The road to the presidency runs straight through Pennsylvania.
To carry the tightly divided swing state, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris are trying to entice the less-engaged members of their parties to turn out. They’re also trying to win over the white whales of electoral politics: undecided voters.
Who are these people? Spotlight PA attempted to find out.
One important caveat when thinking about undecided voters is that there are never many of them. U.S. politics is polarized, and most voters don’t have a hard time picking a presidential candidate.
However, “we know there's a sizable number of people that really do make their final choice close to, and including up to, Election Day,” he said. “I think the undecided voter numbers may understate that there are some people who are still thinking about their choice, even if they have sort of made it.”
He said there are a few other things pollsters generally know about undecided voters.
For one, truly undecided voters are often less likely to cast a ballot. Additionally, the last two presidential elections have seen voters who call themselves undecided break primarily for Trump.
Yost isn’t positive that that trend will continue and noted that all elections are different. The 2016 election saw Democrats vying for a third consecutive term with an unpopular candidate, which put them at a disadvantage. In 2020, Trump may have benefited from an incumbency boost. While he lost Pennsylvania, voters across the country who said they were undecided voted for him by about a 20-point margin, according to a national-level analysis from Tufts University’s Cooperative Election Study.
This year, Yost said, is “a different critter.” His polling has shown a better political environment for Republicans, with Joe Biden’s popularity underwater and voters consistently ranking the economy as their biggest concern. But if that’s the case, he added, Trump should be polling better.
“We don't have much precedent for a one-term incumbent who's been defeated for reelection who is running again,” he said. “I just don't know who has the advantage.”
Lara Putnam, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh who studies election data, has also been monitoring potentially undecided voters. She keeps close tabs on election registration data. While such information doesn’t always accurately predict outcomes, it can indicate which way voters are leaning — and she thinks she’s seeing an interesting shift in Pennsylvania.
Last year, the state made a significant change to one element of its voter registration process: When people go to the DMV, they’re now automatically prompted to register or update their registration.
This has led to an increase overall in people registering at the DMV, and it has fueled an even bigger increase in people at the DMV changing their registrations.
“Which totally makes sense,” Putnam said. “Because usually people don't ever bother, especially people who don't move. … It’s one and done.”
In what direction are these voters changing their registrations? According to Putnam’s math, they’re overwhelmingly becoming independents.
“People who register as independents are more likely to be up for grabs,” Putnam said, though she cautioned, “Not all independents are actually up for grabs, and the people who register as independents are also less likely, when push comes to shove, to show up and vote.”
Spotlight PA found and spoke to some of those independent voters to hear their thoughts, using a list of voters who responded to one of Yost’s Franklin & Marshall polls and said they were willing to speak to the media.
The team also talked to otherwise undecided or idiosyncratic voters — including registered Democrats who lean Republican, Republicans who dislike Trump, and people thinking about splitting their tickets.
They have roughly two weeks to make up their minds.
The ticket-splitters
Alice Brawley, Crawford County
Alice Brawley, an 82-year-old Republican from Meadville, told Spotlight PA her presidential vote has been decided for years.
“Trump is, in my opinion, a very disgusting man,” Brawley said of the former president.
She formed that opinion before Trump ever ran for or held public office, citing his decades as a real estate developer, casino magnate, and reality TV star.
Brawley didn’t remember who she voted for in 2016, but it wasn’t Trump, she said. In 2020, she cast her vote for Joe Biden. And this year, she plans to vote for Kamala Harris.
“I have not found anything that I totally dislike about her,” Brawley said.
Beyond president, Brawley said she votes based on what she hears and sees of candidates on television.
The former day care manager said she can’t identify a particular issue that matters to her and doesn’t pay attention to candidates’ party IDs.
Case in point: She plans to vote for Republican hedge fund millionaire Dave McCormick in the competitive race for U.S. Senate.
McCormick, she said “seems like a gentleman” and like he “has some brains in his head.”
