’s future and your children’s future.”
That was the kind of hope that Stephanie Ware brought, along with her two children, when she went to vote for Harris at Homewood’s Kingsley Center Tuesday afternoon.
"I think she's really just for the people, and she's going to do what it takes to make life more comfortable,” Ware said.
And seeing a Black woman on the ballot shows that "we can do it just as much as a man can do it," she said. "I want to definitely see her get the opportunity.”
Trump, for his part, has been criticized for styling himself as a “protector” of women himself. (“I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not,” he said at a rally in Wisconsin.) And he didn’t mention abortion Monday night, setting aside his long-standing and deeply tenuous argument that the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn abortion rights, which his judicial appointees made possible, was popular because it put abortion rights in the hands of states.
But his Monday-night event in Pittsburgh arguably suggested the extent to which his campaign has worried about his standing with women.
Trump himself observed that “in politics, you’re not allowed to call a woman beautiful anymore.” And among his guest speakers was conservative media personality Megyn Kelly, who told his supporters that while he “got mocked by the left for saying he would be a protector of women … it’s why I’m voting for him.”
Kelly then addressed the “ladies out there who want a bit of girl power. .. How can you win when the sons and the husbands and the brothers and the dads you love are losing?”
But at the heart of Trump’s campaign — and, polls suggest, his popularity — has been a populist economic stance that since the outset of his political career nearly a decade ago has focused on fracking, tariffs, and his own purportedly forceful approach to negotiation.
His final Pittsburgh speech barely mentioned fracking, the industry that long has been at the heart of his economic pitch to Western Pennsylvania. He focused much more heavily on tariffs, which his campaign offers as the solution to problems ranging from fentanyl to factory closures.
“We're going to tariff the hell out of them,” he said of China. “And Mexico. … If we put even a small tariff on like 10, 15%, you're talking about tens of billions of dollars.”
But Trump’s economic message arguably began and ended with a question he asked near the top of his speech: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”
For many of his supporters, the answer is obvious. Just outside his polling place in Shaler, Andrew Helble said concern about immigration and inflation were top issues. “Our previous four years under [Trump] were a good time,” he said.
Harris’ speech was given against an icon of the steel industry, the blast furnaces that once served a U.S. Steel mill, the Homestead Works, whose name was an emblem for American manufacturing might. But she didn’t reference the setting, nor did she refer to her own economic plans, some of which — including a series of tax cuts to encourage small-business creation and plans to address shortages in rural health care shortages and other needs — her campaign rolled out earlier in Pittsburgh.
But at the heart of her argument has been the fragility of democracy. And if Trump’s supporters look back on his previous term with fondness for his economic record, his doubters look forward with anxiety about what another four years could bring. Many cited the fact that Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to keep him from leaving office in 2021, and fear what he will do if returned to it.
"I have very strong opinions about him as a person," said Leann Krupa of Shaler. "It didn't go that great the first time — they stormed the Capitol.”
Trump’s final Pittsburgh speech reflected those concerns, including as it did years-old grudges about the investigations of his first presidency, and promises to put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a skeptic of vaccines and water fluoridation — in charge of health policy.
“Bobby’s going to pretty much do what he wants,” he said.
As the closing of the polls drew near, Democrats and Republicans alike seemed optimistic. Both were touting heavy turnout in the places where they needed it. Republicans were looking at strong performances in GOP bastions such as North Fayette and Sewickley, while Democrats celebrated big numbers on college campuses.
They won’t both be right. But then — as the speeches of their standard bearers made clear — even when these political movements roll into the same city, they seem to live in two different worlds.
