Will Trump Win Pennsylvania? By Jim Geraghty
The best indicator of the Trump campaign’s standing in Pennsylvania is the voter-registration numbers.
In November 2016, Pennsylvania had 4.2 million registered Democrats, 3.3 million registered Republicans, and 1.2 million registered with “other parties” or none.
By June 2020, Pennsylvania had 4.09 million registered Democrats, 3.29 registered Republicans, and 1.21 million registered with other parties. Then the parties began their post-primary voter-registration drives — and Republicans added a net 135,619 voters between June and the final week of September, while Democrats added 57,985 and other voters increased by 49,995, Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report calculates. Add it all up: Democrats are down 66,778 registered members from November 2016, while the Republicans added 125,381, and “other” is up 61,313. The Census Bureau estimates the changes to each state’s population each year, and Pennsylvania’s population has mostly remained flat, gaining about 19,000 people over the past four years.
Party registration doesn’t always align with voting intention. Four years ago, Trump won Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes out of more than 6 million cast, a difference of about seven-tenths of 1 percent and the narrowest margin in a presidential election for the state in 176 years. People also forget that 70 percent of registered voters cast ballots. Trump didn’t need Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes to put him over the top, but it was an emphatic sign that the Democrats’ “blue wall” in the Upper Midwest had almost completely collapsed.
Playing with the potential scenarios of the Electoral College map makes it clear that Trump can fairly easily win a second term if he wins Pennsylvania, but it is particularly hard to get him to 270 electoral votes if he doesn’t. At Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, Pennsylvania is deemed “the single most important state of the 2020 election” and “by far the likeliest state to provide either President Trump or Joe Biden with the decisive vote in the Electoral College.”
If voter-registration changes were the only measure of popular support, Republicans could feel confident about Trump’s carrying Pennsylvania this cycle. But the polling in this state has told a boringly consistent story: Biden was ahead early in the year, Biden was ahead in the middle of the year, and Biden is ahead now. One Rasmussen poll showed a tie in August, and one CNBC poll in May showed Trump ahead by four percentage points. Every other one of the 35 polls conducted since March that were used in the RealClearPolitics average has shown Biden ahead by two to eleven points.
Many Trump defenders will scoff that the polling in Pennsylvania in 2016 was “wrong,” and, indeed, four of the six polls used in the final RCP average had Hillary Clinton ahead. But they weren’t wildly off. One pair had her ahead by four points, another pair had her ahead by two points, one showed a tie, and another had Trump ahead by a point. That final average of Clinton being ahead by 1.9 points wasn’t far from Trump’s oh-so-narrow victory in the vote count.
Are pollsters missing some “shy” Trump voters? Pollsters disagree about whether their methods miss any particular demographic in a significant way, and a campaign would be foolish to assume that it’s going to dramatically overperform its final numbers in surveys. But one survey in late September does offer an intriguing argument: Praecones Analytica conducted an election poll for the Delaware Valley Journal, surveying 694 registered voters in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties. Biden led Trump in the four-county area, 60 to 35 percent. But 48 percent of respondents said they “know a friend, family member, or co-worker who they believe is supporting Trump but keeping it a secret.”
“There’s a common belief that many Trump voters are keeping their support for the President secret,” wrote Jonathan Klingler of Praecones Analytica in his analysis of the poll. “If half of voters know a closeted Trump supporter, this could indicate either a small group of well-connected shy Trump supporters, or a larger silent majority. Past investigations have found little evidence that Trump voters conceal their support from human pollsters, but if there were a substantial number of Trump supporters ignored by polls, it could turn a close election in favor of the president.”
Most political observers thought Trump had at least one potential silver bullet for the Biden campaign in Pennsylvania on the issue of fracking. Back when Bernie Sanders looked like the most likely nominee for his party, Pennsylvania Democrats feared Sanders’s call for a fracking ban would doom the party in the state. Biden now says he doesn’t seek to ban fracking but merely wants to bar new permits for drilling on public land. In his final debate with Sanders, Biden pledged “no more new fracking,” and in fact proposed energy bans that would go well beyond fracking. Biden also said, “No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period.” When confronted by environmentalists at a rally in February, Biden said, “These guys are okay — they want to do the same thing that I want to do, they want to phase out fossil fuels and we’re going to phase out fossil fuels.” A Biden administration would be generally hostile to new oil and natural-gas extraction and would want to gradually shut down the coal industry entirely. And a Biden administration’s tolerance of fracking might last only as long as Biden does; Kamala Harris does support a complete ban on fracking. But so far, that isn’t helping in a way that can be measured by public-opinion surveys.
