PHILADELPHIA — There are few places in America that have seen food prices spike as dramatically over the last four years as Philadelphia and its suburbs.

The fallout could decide Democrats’ fate in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, according to interviews with more than 30 voters, elected officials and political operatives.

The rising cost of living during President Joe Biden’s time in office has put Democrats on the defensive nationwide. While food inflation has come down over the past year, prices remain 20 percent higher than they were in the 2020 presidential election, a stubborn reality that has clouded voters’ perceptions of the economy. Nowhere is the issue more salient, or potentially, more consequential, than in the Keystone State.

Vice President Kamala Harris is spending her last day campaigning before Tuesday’s election in Pennsylvania. As she noted during a campaign stop in North Philadelphia last month, “Truly the path to victory runs through Philly and it runs through Pennsylvania.” Voter turnout in the city, a Democratic stronghold, is crucial to Harris’ chances of winning the state and Democratic incumbent Bob Casey’s hope of hanging onto his Senate seat. It’s also a factor in Democrats’ attempts to beat back a GOP challenge in a House district in Allentown, an hour north of Philadelphia.

While the cost of food is not the only issue shaping voter perceptions in those races, it’s given Republicans a potent talking point in the closing weeks of the election.

“I blame the president,” for rising food prices, said Rich, a registered independent voter loading his groceries in a Philadelphia ShopRite parking lot, who declined to give his last name. “I used to be a Barack Obama voter. I am completely opposite now. They’ve changed me.”

Mark Harris, a Pittsburgh-based Republican strategist who has done work for the Senate candidate Dave McCormick’s campaign, said in an interview that rising food costs have come up “very frequently” in his research in the state. “It’s a pain point that people have to deal with every day. It’s like gasoline in that sense,” Harris said.

McCormick, a hedge fund manager, and his GOP allies have seized on the issue in his campaign against three-term Democratic incumbent Bob Casey. “Everything costs so much,” one young mother laments in a TV ad funded by a McCormick-aligned Super PAC, which spent over $1 million to air across Pennsylvania media markets earlier this fall. “Filling up the car, getting groceries and the bills, they keep stacking up. I blame Bob Casey. His reckless spending caused prices to skyrocket.”

“Pennsylvania has the highest grocery inflation rate of all 50 states — this is the price of Bob Casey’s poor leadership, and it’s crushing working families and small businesses across our commonwealth,” added McCormick in a statement to POLITICO.

In the Lehigh Valley, GOP challenger Ryan Mackenzie is likewise bashing the Democratic Rep. Susan Wild on the issue.

“People aren’t stupid. They know that inflation is driven by bad decisions that came out of Washington, D.C.,” Mackenzie said in a phone interview. “High prices of food are driven by inflation. It’s not hard for people to connect those dots.”

President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, have made food prices an issue when they’ve visited the state, too. Vance staged a photo-op in Reading in September, blaming Harris for the $4 price tag for eggs — though in this display, the eggs are just $2.99.

And last month in Kittanning, northeast of Pittsburgh, Trump handed a mother of three $100 during a stop at a local grocery store.

“It [the cost] just went down 100 bucks,” he told the woman, Jenny Kantz. “We’ll do that for you from the White House.”

In a statement, RNC Spokesperson Taylor Rogers said that if elected, Trump would “cut taxes and unleash American energy to lower prices on groceries and other goods.”

“From cereal, to baked goods, chicken and beef, eggs, and milk, Americans are paying the price of Kamala’s failed polices just to put food on the table for their families,” Rogers wrote.

Economic experts, for what it’s worth, have challenged the idea that Trump would be able to accomplish that via his proposed policies — and Harris and other Democrats have warned his promise to raise across-the-board tariffs would actually inflate prices.

Just since Labor Day, the presidential campaigns and allied PACs have spent over $22 million to air ads on the issue of inflation in Pennsylvania, according to AdImpact.

The worldwide shutdowns during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic created massive shipment and production delays for goods around the globe, which in turn sent prices soaring. Nationally, food prices surged by nearly 10 percent in 2022, the highest rate of inflation since 1979.

The war in Ukraine in 2022 exacerbated food price spikes, increasing the costs of grains, fuel and fertilizer — expenses farmers and subsequently food companies passed on to consumers. Consolidation across food and grocery retail markets have also contributed to higher prices, some experts said, pointing to growing company profit margins even as the effects of the pandemic faded. Republicans argue the trillions in government spending during the pandemic are also a major driver.

While experts are not certain why some metro areas — Philadelphia as well as Detroit, Boston, Houston and Dallas — have experienced particularly high food inflation since 2020, they have pointed to differences in labor costs and competition among retailers as some likely contributing factors.

