Step aside New Hampshire and Iowa; your days of hogging up all the electoral oxygen in the country may be seeing an end. Pennsylvania has become the true battlefield state in the country. California and New York are solidly blue, Texas and Florida are bright red, and our very own Keystone State, the fifth most populated in the country, is ripe to go in either direction. That means that candidates from both parties are going to have to show that they have “Pennsylvania Pride” and can bring their party those super valuable nineteen electoral college votes in the November 2024 election.
A little history will help grasp the seismic shift that is taking place right now. In the presidential elections from 2000 to 2012, the Democratic candidate won more votes than the Republican. In the 2016 race, the Republicans finally broke the pattern, with Donald Trump receiving 2,970,733 votes to Hillary Clinton’s 2,926,441, roughly a half a percent difference. And the official vote count for Pennsylvania in 2020 had Joe Biden receiving 3,458,229 to 3,377,674 for Trump. This was barely a .2 percent difference.
But something has been happening since 2020. This 50/50 seesaw between the Republicans and Democrats has shifted. Fifteen years ago, the Democrats had a 1.5 million registered voter advantage over the Republicans. This is why they knew that they would win if they could just get their constituency to the voting booth. The ‘no-questions-asked’ absentee ballot initiative was an ideal tool for their party. They put their eggs in this basket because they knew they had more votes on their side.
However, that was then, and this is now. In the recent 2022 primary election, the Republicans cast 138,831 more ballots for their governor candidate than the Democrats. A recent Reuters article noted, “Nowhere is the Republican advance in voter registration greater than in Pennsylvania, where so far this year Republicans have converted four Democrats for every Republican who has switched to the Democratic Party, according to data published by Pennsylvania’s Department of State. That’s on track to be the highest conversion rate in at least a decade and well above 2016, when Republicans took the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate.”
That 1.5 million voter advantage that the Democratic Party enjoyed in 2008 has been cut down today to less than half a million today. Even the stronghold of Philadelphia is seeing a shift. Just this year, 1,315 Democrats in Philadelphia have filed to change their party registration to Republican, more than four times the number of Republicans making the opposite switch.
Many surveys reveal that many of these voters are reluctantly leaving their party, but they view it as their party has left them. In addition to inflation and other economic issues, a growing number of Pennsylvania voters have become disillusioned with the Democratic Party over its perceived shift leftward on cultural matters. Dr. Terry Madonna, a highly regarded political science professor at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, has noted that the shift toward the Republicans is not just inflation but the frustration in a wide number of issues. Rampant crime, parents being told they have no say in their child’s education, and severe restraints on energy supplies — that had been a boon to the state’s economy not so long ago — have all disturbed the most loyal of Democratic Party members. All this has resulted in their party having the smallest margin over the Republicans in two decades.
National polling shows there has been a shift in recent years in voter preferences. They have become more and more disillusioned with big government answers. They now show a preference toward less government involvement in everyday life and an economy featuring capitalism and free enterprise to give individuals more power to solve their own problems. Truth be told, the Republican Party has recognized but has not exactly championed these preferences. But, these concerns definitely fly in the face of the traditional Democratic Party focus on bureaucrats running federal government initiatives designed to solve all of our country’s social and economic problems.
The outcome of the presidential election in November of 2024 will largely be determined in our very own Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I would not be surprised that as Pennsylvania goes, so goes the country. And if I am right, there will be a caravan of presidential wannabes knocking at our county’s door in the not-so-distant future.