Raymond Nauyokas, Armstrong County
Raymond Nauyokas is worried about the future of the county.
“Things are so divided,” Nauyokas told Spotlight PA. “I think that no matter what [will] happen, that it may not be good.”
Nauyokas, 57, works for the U.S. Army as an equal opportunity specialist and requested a military absentee ballot because he’ll be out of town working on Election Day. When he spoke to Spotlight PA in mid-October, it had yet to arrive. He said he’ll be undecided until he “fills in the bubbles.”
He’s a registered Republican, and predicted that most of the candidates he’ll support will likely be on that side of the aisle, especially at the top of the ticket.
Nauyokas believes that the economy did better under the Trump administration than under Biden’s. He also said his positions on public safety and immigration are more in line with the Republican party, calling security his top priority. He wants to see more funding for police officers, increased law enforcement presence, and fewer commutations for incarcerated people.
“Things are kind of crazy, with a lot of crime and illegal aliens coming through,” Nauyokas said. “It's just it's not very safe anymore.”
He said that he’d also like to see more transparency when it comes to the country’s financial support of Israel, but he generally supports the U.S.’s involvement abroad.
However, Nauyokas said that he’s open to voting to Democratic candidates in downballot races like state representative, so there’s a possibility he will split his ticket.
He said that he’s seen local Democrats in his county back police departments and try to increase police presence.
“Security-wise, they seem to have a better message locally,” Nauyokas said of Democrats.
Muhammad Qureshi, Philadelphia County
Muhammad Qureshi, a registered Republican, planned to vote for Trump until a few months ago.
Things changed when he heard the former president’s rhetoric on the war in Gaza. He thought Trump sounded racist on the issue, and said his plans for the war would likely only “support more genocide” against Palestinians rather than bringing an end to the violence.
“He is supporting invasions,” Qureshi said. “We should be the ones who would say ‘Ok, we need to stop — or at least play a role to stop — violence in the world.’”
Qureshi, who immigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan and became a citizen in 2012, said he had first considered voting for Trump because he thought the Republican might focus on public safety. The nurse, who works in northeast Philadelphia, said he has witnessed an uptick in violent crime in the past few years.
In his neighborhood, he said, he’s seen an increase of car break-ins and street racing. He wants a candidate who will address those issues.
“I am not a political person. I don't care who comes into power or who doesn't come but this is a new problem, which is happening in my community,” Qureshi told Spotlight PA.
Crime wasn’t the only reason he was thinking about voting for Trump. Qureshi was disappointed by Biden’s tenure in the White House. The rising prices of everyday necessities, like gas and food, were a major concern. Qureshi acknowledged that price hikes were partly due to the pandemic, but felt that Biden should have done more to lower inflation during his term.
However, he is cautiously optimistic about Harris. From the few speeches he’s seen, Qureshi said, he felt that “she does care about ordinary people.” But above all, he said, he’s ready to see a change in the White House. He already submitted a mail ballot with the vice president’s name in the top spot.
He didn’t vote a straight Democratic ticket, though.
Though Qureshi — a registered Republican in deep blue Philadelphia — mostly voted for “Harris’ people” in downballot races, he made an exception in his local race for state representative, voting for Republican candidate Aizaz Gill.
He said it was important to him that Gill had received the endorsement of local police and emergency medical service workers.
The issue voters
Ahmmad Eldeib, Beaver County
If Joe Biden was still leading the Democrats' ticket, Ahmmad Eldeib would probably be writing in a random name for president.
“I think Biden did his best, but I don't agree with a lot of things that older generations might believe and think are acceptable,” Eldeib told Spotlight PA.
Eldeib, a 48-year-old independent who lives in Beaver Falls, said he voted for Biden in 2020.
Eldeib’s politics skew progressive despite his lack of affiliation. He hasn’t voted for a Republican since his first time voting as a teen, and said he is concerned that the party would roll back individual freedoms using Congress or the courts.
