PHILADELPHIA — There are times where Alyce Hobson, 80, can’t believe what’s happening to food prices. One Sunday in late September, she walked into a Philadelphia grocery store and came out with three small items that cost almost $30.
“Prices are totally ridiculous,” said Hobson, a retired government employee who assisted Philadelphia’s social workers. “I looked at my bag and said, what did I buy?”
The economy, specifically inflation, ranks among her chief issues in this presidential election. She wants a candidate who can get it under control and end what she thinks is rampant price gouging. Hobson believes that candidate is Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I do need a president who understands that people and their budgets really can’t manage that indefinitely,” she said. “Something, at least the quality, the sizes, but hopefully the prices have got to change.”
When Hobson casts her ballot, she’ll be one of the estimated 1.14 million eligible Black voters in Pennsylvania who have the option to vote in what many political observers and both campaigns readily describe as the most significant of the nation’s seven battleground states. Pennsylvania and its voters control 19 electoral college votes, more than any other swing state.
In September, as Capital B spoke with Black voters in Philadelphia — the state’s most populous city, which is nearly 40% Black — what came into view were many voters like Hobson, eager to cast a ballot in this presidential election, but who know or continue to encounter others in Philadelphia they describe as apathetic or determined to boycott voting. The situation has, just weeks before the election, created a sense of unease about the future.
For many of these voters, improving the economy is a big issue. But they raised a variety of others, including preserving civil rights gains, restoring and sustaining abortion access and reducing gun violence. The voters, who like most Black people in Philadelphia were nearly all Democrats, also said they were buoyed by the possibility of electing a Black woman president or rebuffing her opponent, a man who they said excels at weaponizing hate.
Most were cautiously optimistic about Harris’s prospects. But if their neighbors here don’t turn out to vote, they recognize that her prospects will be poor. A Real Clear Politics average of 13 recent statewide polls indicates Harris and former President Donald Trump are tied.
“As close as Pennsylvania is,” said Kellan White, a senior Harris campaign adviser in Pennsylvania. “As close as it always is, we’re in for the fight, because at the end of the day, you know, our very democracy is on the line.”
In Philadelphia, and in the county of the same name, some political analysts believe, rests the key to presidential victory. Registered and active Democrats outnumber their Republican peers in Philadelphia 6 to 1 and those registered and active as independents or with other parties make up nearly 20% of the entire electorate.
It’s here that Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, can wrack up a sufficient number of votes to counteract what Trump is expected to collect in the suburbs around the city and in other parts of the state.
President Joe Biden did so in 2020 and won the White House. In 2016, when Trump secured the presidency, he won Pennsylvania with just 44,292 votes, the majority due to Black voters who did not turn out in Philadelphia or Democrats and independents in the state who, contrary to precedent, cast a ballot for Trump.
Part of the Democratic Party’s base, Black voters matter here in this election more than any other single group. One political operative described the respective campaign’s efforts to appeal to Black voters as do or die.
Recently, things have escalated to the point that letters have appeared in some mailboxes falsely claiming the current administration has selected their home to house undocumented immigrants.
“That’s because they know they can not win without Pennsylvania,” White said about the misinformation effort. White did not accuse the Trump campaign of sending the letters, but rather Trump supporters.
“Why would I vote?”
Hobson lives in Mount Airy, a middle class and racially mixed neighborhood in Northwest Philadelphia, one of the first integrated in the United States. She is such an enthusiastic Democrat that when we met at a nonpartisan political gathering in Northwest Philadelphia on a weeknight hosted by Capital B and Philadelphia organizations and funders, her political inclinations were clear before she said a word. Hobson was carrying an accordion-like purse made of plastic-coated miniature magazine covers featuring members of the Obama family. She is more than aware that not everyone feels the same way about politics and the people involved.
Last year, as she registered newly eligible voters in area high schools, many girls were eager to register. But Hobson had the hardest time of all with boys enrolled at Martin Luther King Jr. High School. The school serves a student body that is about 94% Black and sits in Germantown, a historic section of Philadelphia where the American anti-slavery movement is said to have begun.
“I can’t tell you how many times I heard, ‘Why would I vote?,’” Hobson said. “‘That doesn’t do anything.’ ‘An election doesn’t have anything to do with me.’”
In a city facing economic headwinds like Philadelphia, that kind of apathy isn’t hard to find. A city councilman who is Black announced in February that he is so concerned about the number of young Black men who have not voted in recent elections that he and others would try to register 2,024 Black men under 40 by the state’s Oct. 21 registration deadline.
Philadelphia remains the poorest of America’s major cities, where 20% of the population survives on incomes that fall below the federal poverty line. Poverty — with its tendency to focus energy, attention, and time on matters of survival and weaken faith in elections — creates conditions social scientists have long linked with depressed turnout and inconsistent voter participation.
