PHILADELPHIA — The City of Brotherly Love has only become more Democratic in the past two decades in terms of party registration, which stands today at 785,000 party members. It is certainly not hard to find Harris-Walz signs to back up those numbers.
However, it is also not hard to find Trump-Vance signs as well in places you normally wouldn’t find Republican campaign material, such as middle-class enclaves that are often the homes of union families.
Go to the working-class Philly union neighborhoods in Fox Chase, Mayfair, the river wards that border the Delaware River north of the Ben Franklin Bridge, Port Richmond, Bridesburg, and north of Harbison Avenue and you will see Trump support.
In a drive across U.S. Route 30 from one end of the commonwealth to the other, you get a feel as to where this race is going. It is clear that the hardcore Democratic regions are in Pittsburgh and here in Philadelphia as well as in the Philly collar counties of Montgomery, Delaware, and Chester.
Even Allegheny County, which surrounds the city of Pittsburgh, while still decidedly Democratic, has lost some of that dominance to new Republican and third-party registrations in the past few years.
The state as a whole has changed dramatically since 2008, when counties in the west like Beaver, Cambria, Fayette, Westmoreland, Indiana, and Washington were majority Democrat and strongly so. Now the opposite is true.
In October 2008, Democratic registration had surged by 13 percentage points, while Republican registration shrunk by 1 point ahead of that year’s presidential election between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain.
That year, Democrats saw an increase of a whopping 500,000 new voters, while the GOP saw its registrations retreat by nearly 30,000. In total, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 1.2 million voters by Election Day that year.
The state has changed dramatically since that cycle. Obama would win the state in 2008. He’d win again over Mitt Romney in 2012, but what went overlooked is that he earned 300,000 fewer votes than he did four years earlier, with Romney only gaining 25,000 more votes than McCain.
Voters were telling us something that year if we were paying attention. And that was that 300,000 Pennsylvania voters stayed home or just didn’t vote for the top of the ticket. Why? Mostly because they personally liked Obama but not his policies and Romney seemed more like the guy who would walk to your desk with a box and escort you from the office than the guy who would save your job.
By the time 2016 rolled around, those voters were up for grabs. Trump was the result of both parties disappointing voters, not the cause of it. They were unhappy with the Republicans not listening to them over the wars and unhappier with the Democrats’ lurch leftward on cultural issues. No one was hearing them.
Today, Democrats still have a voter registration advantage, but it has shrunk from 1.2 million in 2008 to just 325,000 today, a rightward shift that has not been understood.
Even the mail-in balloting effort, long dominated by the Democrats since the COVID-19 election cycle of 2020, has seen for the first time Republicans outpacing Democrats.
Decision Desk HQ political data analyst Michael Pruser posted on X Tuesday evening that he has been tracking Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballot requests and returns since the primary in 2020.
“Today was the first time in just over four years (10 statewide elections) that Republicans out requested Democrats in mail absentees for the previous day,” he posted, showing a chart with 8,299 Republicans requesting mail-in ballots and 8,079 Democrats doing the same.
Former President Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), his vice presidential running mate, have been to Pennsylvania’s Butler, Johnstown, Indiana, Wilkes-Barre, Westmoreland County, Allegheny County, and suburban Philadelphia in the past two weeks. Trump will be in Reading and Scranton on Wednesday, with Vance back in Johnstown on Saturday holding rallies.
Harris and Walz have held private invite-only events in Pittsburgh, Erie, and Wilkes-Barre and at the Pittsburgh airport in the past month. Obama will hold a Harris event, another that appears to be invite-only, on Thursday evening at the University of Pittsburgh Fitzgerald Field House, which holds around 400 people.
T.J. Rooney, former chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party and a former member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, said he is convinced Harris will win the race because of her support in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, “in particular among black female voters and white suburban women. It’s going to be close, but I think she pulls it over the line.”
David Urban, Trump’s senior campaign adviser in 2016, said he sees the race unfolding differently, in that whoever wins the counties outside Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, such as Cambria, Luzerne, Beaver, and Erie, will win the state.
“No Republican wins Philadelphia and its suburbs. So the question is how badly do you lose them? If Trump loses those areas by a million or less votes, we win. However, if we lose by more than a million, we likely lose the state,” he explained.
“Don’t forget that in 2020, Trump got more votes in Philadelphia than he did in 2016. I suspect he’ll do even better there. Now is that going to be hundreds of thousands? No. It is going to be tens of thousands,” he said.
The real test, though, is those rural counties, Urban said: “I think that Donald Trump’s numbers in the rural counties is the key here. He is going to do extremely well, historic numbers, in 60 of our 67 counties.”
And he’ll do well enough in Bucks and Northampton counties, Urban added. “But the key is getting anywhere from 500 to 1,000 more people to show up in those 60 rural counties than did in 2020. That is how he wins.”
Urban said the voters to look out for are the working-class voters who didn’t go to college and either went to trade school, own small businesses, work in agriculture, or are in a labor union. “These are the voters who just might be the voters who decide this election,” he said.
According to the latest U.S. Census Bureau numbers, 37% of Pennsylvanians over the age of 25 hold a bachelor’s degree, with 17% holding an advanced degree.
Pennsylvania is also the home of 749,000 union members, the highest level since 779,000 members were reported in 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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The state is also home to 1.1 million small businesses, which employ 2.5 million people — about half the state’s private workforce.
The RealClearPolitics averages in Pennsylvania continue to show a statistical tie with less than four weeks to go.