LIKE BIDEN, SHE MUST BE TIGHTLY CONTROLLED BY STAFF: Salena Zito: Harris’s tightly controlled Pennsylvania event avoided Pittsburgh.
She finished the day at a local Sheetz gas station, which was ironic at least and arguably hypocritical considering that Harris’s administration sued Sheetz in April. The ludicrous suit claims that merely by conducting criminal background checks on job applicants, the company was practicing racial discrimination.
Beaver County is located to the west of Allegheny County, adjacent to the airport. It was once a powerful component of the Democratic Party, filled with union families who worked at the steel mills in Aliquippa and Ambridge. But as the Democratic Party shifted leftward, the voters moved toward the Republican Party. In 2020, then-President Donald Trump won the county over Joe Biden by nearly 20 percentage points.
While some local Democrats thought the move was strategic to show she was attempting to expand her universe, others were more cynical, citing the tight control of who attended her planned events and the risk she would take doing an event in Pittsburgh, where she might face a pro-Hamas contingent in her party that has become very politically vocal there.
Late last week, that movement, spearheaded by the Pittsburgh Democratic Socialists of America, came to a head. The Democratic Socialists of America’s Pittsburgh chapter submitted a petition to the city for a proposed ballot question this November that would ban Pittsburgh from doing business with companies that have financial ties to Israel. The petition spurred accusations of antisemitism and placed Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey on the hot seat.
Gainey’s initial reaction was a concern that the ban would grind to a halt the city’s ability to deliver services. Gainey did not, however, ever publicly object to the ballot question. When the ballot petitions were handed in last week, it was discovered over a dozen employees within Gainey’s administration, including Communications Director Maria Montaño, had signed the petition. Within days, Montaño stepped down from her position.
Since Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel last Oct. 7, the city has become a hotbed of pro-Palestinian protests, including an encampment that was set up on the grounds of the University of Pittsburgh. The city has also become a hotbed of vandalism to synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses, and the homes of Jewish residents in the city neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, where the massacre of 11 congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue occurred six years ago.
Several longtime Democratic strategists in Pennsylvania believe Harris avoided Pittsburgh for any of her stops and stuck close to the airport so she could avoid the possibility that protesters would interrupt her tour in the important battleground state of Pennsylvania.
Related: Abandon Biden rebrands into Abandon Harris during DNC: ‘Reminiscent of 1968.’
She’ll run from these people, but she won’t denounce them.