Then there is the not-so-simple matter of the actual voting. Like voters everywhere else, Pennsylvanians are worried about catching the coronavirus and have expressed much interest in early and absentee voting. More than 2.4 million Pennsylvanians have requested mail ballots this year, and they are allowed to request them until October 27.
In mid September, the state supreme court made three rulings that were perceived to be advantageous to the state’s Democrats. First, the court pushed back the deadline for receipt of ballots from Election Day to 5 p.m. on Friday, November 6, as long as they’re postmarked by Tuesday, November 3. And the mailed ballot might not even really need a postmark; the court also ruled that ballots that “lack a postmark or other proof of mailing, or for which the postmark or other proof of mailing is illegible,” and that are “received on or before 5 p.m. on November 6, will be presumed to have been mailed by Election Day unless a preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that [they were] mailed after Election Day.”
Second, the court concluded that the state election code permits county boards of elections to accept hand-delivered mail-in ballots at locations other than their office addresses, including drop boxes. As of this writing, 15 counties are using drop boxes in addition to balloting by mail. The drop boxes may be popular but are somewhat superfluous; Pennsylvania voters are being encouraged to cast their ballots at least two weeks before Election Day and don’t need to use postage.
Third, Green Party presidential candidate Howie Hawkins was ruled ineligible because of errors in his filing paperwork, which may be more consequential than it initially seems. Four years ago, Green Party nominee Jill Stein won 49,941 votes in the state.
But the perceived advantage to Democrats from those decisions may be balanced by the court’s decision to uphold a rule barring “naked ballots.” Pennsylvania voters must place completed ballots inside a provided “secrecy envelope” before putting them in the outer envelope. The secrecy-envelope requirement is meant to ensure vote integrity. If a ballot arrives without the secrecy envelope — “naked” — it will not be counted. Before this election, Pennsylvania had stricter rules for voting absentee, so it is likely that most voters don’t have much experience voting by mail. In 2019 municipal elections, 3,086 absentee ballots in Philadelphia lacked secrecy envelopes, or 6.4 percent; in Mercer County, north of Pittsburgh, about 5 percent of mail ballots in this year’s primaries were thrown out for not having a secrecy envelope.
If 5 percent of a million voters forget or neglect to use the secrecy envelope, that would amount to 50,000 ballots rejected — a larger sum than Trump’s margin of victory in 2016. Polling indicates that a lot more Democrats intend to vote by mail than Republicans, and as of this writing 58,806 registered Democrats in the state have returned ballots, compared with just 11,646 registered Republicans. Ordinarily, that would be an ominous sign for the GOP — but any returned ballot without a secrecy envelope doesn’t do anyone any good.
Then there’s the question of whether the voter’s signature on the ballot matches the signature on file. In September, Pennsylvania secretary of state Kathy Boockvar issued guidance to counties concluding, “The Pennsylvania Election Code does not authorize the county board of elections to set aside returned absentee or mail-in ballots based solely on signature analysis by the county board of elections.” The Trump campaign filed suit against the ruling, and the issue may end up before the state supreme court before the election.
Once the votes are counted, it may be a while before anyone knows who won. Pennsylvania counties cannot start counting ballots until the morning of Election Day, which means that the vote count may arrive later — perhaps much later — than usual. Biden could win the absentee ballots by a wide margin and Trump could win the Election Day votes by a wide margin, with leads changing as one tally is added to another. Even when the votes are counted, the counting might not be done. Under Pennsylvania law, the state automatically recounts any race in which a candidate for statewide office loses by half a percentage point or less. As Florida was to 2000, Pennsylvania may be to 2020.
Right now, the only thing in Pennsylvania that’s guaranteed to be red this fall is the foliage.
Comments are closed.
