On a recent Sunday afternoon, in Chester County, Pennsylvania, some hundred women gathered at a strip mall between an Acme supermarket and Mister Wok Chinese Restaurant. Cramming into a pop-up Democratic field office, they listened, rapt, as Elizabeth Warren, the senator from Massachusetts, preached to them. “Every door you knock on, every text you send . . . every person you visit with while you’re doing school dropoff, every single conversation you have, every outreach you have—it’s for Kamala, but it’s for our democracy,” she said, bouncing on her black sneakers. Despite her vim, Warren’s voice wavered with exhaustion. “I will walk across broken glass,” she told me later. “I will swim a river full of piranhas, but I am going to get this done.”
The women cheered for Warren, then formed a selfie line that snaked around the office’s inflatable palm trees. (There was an odd disconnect between the office’s interior and the drab parking lot puddling with rain.) Some of the women had brought their daughters with them, among them Tara Haarlander, a forty-six-year-old scientific writer who told me that she had become politically active in 2020 to combat the disinformation surrounding COVID-19. Haarlander waited in the photo line with her eight-year-old daughter, Rachel, who wore a T-shirt that read “We won’t go back, like ever.” Rachel said that she had formed a club called the “Mini Dems,” and was currently writing its charter.
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With a population of five hundred and fifty thousand, Chester County is the wealthiest of the four “collar counties” surrounding Philadelphia. Its voters are critical to securing a Kamala Harris victory in Pennsylvania. With nineteen Electoral College votes, Pennsylvania is the most consequential swing state in the country, and, for Democrats, no group is more essential to mobilize than the women of the Philadelphia suburbs, who helped Joe Biden defeat Donald Trump in 2020. According to a recent Philadelphia Inquirer/New York Times/Siena College poll, in Pennsylvania, fifty-seven per cent of women favor Harris, while fifty-three per cent of the state’s men favor Trump. Christopher Borick, a professor at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, told me, “With other parts of the Democratic coalition such as Black and Latino voters showing cracks, it may be women in suburban Philly that can help put Harris over the hump in Pennsylvania this November.”
The event at the strip mall was led by Danielle Friel Otten, a Democratic state representative whose district includes part of Chester County. Friel Otten, who is forty-seven, wore a polka-dot raincoat and a necklace that said “V-O-T-E.” She told me that progressive suburban women like herself have come to see helping one another vote as a form of community support. “The mental toll of motherhood is enormous,” she said. “This is one of the ways that we help one another keep the wheels on the bus, by making sure that our neighbor who’s working and running carpool knows that she can vote early or by mail.” But their effort wasn’t just about turning out other liberal suburban women. Friel Otten and other volunteers have also been trying to swing their neighbors, including registered Independents and Republicans, to vote for Harris.
Friel Otten picked up a list of twenty-one potential voters to door-knock, and opened a canvassing app called MiniVAN on her phone. She scrolled over a map of a nearby subdivision and noted the political affiliations of the people on her list: many were registered as Republicans.
“This is usually the time of year we talk only to friendly voters,” she told me. According to conventional political wisdom, Labor Day marks the end of contacting “persuadable” voters; as November approaches, it becomes too dangerous to try to persuade one’s political adversaries to vote. “The risk is that we might turn out voters for the other side,” she explained. This year, however, the game had changed. Friel Otten and the other volunteers were still knocking on red doors into October, hoping to turn them blue, while also knocking on blue doors to insure that as many Democrats as possible cast their votes.
“You’re seeing phases of the campaign that have to mash into each other because they got such a late start,” J. J. Abbott, a Democratic political strategist from Pennsylvania, told me. He explained that the tactic of combining persuasion and mobilization was known as “mobisuasion.” Some version of it was employed by the Biden campaign, in 2020, when the pandemic disrupted the typical campaign calendar. That year, higher-than-usual voter turnout in the collar counties helped to carry the election for Biden, contributing just over a hundred and four thousand more votes for him than for Hillary Clinton, in 2016. Since combining persuasion and mobilization had proved successful in 2020, and this election was polling so closely that no vote could be taken for granted, “mobisuasion” was now part of the Harris playbook. As Abbott put it, “You can’t just wait until the end anymore and tell people it’s time to vote.” Instead, in this drive for the margins, the strategy had become everything, everywhere, all at once.
Since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, women in the Philadelphia suburbs have experienced a political awakening. In Chester County, Friel Otten has become a field marshal of this movement. As the mother of two small children, she first became politically active in 2017, in opposition to a natural-gas pipeline running through her neighbor’s back yard. I met her in 2018, soon after she decided to run for state representative with the aim of flipping her county blue and weakening the long-standing Republican hold on the Pennsylvania state legislature.