As for Trump, “he made it alright to be racist and bigoted,” Eldeib said.
Eldeib, who was born in Saudi Arabia but came to the U.S. when he was a year old and became later naturalized as a citizen, also dislikes limitless corporate spending on politics enabled by the Citizens United ruling. Additionally, he wants more support for public schools and opposes continued American aid to Israel, which he called an “apartheid state.”
The latter belief is his biggest issue with the Democratic Party, which he often supports. That preference predates the ongoing war in Gaza.
“I've felt that the treatment of Palestinians has been wrong for my whole life,” Eldeib said.
But since Kamala Harris replaced Biden, he is all in on her to be the next head of state. Harris, he said, will bring a new generation of leadership to government that is better able to handle the diversifying country.
Eldeib also takes Harris at her word that she wants a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and that she may scale back U.S. aid to help achieve an end to the war.
“The potential for decreasing the funding may be there” under Harris, Eldeib said. “It's not there with Biden, and it's not there with any Republicans.”
Tina Franklin, Luzerne County
Tina Franklin’s vote has been decided since June of 2022.
While she’s not registered to either major party, Franklin, 44, said that the overturning of Roe v. Wade irreversibly changed her political calculus.
“Right after in June of 2022, I said to myself, ‘There's no way that I could vote Republican or conservatively — as I have in prior elections,” Franklin told Spotlight PA.
Franklin said she’s still been doing her research when looking at candidates downballot, but “nothing huge.” In particular, Franklin said she’s looking forward to voting for Fern Leard, a Democrat running for a Luzerne County state House seat.
In the past, Franklin has voted for candidates of both parties. She said she usually tries to gauge candidates based on their policy rather than their party, which is in part the reason she is registered as an independent. Her priorities have usually included increased funding for public education and lowering taxes for older adults.
But after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe, abortion access became her biggest priority. She was shocked by attempts to prosecute women and medical professionals for receiving or performing abortion care.
“It's insane to me that a [politician] thinks that they know more about the female body when they clearly don't,” Franklin said. “They think that they know more than medical professionals.”
She felt especially disgusted by attempts to intimidate medical professionals into not providing care for women who were bleeding or having a miscarriage.
Franklin is intimately aware of the medical danger that can come with losing a pregnancy.
“I've been in that situation, and if Roe v. Wade had been overturned back then, I would have died,” Franklin said. “I think it is inhumane the way that women are being treated right now.”
The conservative-leaning ambivalents
Ilya Pribyshchuk, Erie County
Ilya Pribyshchuk, a 42-year-old construction manager from Erie, has three things he thinks about when deciding on a candidate: integrity, spending, and immigration.
Pribyshchuk, a religious refugee from Crimea who has been a U.S. citizen for 10 years, wants a candidate who stands firm on their convictions, who will try to balance the federal budget, and who will introduce “solid immigration reform.”
But looking at Trump and Harris through that lens, he still isn’t sure who he’ll back when he goes to cast his ballot.
“I know that I have to pick one, but it so much seems that I need to pick the lesser evil,” Pribyschcuk, who is an independent, told Spotlight PA.
While his old home is often in the news and in campaign ads due to the almost three-year-old Russia-Ukraine War, Pribyschcuk said that it isn’t a top priority for him.
“That war is a mess, but … I'm not picking Ukrainian president or Russian president,” he said. “I'm picking U.S. president. So it's more important what they're going to do here.”
At this point, Pribyschcuk said he’s leaning 60-40 for Trump. He didn’t vote for the former president in 2016, but backed him in 2020.
Still, Pribyschcuk wishes he had better options. His ideal presidential race, he said, would be Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania — who he did not vote for in 2022 — against Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
As for U.S. Senate, the father of four said he hasn’t followed the race closely, but is leaning toward a scorched earth strategy: Vote against everyone who's currently holding office regardless of the letter next to their name in hopes the new officials can cooperate and pass solutions for pressing problems.
