https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/11/02/will-trump-win-pennsylvania/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_
Voter-registration numbers indicate his standing
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.”