Keystone

Where have you gone Pennsylvania?
The nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

It’s all eyes on PA, now until Judgment Day. The attention was not predicted. Nor invited. Like those three days in July, 1863. “What are you doing up here?” a Pennsylvania farmer asked Confederate general James Longstreet. “How do you like this way of us reentering the Union?” Longstreet acidly replied.

The only Northern state to be invaded by the traitors. Why us? There was a disharmonic convergence in 1863. Yes, the invasion was deliberate strategy by Lee. However. But. The greatest land battle ever fought in North America was not Lee’s plan. The town of Gettysburg held no strategic significance. Lee intended a hit-and-run-back-across-the-border into a Northern state that would panic Washington, maybe get them to move the capital temporarily, wouldn’t that be a hoot? What became The Battle of Gettysburg was conceived much more modestly and only became the high water mark of the Confederacy through a much more prosaic confluence of factors. All roads converged on Gettysburg in central Pennsylvania in 1863, it seemed the natural choice. And the Confederates needed shoes. Heard there was a great store of shoes in Gettysburg. Let’s git us some.

In the decisive battle to be fought on November 3 the most reasonable paths to victory in the minds of the two candidates all converge on Pennsylvania. Not that Pennsylvania has ever been a bellweather. Nah-ah, that’s Ohio, git yourselves over theah and leave us in peace. Pennsylvanians voted for James G. Blaine in 1884 (Grover Cleveland won), for Herbert Hoover in 1932 (Franklin D. Roosevelt won), for Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 (Harry Truman won), for Hubert Humphrey in 1968 (Nixon won), for Al Gore in 2000 (W won), for Kerry in 2004 (ditto). So no, no bellweather has Pennsylvania been. They’ve been out of step a time or six. The Commonwealth’s share in the Electoral College has also been cut almost in half over time, from a high of 38 in 1912 to 20 in 2020.

We question the judgment of the candidates in 2020 in choosing a state where the underfooting is so unstable but like Lee, they have chosen. Although diminished Pennsylvania still has the fifth-most electoral votes.The closeness of recent presidential elections is another reason. Pennsylvania has always been up for grabs for either Democrat or Republican: only LBJ has gotten over 60% of the vote in a presidential election since the Great Depression; four of the last ten presidential winners in PA have done so with less than 50% of the vote (Trump won it with 48.17%); three others of the last ten have carried the state with greater than 50% but less than 51%.

Trump has always seen Pennsylvania as the “keystone” to his reelection and most feared Biden as an opponent because he thought 1) Generally, that Biden would have the greatest chance of turning Obama-Trump voters back to the Democrats. 2) Specifically, Biden, born in Scranton, would endanger Pennsylvania for Trump. So the third reason is that Biden was born in Pennsylvania.

“The enemy is there,” Trump, with Lee, declares. “And I mean to attack him there.” It is a decision Trump, with Lee, will come to regret but once, and that is eternally.