Later that fall, when she won, Friel Otten’s victory became symbolic of the blue wave that carried Democrats into state and national office, in Pennsylvania and across the country. Four women from Pennsylvania were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where there are now five from the state. (Pennsylvania has still never elected a woman as governor or as a U.S. senator.) “The blue wave wasn’t just blue,” as Friel Otten put it. “It was female.” It was also profoundly local, as Democrats played catch-up with the Republican strategy of targeting politics at the grassroots level, running for school boards and as township supervisors.
Once in office, Friel Otten became a visible symbol of opposition to the oil and gas industry. In 2020, she was targeted by conservative nonprofit groups, who spent more than a half million dollars running an opposition campaign against her and a colleague, which included driving billboard trucks around Chester County with Friel Otten’s photo on them. “The attacks were dumb, but they were relentless,” she told me. “It was the worst bullying I’ve ever experienced.”
Nevertheless, she won reëlection with an extra percentage point of the vote, and her popularity has continued to increase every two-year cycle. In 2024, in addition to running her own campaign and driving the vote for Harris, she is helping other Democratic women in their attempts to flip their districts in the remaining Republican strongholds in the collar counties. One afternoon in September, Friel Otten drove to the gentle hills of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, to strategize with Elizabeth Moro, a candidate running for Democratic state representative, in a wealthy and traditionally Republican district that spans parts of Chester and neighboring Delaware County. (If elected, Moro will flip the last seat in Delaware County from red to blue and help secure a razor-thin Democratic margin in the state house.) Because the homes in much of her district are on large plots of land, Moro is known for riding a scooter when she goes door to door. Sometimes she drives a vintage Land Rover. In the cup holder, she carries dog biscuits made by children with disabilities.
Moro was raised in Michigan as one of twelve children in a staunchly Catholic and Republican family. “I was the twig that went the other way,” she told me. In early 2016, when Trump won the Republican primary, she changed her party affiliation to Democrat. “Trump was the nominee and I wanted nothing to do with that,” she said. In this, she reflects the larger move to the left among American women.
Moro is also a real-estate agent, and, in the fall of 2021, she and her husband, Vince, became the proprietors of a café called Centreville Place, in nearby Delaware. The home of the Bidens is several miles away. (“Jill Biden comes here all the time for muffins,” Moro told me.) Moro caters to a silver-palate clientele: in addition to stocking authentic French butter made in Normandy, she hung fox-hunting prints from her dining room. Tables are grouped closely together so that it is nearly impossible to sit alone or to have isolated conversations. The café is part of Moro’s deliberate effort to create conversations across lines of political difference. Her tagline is “Everyone should have a place at the table,” and she just bought the domain name “political chefs” for her Web site.
“I’m not interested in winning a James Beard Award for my food,” she told me. “I’d rather win a Peace Prize for bringing people together in a time of turmoil.” Although three of the collar counties are swinging to the left, the fourth, Bucks, is reddening, which remains, in these last weeks of the race, a major cause for concern. Friel Otten fears that a victory in Bucks County will help give Republicans a new foothold in the Philadelphia suburbs. To stop them, Friel Otten is campaigning hard on behalf of Anna Payne, who is thirty-seven and running for state representative in the hotly contested county. Diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at birth, Payne is currently undergoing treatment for cancer, which has made campaigning door to door difficult. “But not impossible!” she told me. “Women have been underestimated for a very long time, but we could be the reason that Bucks goes blue and we elect a President Harris.” Payne is battling not only for Bucks County but to help Democrats hold on to their single-seat advantage in the state house. “We could be the game changer,” she said.
In August, I tagged along with Friel Otten to knock on the doors of potential voters who were registered as Republicans and Independents. Many people didn’t answer, which is often the case, regardless of political affiliation. (Some canvassers grumble that the proliferation of Ring cameras is partly to blame.) And yet Friel Otten told me that canvassers going door to door on behalf of her campaign reported contact rates of twenty-nine per cent, which far surpassed national averages of fifteen to twenty per cent.
Friel Otten had noticed that Republican men who were voting for Harris were particularly chatty. “It’s as if they’re proud of themselves,” she said. As we went door to door on a hot afternoon in a high-toned suburb just outside of the Main Line, we approached a house with a white Porsche in the driveway and a back-yard pool. Its owner, Matt, came to the door in his bathing suit, a tattooed sleeve of lotus flowers winding around his left arm. Matt, who works in the intelligence and defense industry, was registered as a Republican. However, for the past two election cycles, he’d voted third-party, he said. It wasn’t so much that he’d left the Republicans, he added, “The Party left me.” He considered himself a Reagan Republican. “Trump has courted such an extreme, with QAnon, Christian nationalists, and the far-right MAGA mentality, it’s not the party whose values I gravitated toward in the nineties,” he said. This cycle, he was voting for the Democrats.
