JD Vance making campaign stop in Newtown, Pennsylvania
NEWTOWN, Pa. (CBS) - Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance is set to speak Saturday at a Bucks County athletic club owned by a prominent GOP delegate .
Vance and Donald Trump have visited Pennsylvania several times leading up to the Nov. 5, 2024 election. Pennsylvania is a battleground state carrying 19 electoral votes and Bucks County is one area outside Philadelphia that Republicans have been working to flip red.
The Trump campaign said Vance will speak shortly after 5 p.m. at a rally at the Newtown Athletic Club's Sports and Events Center on Pheasant Run. Vance is expected to criticize Democratic candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris on the pause on approving new liquefied natural gas exports as well as inflation.
"Pennsylvanians have faced record-high gas and diesel prices, all thanks to Kamala's destructive war on American energy," a news release from the Trump campaign said.
The county has favored Democratic presidential candidates in every election since 1988, and even in 2016 , when Trump carried Pennsylvania. But Republicans are working in Bucks County to turn that tide. In July, the GOP told CBS News Philadelphia that 3,000 new voters had registered as Republicans and pushed the party into the majority in the county.
Joe Biden carried the county by about 17,000 votes in 2020 while Hillary Clinton had a slimmer margin of 2,699 votes in 2016.
"Bucks County has rejected Donald Trump and his MAGA allies in every election since 2016 because they know he only fights for himself and doesn't care about us," Onotse Omoyeni, director of the Harris campaign's rapid response team in Pennsylvania, said in an emailed statement.
"JD Vance's visit will be an important reminder of the extreme, job-killing policies he and Trump are promising to bring back if re-elected. Trump and JD Vance's extreme Project 2025 agenda would ship jobs overseas and spike taxes by more than $4,000 per year, and to protect our economy and our families we need to reject him again and elect Vice President Harris," Omoyeni continued.
The Newtown Athletic Club is owned by Jim Worthington, who chaired Pennsylvania's delegation at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this summer. At the convention he made the announcement that the Keystone State GOP was committing its 67 delegates to Trump.