The county’s unemployment rate sat at 5.1% in July, according to preliminary federal figures, significantly higher than joblessness across the state and country. And in Philadelphia, homeownership and the mortgage debt it requires, education and the debt it also often demands, do not produce anywhere near the same returns for Black residents that they do for white residents, according to a 2023 analysis produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. It’s a city where Black Americans once flocked for opportunity, and a community where fealty to the American Dream can be difficult to sustain.
The stakes are high
Marie Dillard, 18, is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania and one of those people whose lives seem to intersect more directly and more often with pivotal events shaping modern American politics than others.
Dillard grew up in New Jersey and entered first grade the same year that a gunman shot and killed 20 children in a Connecticut elementary school, which felt not too far away. Her high school years at a Delaware boarding school nearly coincided with the global pandemic. She was 16 when the U.S. Supreme Court ended national access to legal abortion, and Dillard decided where to go to college based, in part, on the state abortion policy landscape. Dillard knows and hears that people are struggling, but as a student she doesn’t have many expenses for which she’s responsible and can’t really remember pre-pandemic prices.
Her top concerns include restoring and sustaining women’s access to abortion and electing a president and Congress that will use every type of power possible to restrict access to high-power weapons and gun purchases.
Hobson shares both those concerns. “There’s never been anything good that’s come from men telling women what to do with their bodies,” Hobson said.
Harris’ revelation that she is a gun owner gave Dillard some confidence that a President Harris would pursue gun control while respecting the Constitution’s Second Amendment guarantees and, in particular, some women’s need to arm themselves for protection.
Hobson said she also wants a president who will address crime the way she thinks best: more rigorous gun control.
“In Philadelphia, night after night, we have young people shooting and killing each other for just no reason,” Hobson said. “It’s a tragedy and a nightmare.”
City data indicates that homicides are down 40% when compared to the first nine months of 2023. But, statistics do not always translate to an immediate sense of safety. Recently, Hobson declined a presidential debate watch party invitation from Mayor Cherelle Parker. It would have left her out too late at night, alone.
Dillard said she is also worried about preserving American democracy, untainted by the ideas contained in Project 2025. (Trump has disavowed the conservative manifesto, describing the nearly 1,000-page document and the plans it contains as something of which he has no knowledge. However, the vast majority of those who drew up its contents are current or former Trump advisers and staff).
Dillard understands the sentiments of young people she knows who say they won’t vote at all or will cast a protest vote for a third-party candidate in hopes of making a statement or moving the country toward something other than a two-party system.
“It’s hard to describe,” Dillard said. “I think some of them — they don’t grasp or maybe worry about the suffering that will happen right here, the potential inability to even voice dissent, if we all get four more years of Trump.”
To Dillard, four more years of Trump sounds risky to downright dangerous for women, for girls, for LGBTQ individuals. So, when she casts her first presidential election ballot in November — an event she thinks she may mark with Harris-inspired silk pressed hair for the day — she thinks it might be at least a little exciting. She’ll be voting for a Black woman who shares some of her political goals and is a historic candidate.
Battling for Black voters
Representatives of the Harris and Trump campaigns have described their efforts to appeal to Black voters in Philadelphia as full throttle.
Surrogates are accepting invites from podcasters, such as the Philadelphia-based The Realest Podcast Ever, and YouTube channel operators, and the campaigns are working with social media influencers and engaging with nontraditional media such as the Shade Room to try to reach Black voters. (The number of Americans of all races and ethnicities reading or watching news produced by organizations that have long covered politics has, in most cases, declined sharply since 2016.)
The Harris campaign has seven field offices in the city and dozens of field staff working to meet people where they are or where they congregate — in parking lots, in barber shops and beauty salons. A former plant shop has become a campaign office also offering pot painting sessions. Staff and volunteers are engaging in the hard conversations, White said.
Campaign offices were set up so early in Philadelphia, instead of during the final weeks as it’s traditionally been done, that White remembers seeing a Biden-Harris sign swapped out for a Harris-Waltz placard on July 21. Campaign staff and volunteers have also knocked on doors in every ward, he said.
More of that will be happening with just weeks left before the election. The campaign will be working to counter the Republican effort to peel off some Democrats and others in the city or just dissuade voting, White said. The Harris campaign is also trying to earn some Republican votes in five target Pennsylvania counties, cutting into another Trump path to win.
The Trump campaign has opened at least one Philadelphia field office, but situated it in one of the city’s whitest ZIP codes. In June, U.S. Reps. Byron Donalds of Florida, and Wesley Hunt of Texas, both Black Republicans and Trump supporters, hosted a bourbon and cigars gathering where Donalds appeared to describe the Jim Crow period as one that was better for Black families.
“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” he said. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively. And then HEW, Lyndon Johnson — you go down that road, and now we are where we are.”
