In America’s ‘swingiest county’ voters are being canvassed right up to the voting booth

In Bucks County it is difficult to tell whether visible support for Donald Trump will translate into fewer votes for Kamala Harris

A Trump/Vance sticker punctuates Brandi George’s baby bump as she parades past a long queue of voters.
Cradling her swollen stomach, outside the Bucks County Administration Building, the 35-year-old mother of two has just voted for Donald Trump.
“As a mum of a young family, you know, I’m looking for a candidate who is looking for policies that are just going to make the economy better for my kids to grow up in. I am also religious, I am pro-life, I think that celebrating families is good for the country,” she says.
Mrs George is one of the hundreds of thousands of voters in the critical Bucks County – described by Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro as “the swingiest of all swing counties in the swingiest of all swing states”.
The area helped propel Joe Biden to success in the battleground state. He won Bucks by just over 17,000 votes in 2020, dwarfing Hillary Clinton’s narrow margin of fewer than 3,000 votes.
If Trump wins Bucks County, the most competitive of the Philadelphia suburbs, Kamala Harris’s chances of keeping Pennsylvania, the swing state with the biggest prize of electoral college votes, becomes much harder.
The Keystone State has voted for the winner of every presidential election since Barack Obama, the former president, won in 2008.
JJ Balaban, a Democratic Pennsylvanian political consultant, said the competitive county is “really up in the air”.
“If she loses Bucks County, the maths gets hard for her to carry Pennsylvania… it’s tough to know where she’s going to make up the votes, but just winning Bucks County isn’t sufficient.”
The Harris and Trump campaign have poured resources and time into what is arguably the most important swing state.
Polls show the candidates neck and neck in the state which Trump won by around 45,000 votes in 2016, and Mr Biden flipped back with a 80,000 margin in 2020.
Bucks County’s importance in this year’s race is made apparent by the number of party volunteers camped outside the county building trying to flip voters at the last minute, or arm them with signs and badges to spread throughout the community.
Among them is Jim Matkowski, 52, an electrician from Doylestown who has spent the past few weeks canvassing for the Trump campaign and knocking on the doors of hard-to-reach voters.
Mr Matkowski, who is dressed in a T-shirt emblazoned with the picture of Trump pumping his fist in the air following the attempted assassination in Butler, said he is “absolutely” confident Trump will win.
Pointing to the number of people around him wearing Trump merchandise, he says the Democrats are “giving stuff out but nobody’s taking it”.
He adds: “To live in Bucks County, which is arguably the most important county in Pennsylvania, which is the most important state, it’s a great honour.”
The northeast Philadelphia suburb has already been mired in claims of election interference after the Trump campaign sued, alleging that voters who joined queues before the 5pm deadline on Tuesday had been turned away.
Bucks County Judge Jeffrey Trauger granted Trump’s request, extending the deadline to apply in person for a mail-in ballot to the end of the business day on Friday.
Mike Mrozinski, 59, a retired business owner, who drives around Bucks County in a beige truck adorned with Trump flags, says he is confident Trump will win. He thinks Trump won in 2020 too.
As he is speaking several cars drive past and honk their horns in support of his bold signs, although he says not everyone has been so welcoming.
“I get some people saying ‘pathetic’, and I’m not angry. I say: ‘Why? Why is it pathetic? I love my country.’”
Mr Mrozinski, who has voted Republican in every election other than when he made the “mistake” of voting for Mr Obama in 2008, said he will vote in person on Nov 5 because he is concerned mail-in ballots are not legitimate.
Despite being a majority in the city centres, the feeling among Democrats in Doylestown is more hesitant.
Beth Matthews, 64, a kitchen and bathroom designer, said she has been waking up at 4am each day because she is so anxious about the election.
“I’m feeling scared,” she says from her front garden, where there are several Harris/Walz signs pushed into the grass.
“Four years ago I felt confident, quietly confident. Now I’m scared.”
