Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign laid out what it sees as its path to victory in Pennsylvania in a memo shared exclusively with NBC News ahead of Monday night's rally in landmark Erie County.

The Harris team pointed to polls showing Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, performing better in the suburbs of the battleground state – which it called “our own little 'blue wall'” in Pennsylvania – compared to President Joe Biden's performance there achieved growth in 2020.

The campaign also emphasized that victory would require increasing popularity among educated suburbanites, including those who voted Republican in recent elections. Nearly 160,000 voters in the state cast ballots for former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in this year's GOP presidential primary — with their numbers being stronger among suburban voters — even after she had already dropped out of the race against former President Donald Trump had gotten out.

“The Harris campaign’s path to winning Pennsylvania capitalizes on Trump’s unprecedented weakness in the suburbs,” said the memo, which also highlighted the campaign’s focus on Haley voters. “Since Trump won them in 2020, we have flipped the suburbs from red to blue, and we have also increased our support among women and tripled our support among college-educated white voters in the state.”

The campaign cited The Philadelphia Inquirer/The New York Times/Siena College and Marist College polls last month that both showed Harris six percentage points ahead of Trump in the suburbs — a notable improvement from Trump's 3-point victory over Biden to suburban Pennsylvania residents in 2020, exit polls showed. (The results of both polls last month were within their margins of error.)

Recent polls have shown the Pennsylvania race overall to be within the margin of error for polls. A Quinnipiac University poll this month showed Harris up 3 points, an Inquirer/Times/Siena poll showed her up 4 points, and the Wall Street Journal Trump has a one-point lead.

It is the most desirable battleground on the map, offers the most votes among hotly contested states and is the most common campaign target for both Harris and Trump.

Trump's “weakness in the suburbs means that to actually win he will have to double and triple his base in the reddest counties in the state,” said Brendan McPhillips, a senior adviser to Harris' Pennsylvania campaign. “And so we go on offense and go where he believes he has strength and can be competitive.”

The campaign highlighted events that Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, held in red counties like Johnstown, Lancaster and Rochester. It also detailed investments made in red parts of the state to “squeeze margins and stop Trump's only hope of victory,” and noted that 16 of his 50 statewide campaign offices are in counties that Trump is in won 2020 by more than 10 points.

The recent presidential election in Pennsylvania was exceptionally close. Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by just over a point. In 2016, Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by an even narrower margin.

“Because most polls show this is a margin of error, we are also going on the offensive with rural voters to narrow Trump's lead – a key advantage since Trump's team does not have the capacity to run persuasion and mobilization campaigns to be carried out simultaneously,” the Harris campaign memo reads:

McPhillips said improving Biden's margins in those counties by just 1 to 2 points would effectively cut off Trump's path to plunging the state into the red.

“We’re eating into his margins in a way that can’t sustain a win,” he said. “And that’s how we’re going to beat him, and that’s how we can be offensive on so many fronts.”

The campaign stressed that it had knocked on more than a million doors across the state as of Sunday, including 250,000 over the weekend since Harris replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket. It also pointed to its 50 offices and 450 local employees.

Harris has so far spent much more time in the western part of the state, including rural areas, than in the Philadelphia market, which McPhillips said is partly to introduce her to voters who may know her less.

For Trump, billionaire mogul Elon Musk increased his political involvement in the state this month through his America PAC, which is working to turn out the vote for Trump.

McPhillips dismissed the potential impact of these efforts.

“They can’t reach the level we’re at,” he said. “Even with Elon Musk’s money, you can’t spend enough to grow a business that can compete with ours. It is too late. You had to start in March, February, January, and they've been calling it for so long. It will definitely be close. We've always planned this. But that planning manifests itself in the fact that we actually had a plan and no idea about it.”

The Trump campaign said the Harris campaign is covering up a problem it faces in Pennsylvania cities — particularly in Philadelphia, the highest-voting place for Democrats in the state.

“You can point to the suburbs, but they're losing ground in places like Philadelphia,” a Trump campaign official said. “This is exactly why (former President Barack) Obama just begged African-American men to vote for her. They’ve sounded the alarm and they know they’re going to lose.”

The Trump campaign also pointed out that Republicans have significantly narrowed Democrats' voter registration lead in the state while moving Bucks, Luzerne and Beaver counties into Republican voter registration leads. It also highlighted reports that working-class voters in Philadelphia have embraced Trump.

Kush Desai, the Trump campaign spokesman in Pennsylvania, called Obama's visit a sign that the Harris team was in trouble. “An Obama visit will not convince Pennsylvanians to vote for four more years of open borders, rising prices and disasters at home and abroad,” Desai said in a statement.

In its memo, the Harris campaign said it believed it could “at least match” Biden's support in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia during his victory in those cities four years ago. She went into more detail about her efforts to reach Black voters in the state, including the staff she has hired for outreach and engagement and her events focused on Black voters.

Last week, Obama made noncommittal remarks during a campaign stop in Pittsburgh in which he said his understanding of the race was that “we have not yet seen the same kind of energy and turnout in all of our neighborhoods and communities as we did when I was there.” was.” is running. … (T)his seems to be more pronounced among the brothers.”

To speak directly to black men, he urged undecideds to rally behind Harris, saying her record deserves their support.

“This is outstanding performance that must be rewarded,” Obama said.

State Sen. Vincent Hughes told NBC News he could “understand the frustration” Obama expressed.

“Maybe the tone should have been a little different,” he said. “But let’s be clear. Let's get to the heart of what he said. There is nothing about Donald Trump's background, his career, or anything that would make any citizen, let alone a black man, vote for him. He is not a successful businessman. … He was sued for housing discrimination.”

Hughes said the Harris campaign will achieve its goals among both black men and voters in Philadelphia, adding that he has seen a flurry of campaign activity there recently that exceeds what Democrats saw in 2020 during the worst phase of the Covid pandemic.

“Things are going right for the vice president,” he said. “Look, for a woman and for a black woman it's always harder. It's not fair, it's not right, but it's getting harder. If we can make a breakthrough with this election, maybe we can finally break through this glass ceiling and not make it so difficult for ourselves in the next one.”