“It's probably about time for us to fire some” politicians, Pribyschuck said. “Democrats, Republicans, doesn't matter.”
Jack Slaughter, Lancaster County
In the coming months, Jack Slaughter will turn 20 years old, start an online degree in psychology, head off to basic training for the National Guard and cast his first-ever presidential vote. He plans to support Trump — even though he doesn’t really like him.
His choice is mostly inspired by the economy and his hopes that Trump can begin to implement a more conservative future for the nation, starting with education.
A resident of Kirkwood, in southern Lancaster County, Slaughter was raised Episcopalian and spent time in both public and private schools growing up.
He preferred his time in private schools, which he said focused more on discipline and morals. He’s exploring converting to Eastern Orthodox Christianity because his original church became “a little bit too progressive.”
A registered libertarian, Slaughter said he has “pretty stereotypically conservative” views. That includes his belief in capitalism, opposition to abortion access in most cases, desire for stricter immigration rules, and support for the abolition of the federal Department of Education.
The latter has been a conservative talking point since the 1980s and is part of the Project 2025 agenda, a set of right-wing policy goals from which Trump has attempted to distance himself. But for Slaughter, getting rid of the department would be a “bold step that is at least doing something towards the right direction.
“The government shouldn't have too much of a say in raising people's kids,” Slaughter added.
However, he’s not a fan of the Republican Party, which he thinks doesn’t fight hard enough for his values. That’s why he’s registered as a libertarian.
“The Republican Party used to stand for more, oddly enough, proactive moves towards traditional values and all that,” Slaughter said. “But lately, from what I've seen, it's kind of a uni-party deal where it's more of a controlled opposition than actually doing much.”
He also doesn’t like Trump “as a person, at all,” or elected officials in general. He thinks they put themselves first. He also thinks U.S. politics should include more term and age limits.
If Robert Kennedy Jr. was still on the ballot in Pennsylvania, the political scion would probably have Slaughter’s vote. But looking back on the economy in Trump’s first term, the young voter said he’d rather have that than the past four years under Biden.
“I don't really care how good of a person my president is if the gas is almost $4 a gallon,” Slaughter said.
Selami Veseli, Lehigh County
Selami Veseli’s top priority in this election is free speech.
However, the registered independent doesn’t know which candidate will be best on that issue. Veseli, 57, says that he hasn’t been impressed by either Harris or Trump, though he said he thinks Trump’s vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, seems well-educated and well-spoken.
Veseli immigrated from Albania in the late 1990s and became a U.S. citizen more than twenty years ago. He said he clearly remembers having speech restricted during his youth in the formerly communist nation.
He’s wary of the U.S. going down a similar path as its politics get increasingly polarized.
“I have been feeling that, for some time now, people don't say much. People don't express their opinions,” Veseli told Spotlight PA. “I want to be able to say what I think without being afraid I have some consequence at work.”
Veseli said he thinks the Democratic and Republican Parties are similar enough in ideology and policy that his focus should be on the candidates themselves.
He’s looking for a president who will protect his right to free speech and be honest about their beliefs.
“Somebody who has his own beliefs, and is willing to stand for them. That’s what I’m looking for,” Veseli said. “This time, America needs good men instead of smart men.”
He said he’ll likely finalize his decision sometime during the first week of November. For now though, he is still undecided.
Veseli says he’s leaning toward voting for Trump, but is unsure that the candidate will be able to deliver on his promises. While he’s more in line with Trump’s political agenda than Harris’s, he feels that Trump is unpredictable and speaks without care.
He also has reservations about Harris’s character.
Veseli was put off by Harris’s loyalty to Biden despite what he saw as the president’s clear cognitive decline. He pointed to the first presidential debate as an example. Veseli said he would have preferred Harris to be honest about Biden’s mental acuity and share her concerns with the public.
Veseli added that he would not consider voting for a third-party candidate, calling it a wasted vote.
“With two weeks left, I’ll probably vote for Trump,” he said. But he added, “There’s still time enough left for something [to change]. If he makes a blunder, I’ll stay home.”