(Johnson signed a raft of social welfare and antipoverty programs into law, many of which serve significant shares of Americans of all races to this day. Black voters began supporting Democrats en masse in the 1930s.)
As the Trump campaign courts Black voters in Philadelphia and other parts of the country, they have encouraged people to “put their emotions aside” and to vote in the interest of their wallets and their own lives, said Janiyah Thomas, a Black media director with the Trump campaign based in Florida.
“It’s just kind of trying to cut through weeds, especially when we’re talking to Black people,” she said. “People aren’t voting on culture. They are voting on the economy. They are voting on crime. They are voting on immigration, you know, the six things they’re dealing with every day. We can have a culture war conversation, but we are not solving that today or tomorrow.”
Sometimes they also remind voters that precisely how one votes is not a matter of public record.
That reminder may have appealed to a voter I met at the Community College of Philadelphia, a 19-year-old Black male student in the second year of a business program with plans to open a restaurant. Of all the Black voters I encountered in Philly, he was the one who described himself as leaning toward a Trump vote. He was unwilling to give his name.
“The lectures and looks I’d get,” he said, “I really don’t have the time or the patience. I do my research.”
The weight of history
To the Rev. Malcolm T. Byrd, 69, much of what’s happening with both campaigns feels a bit distant, perhaps a bit too reliant on digital outreach and others in elected office, positions of leadership or trust in the community to convey the stakes of this election, to cut through some lingering degree of apathy and voluminous misinformation.
Byrd noted the results of a NAACP poll made public this month, which showed that 25% of Black men under age 50 support Trump.
The economy “is absolutely a concern,” Byrd said. “But, I realize that it’s not simply good enough for me to recall what my 401(k) was during the Trump administration nor to recall that the government gave stimulus checks to some individuals. I can’t be shortsighted in believing that momentary situations are worthy of forgetting about a burden to a nation and everybody doing well.”
Byrd said he would like to hear more about the pathways out of poverty that a Harris administration would create, and views Harris and her campaign surrogates as talking constantly about the woes of the middle class. That, too, is important. But investing in the well-being of the entire nation is the right and necessary thing to do, Byrd said.
Byrd leads the congregation at Hope’s Beacon Baptist Church in West Philadelphia. He serves as a chaplain at an area youth detention facility. He directs a nonprofit, the Forum Philly, focused on gathering people for meaningful conversations and explorations of civic challenges and producing research and sometimes suggestions about ways to improve life in the city. He also works as an adjunct professor at a local university.
For Byrd, Trump is an intolerable option because of the way that he has weaponized hate, using it to galvanize his voters and to stand in opposition to collective concern, to the civil rights and inclusion necessary to sustain a healthy economy and a multicultural democracy.
“Now, let’s face it. America is still virulently racist,” said Byrd about the motivations of Trump supporters who continue to make the race competitive in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. “There are some forces that I think are very angry. Some are charged, and they feel that they’re on a mission to return America to what it once was in its worst times in history.”
Inauguration Day 2025 will fall on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. It would be devastating, Byrd said, if the nation marked it with the inauguration of someone as “radical,” and “racist,” as Trump.
I met Byrd on a Friday afternoon in late September at a political information and get-out-the-vote session at Sharon Baptist Church in Northwest Philadelphia organized by the National Action Network, a nonprofit civil rights organization. There, about 70 Black people — most of them over the age of 65, according to a show of hands — dressed in starched shirts and dresses, some in suits and ties, gathered for lunch and what was described as nonpartisan conversation.
Over baked fish and chicken, salad and thick slices of homemade pound cake, speakers warned the audience about the growing gap between men and women pursuing a college education and what each of the candidates have said about access to higher education or post-secondary training. Several spoke about the contents of Project 2025 and its likely impact on care for disabled children, Social Security, and civil rights.
Byrd had brought with him the Rev. Junius E. Ploughman, an associate minister at Philadelphia’s Monumental Baptist Church. Ploughman, 98, hoped to meet the National Action Network’s founder, the Rev. Al Sharpton, during his brief appearance. He didn’t get the chance. Still, it was Ploughman who offered something true but relatively uplifting before he and Byrd left the church building.
“I have lived long enough now that this is the second life,” Ploughman explained to me. He has experienced more than 20 previous presidential elections, the first decade of women’s suffrage, the death of segregated public spaces and formally segregated schools, and the steady growth of an active Black voter base that reached its peak in this century. “The first was a period of unmitigated oppression. This is the second. … And over here, in this life, I see that what was once the wildly unimaginable has become the completely possible.”
By that, Ploughman meant, in November, he’ll cast a ballot that could help make a Black woman president of the United States.
This coverage was made possible by a grant through the URL Collective, a nonprofit supporting local, diverse media. Capital B and URL Collective have partnered to bring you election reporting from grassroots media.