“My hypothesis is that this is really driven by things like labor and wages and rent and transportation costs that might vary regionally,” said David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University, adding that consumer behavior can also factor in. For example, “in regions or cities where consumers favor foods with lower inflation, like fresh produce, overall food price inflation tends to be modest compared to areas with high demand for processed goods like cereals, bakery products and packaged foods, which have seen higher price growth,” he added in an email.

Casey, for his part, acknowledged to reporters after an event in West Philadelphia earlier this month that the “cost of living is a huge issue” in his race. “I think it’s probably the number one issue domestically across the country, and we’ve got to address it.”

But he argues much of the blame for rising food prices should be assigned to corporations — not Democratic politicians. The senior Pennsylvania senator, and son of former Gov. Bob Casey Sr., has made so-called greedflation a focus of his campaign and Senate work, releasing a series of reports documenting extensive profit margins long after pandemic-related cost increases to food manufacturers and groceries fell and proposing legislation that would ban food price gouging, a plan that his campaign says is based on dozens of similar state laws, including in Pennsylvania.

Biden, a close ally, took up the issue before he dropped his reelection bid, and Vice President Kamala Harris pitched a price gouging ban in one of her first major policy speeches, giving a nod to Casey’s legislation.

Political analysts in Pennsylvania say that the strategy makes sense.

“When Casey started … to make this his key angle and it’s been adopted, I think it ultimately was a good strategic move because you have to confront the issue,” said Christopher Borick, a Pennsylvania pollster and political science professor at Muhlenberg College.

And the message has broken through, at least with some Pennsylvania voters.

Cozy Wilkins, 66, a volunteer at the New Bethany food pantry in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, echoed Democrats’ “price-gouging” language when asked about rising grocery costs — and plans to vote for Democrats.

“They’re price gouging. They’re taking advantage of the situation of us going through Covid,” Wilkins said in an interview. “That makes it harder for women to feed their kids. When you’re price-gouging, all of these big corporations, they’re taking all of the money, and they’re not feeding the people. That’s very unfair.”

Rich Iezzi, a Philadelphia resident who works in the wholesale food business, said he saw price-gouging happen in real time: When inflation ebbed in the years following the pandemic, his prices correspondingly fell, but his competitors kept their markups high, juicing profit margins.

Iezzi said he’d already cast his ballot for Harris and Casey, and that the Pennsylvania senator’s price-gouging proposal was “one more reason” to vote for him. “He’s more apt to go after the price-gouging. That’s more of a good thing. I don’t think Republicans care about that as much.”

Casey leads McCormick in a recent Emerson College/RealClearPennsylvania poll by just one point. Harris and Trump are running neck-and-neck in the state, but a recent Franklin and Marshall College poll shows Harris still trails Trump by 6 points on the economy among registered voters.

The continued focus on food prices is forcing Democrats in the state off their preferred talking points — like abortion.

While Wild has embraced Casey’s price-gouging rhetoric, acknowledging her constituents’ financial hardship, she’s largely focused her advertisements and political events on reproductive rights and lowering the costs of prescription drugs, better issues for Democrats in places like Northampton County, where voters have picked the president 22 times in the last 24 elections.

“We are on the right trajectory,” Wild said in a recent interview in downtown Allentown. “The things that were put into place in the last Congress and by this administration to bring inflation down are actually working. I know that it’s been a long process, and it seems slower than people like, but we are moving in the right direction.”

Wild leads Mackenzie 50 to 45 percent in a recent Muhlenberg College poll. The same poll also finds that the economy, including inflation, is far and away the most important issue to district voters. That’s true statewide, as well, according to a New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena College poll of likely Pennsylvania voters conducted in early October. Abortion was the second leading issue for voters in that poll.

For Pennsylvanians, the pain of inflation has been compounded by the fact that their incomes aren’t keeping up. The state’s minimum wage remains stuck at the federal rate of $7.25, even as many other states, even ruby red neighbors like Ohio and West Virginia, have set higher state minimums.

Those converging economic forces have prompted a rise in Pennsylvanians facing food insecurity, the official term the Agriculture Department uses to define families who didn’t have enough to eat.

New Bethany, the Bethlehem food pantry, reports seeing a 90 percent increase from 2022 to 2023 in the number of households served, according to Marc Rittle, New Bethany’s executive director — likely due both to rising food costs and the end of generous pandemic-era benefits like an expanded Child Tax Credit. In Philadelphia, the food bank Philabundance, which serves the metro region, saw a 25 percent increase in food insecurity in its service area in 2022.

“I’m 69 years old and I’m still working to make ends meet,” said Linda Amodei, standing outside a ShopRite. “I want to quit but I can’t.” But while Amodei, who lives in Philadelphia, said that rising costs have shaped her political outlook, crime is her top concern, and she plans to vote for Trump.

In Allentown, Caitlin Young, 26, a mother of two with a third on the way, recounted how she was forced to turn to government assistance in recent years due to the high cost of living — one of a number of issues she cited in her decision to vote for Trump in 2024, as she had in 2020.