A day before During the presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris made her first campaign visit to Reading, Pennsylvania – a predominantly Latino city just an hour outside of Philadelphia. Donald Trump's campaign had been reaching out to Latino voters in the Berks County city since June, when the Republican National Committee opened a Latino Americans for Trump office to boost its appeal to Latino voters across the state.

When votes were counted in Berks County, the gulf between campaigns was wide. As in 2020, Berks went for Trump again on Tuesday – this time by 4.6 percentage points to 58 percent. Harris received 43 percent of the vote, while President Joe Biden won 45.2 percent in 2020.

The problem wasn't that Berks had become a Republican stronghold, but that Democrats had ceded territory long before Trump opened his campaign office this summer. It was a familiar story for progressive organizers across Pennsylvania who have tried in recent campaign cycles to win back voters that Democrats left on the table.

Democratic aides in Pennsylvania were on their heels in 2016, when Trump put the state in the red for the first time in three decades and won three districts that had twice voted for former President Barack Obama. When Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020, analysts and organizers attributed the victory to work in progressive cities like Philadelphia. But it wasn't the Biden campaign that did the legwork, but rather progressives and independents working in coalitions led by groups like Pennsylvania Stands Up, Make the Road Action Pennsylvania, the Working Families Party and unions like Unite Here and Service Employees International Union were led.

Democrats' reliance on progressive enclaves and local organizers to close the gap they lost with Trump's first victory was never more evident than in the midnight hours before Wednesday, as Trump pulled away with electoral votes and Harris' narrowing path to the presidency Victory once again went to voters in cities like Philadelphia.

While Biden won 13 Pennsylvania counties in 2020, Harris won just eight — with Trump edging out Bucks, Northampton, Erie, Monroe and Center counties. As the results solidified for Trump, mainstream media and Democratic pundits turned their fire not on the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party, but in two other directions – on minority voters who, along with white men and women, had turned to Trump; and among progressives who had either stayed home or voted third-party over Harris' role in the Biden administration's support of Israel's war on Gaza.

Such criticism is wrong, said Working Families Party national director Maurice Mitchell. Democrats, he said, gave way to Republicans in states like Pennsylvania, even though they knew they had the only key to winning the White House.

“This coalition is weakening for a number of reasons,” Mitchell said Tuesday night at the WFP watch party at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Philadelphia.

People asked fundamental questions of both parties, Mitchell said. “What do we gain concretely and materially from this relationship? And they deserve answers.”

That the race was so close sparks an important discussion about Democrats' continued failure to build power outside the four-year election cycle, said Nicolas O'Rourke, minority leader on the Philadelphia City Council. “Voting is the last thing we do in a functioning democracy.”

O'Rourke is one of two Working Families Party members on the city council. Local Democrats fought tooth and nail against the WFP, but the group's victories pushed Republicans from the council in the heavily blue city for the first time in history, with O'Rourke's victory in 2023. He said the focus on whether black men had defected from the Harris campaign ignored the larger reason for changing demographics.

“The problem I found in most cases was not interest in Trump, but a lack of interest in engaging. And that applies beyond this election season and this election cycle,” O'Rourke said. “I continue to believe there is an opportunity to engage black men. You feel forgotten, unseen. They see no value in voting – some of them, not all of them. … There is a lot to be said about the commitment of political parties to actually connecting with black men before expecting them to come forward.”

“This is something every party should pay attention to, whether it is election season or not, because a functioning democracy would take care of it.”

A few hours Before Harris made her first stop in Reading, Trump held a rally with thousands of people at the Santander Arena in the city's downtown.

While Trump made fewer stops in Pennsylvania than Harris — 22 to Harris' 26 — Republican groundwork targeting voters in Latino, black and white working-class neighborhoods allowed him to outperform Democrats, who placed much of their focus on targeting wealthy voters in blue strongholds to convince.

While Latino men and women supported Biden by 59 percent and 69 percent, respectively, exit polls from Tuesday show 55 percent of Latino men voted for Trump. Latino women still overwhelmingly supported Harris, although down 6 percentage points from 2020.

Latino voters in Reading are accessible — Democrats just haven't bothered, Eddie Morán, Reading's first Latino mayor, told Politico Magazine earlier this month. Morán won his 2019 primary against a Democratic incumbent by doing one thing: speaking to Latino voters in districts that Democrats had forgotten.

Much of the Democratic outreach to Latinos has come with the help of groups like Make the Road Action PA, which focuses on engaging black and brown voters. The group knocked on more than 560,000 doors, contacted 50,000 voters in eight counties and conducted 413,000 conversations with Latino voters across the state.

Issues such as living and housing costs were at the forefront of these conversations, said Diana Robinson, deputy director of Make the Road Action Pennsylvania. “The rent is too high, people are having difficulty paying their bills. This is something that we believe unites people across the board,” she said. “In Pennsylvania, the minimum wage has not increased in more than 20 years.”

Kandice Cabeza, a Harris voter in Northeast Philadelphia, said she supported abortion rights but was not enthusiastic about either candidate. She is originally from Baltimore but has lived in Philadelphia for 10 years.

“What do you do for people? What's changing in the cost of living, food, medical care, things like that, medical bills? All of those things are important too,” Cabeza said. “I haven’t really heard much about it from either of them. They're kind of arguing about who's going to be number one. But what about us? It’s like crossing your fingers that someone cares about all of us and not just a certain group.”

Independent groups are making it their mission to woo working-class voters that the Democratic Party no longer wants to reach, WFP's Mitchell said. “It's not necessarily a rightward drift in the way some political pundits are talking about it. Our approach is to take seriously meeting working class people where they are.”

The working class is incredibly diverse, but a core theme unites working people across all ideologies, Mitchell said. Three Working Families Party candidates have flipped House seats in New York, where the party lost the House seat to Democratic defeats in the 2022 cycle. John Avlon and former Rep. Mondaire Jones, both Democratic candidates in New York who leaned toward the center, lost in swing districts. Rep. Pat Ryan, D-N.Y., faced an AIPAC-backed Republican challenger in the Catskills and mid-Hudson Valley. Ryan campaigned alongside progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., in October. He won by 1 percentage point.

“Basically it’s class warfare, right? There's a reason why Democrats sometimes talk about taxing billionaires. Because it is very popular. We just think they need to say that a lot more,” Mitchell said. “This group of working-class voters of all races who have either dropped out of politics in general and are extremely skeptical of politics, or who are looking for different politics and find populist politics, and that sometimes leads them to the populist right.”

In a statement Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, IV-T, blamed Harris' loss on the party's neglect of working-class voters. “It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party that has failed working people is finding that the working class has failed them. First it was the white working class, and now it's Latino and black workers too,” Sanders said. “Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation experienced by tens of millions of Americans? Do you have any ideas on how we can take on the increasingly powerful oligarchy that wields so much economic and political power? Probably not.”

It's not surprising that minority support for Trump is increasing, Mitchell said. “Black people running for the Democrats is not full and unconditional support for a political party. It is a strategic move,” he said. “I want more black voters to ask questions and for political parties to recognize that there is a growing segment of the black electorate that can be persuaded.”

The trends themselves are not worrisome, Mitchell said. “How you respond to these trends is, in my opinion, crucial. So if the Democratic Party doesn't take these trends seriously, I think they're going to be in trouble. We take them seriously.”