Ms Harris needs to retain as many Biden voters as possible in Bucks, which with its mix of blue-collar towns in the south and rural areas in the north is a sort of microcosm of the country. The Democrat nominee has lost at least one vote in contractor David Dipasquale.
“I voted for Jill Stein in 2016. In 2020 I held my nose because I never vote for warmongers, and I knew that Biden was going to be a warmonger, but I couldn’t imagine how bad it would be,” he tells The Telegraph.
“So this, this election, it’s going to be Jill again.”
“The DNC did call up and say ‘how are you doing, how are you going to vote?’. I said ‘I have one, one word I can share with you… it’s genocide’”.
Asked whether he worries about votes like his could hand the election to Trump, he says: “My vote is my vote and that risk is not on me.”
Bucks is one of four Philadelphia suburbs where Ms Harris has to win by significant margins to stand a chance of hanging on to Pennsylvania.
Mr Biden enjoyed a 120,000 swell in votes across the state – 105,000 of which came from Montgomery, Bucks, Delaware and Chester.
The Telegraph spent two days criss-crossing between the four key counties to speak to voters on the ground.
Driving north from Doylestown on the 611, political signs line the grass reservations for miles and miles.
Some read “Trump/Putin” suggesting the Republican nominee is on the ticket with the Russian autocrat. Others say:  “More War – vote Harris.”
In this part of Pennsylvania, adverts have deluged the highway, the airwaves, they sandwiched every YouTube video, and most voters are fatigued by it.
Both campaigns have spent more money on ads in Pennsylvania than any other battleground state, and both campaigns will make their final overtures to voters from Pennsylvania on the eve of election day.
In Norristown, Montgomery’s county seat and where Michelle Obama was deployed with Alicia Keys to mobilise potential voters on Saturday, Democrat Ellie Klein said she felt “terrified” ahead of the election.
“I don’t want Donald Trump to win. I’m a trans person, so he and the Republican Party don’t really believe that I have a right to exist,” she told The Telegraph from outside the county court building where she will be working as a clerk.
But the divisions of this community run through Ms Klein’s own home – her father is a Trump supporter.
“It makes you feel, obviously, very uncomfortable. I mean, we have conversations at the dinner table about it, and he has nothing bad to say about Trump, really.
“It’s been quite intense, being in a swing state, like the amount of signs and people, it’s very hard.”
Although there is an abundance of Trump signs in the rural pockets of these key counties, there are also homes in the city centres adorned with MAGA signs.
Mr Balaban, a Democrat, said the abundance of visible support shows an “emboldened Trump movement”, but this might not translate to votes on election day.
“There’s no question that you’re now seeing there being more vocal and more visible, sure, but that doesn’t actually show greater signs of support.”
Roy Kallinen, 69, a lifelong Democrat who is voting for Trump, has several signs in his front garden in Media, the Democrat hub in the heart of Delaware County.
Speaking to The Telegraph as his three Labradors leap up around him, Mr Kallinen reveals he switched sides because of the pandemic.
“There used to be no Trump signs anywhere during the last two elections. I mean, people would be crazy if you put one up. This time you see them all over the place out here in Delaware County.”
John Walls, a Trump supporter who lives in the Democrat enclave of West Chester, said there are a lot more signs up in his neighbourhood than there were in 2020.
“I don’t think people are afraid to show who they’re supporting now”, he says, adding that three of his Jewish friends have flipped to support Trump because of the administration’s stance on Israel.
The business owner, 54, thinks Trump will take Pennsylvania.
“As soon as you get out of the borough, the Harris/Walz signs disappear and they’re replaced with Trump signs, and it gets us that way, until you get to Pittsburgh,” he says.
Whether these signs translate to fewer votes for Ms Harris in these key Philadelphia suburbs is yet to be seen.
But one thing is for certain – if she fails to shore up a groundswell of support here, her chances of winning Pennsylvania and the election become much, much tougher.