The true undecideds?
Nicole Banta, Chester County
Nicole Banta, a registered Republican, voted for Donald Trump in 2020. At the time, she saw him as more of a Washington outsider than Joe Biden, which she found appealing.
But she has since reevaluated her support. Banta watches all the presidential debates, and said she dislikes the way Trump keeps “rehashing the past over and over and just kind of staying stuck there.”
She’s tired, she said, of Trump always talking about “what the Democrats have done to him.”
“I’m … willing to understand where anybody's coming from,” she said. “But it just doesn't do very much good to stay stuck there when there's so much that needs to be done.”
Banta, 40, is a stay-at-home mom of two kids. She and her family attend an independent Baptist church, and spirituality is a big part of her life. She’s originally from Tennessee and has lived in Pennsylvania for about a decade.
She typically agrees more with Republicans on policy issues such as limiting access to abortion. But she’s been annoyed with both parties having what she sees as inadequate answers on other issues that she cares about, like the fentanyl crisis and improving schools.
And where she thinks Trump is too stuck in the past, she thinks Harris hasn’t made enough of an impression.
“I think that she has potential,” Banta said of Harris. “But the different decisions that she's made over the last four years haven't been very full of positive results. I think that she's had four years to prove something more than what she has, given her position [as vice president].
Banta is also unsure how she’ll vote in the U.S. Senate race. She may end up casting her ballot for all third-party candidates, but she’s currently praying on it to help make a decision.
“What would make it a whole lot easier for me is if one or hopefully more of them came to the conclusion that they needed to trust in the Lord,” she said. “If they were saved and walking in truth, that would be that would make it an easier choice.”
Diane Josepher, Chester County
Lately, Diane Josepher and her husband have been arguing about politics.
The couple are both in their early 70s. Before retiring, Josepher worked in retail loss prevention, marketing, and corporate collections. Her husband spent most of his career as a letter carrier.
Both are longtime registered Democrats, but Josepher said they’ve drifted away from the party over the past decade or so, particularly after Trump came on the political scene.
Her husband likes Trump. Josepher also voted for the Republican in 2020, but more recently, she’s had serious misgivings.
“He says he loves this country, which is great,” she said. “But … some of the things he says are really crazy. That kind of makes me think, ‘What's going on with him?’ I always say to my husband, ‘If he would keep his mouth shut half the time, he would be unbeatable, because he does love this country.’”
Things that have unsettled Josepher include Trump’s criticism of the late U.S. Sen. John McCain for being captured during the Vietnam War; his misinformation-driven claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating cats and dogs; and his criticism of Anthony Fauci while the doctor was a leader of the White House coronavirus task force.
“He hires people, experts, to give him advice, but then he doesn't take it, and if he doesn't like what they say, he fires them,” Josepher said.
But though Josepher isn’t sure about Trump, she likes a lot of the Republican party’s platform. In particular, she thinks they align with her values when it comes to security on the southern border, crime, and the economy.
She likes some things about the Democratic party, too. Kamala Harris, she said, would probably bring “more of a caring feeling for people. She's promising to help the middle class. I really believe that she'll take the advice of her appointees.”
But she has misgivings about Harris as well.
“It seems like she's just clueless as to what's going on,” Josepher said, noting she’s never been impressed with Harris’s responses to questions about her work on immigration. Plus, “I don't think she can straighten out the economy, even though the jobless rate and the interest rates are getting better.”
Josepher watches Fox News with her husband, but she’ll also watch cable news she thinks has a more liberal slant, like CNN. She often feels overwhelmed wading through material about both candidates and seeing election ad after election ad.
In 2022 she voted for Gov. Shapiro, and still thinks he’s “really good.” But along with being unsure about the presidential race this year, she hasn’t decided how she’ll vote in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race between incumbent Bob Casey, a Democrat, and McCormick, the Republican.
“All I keep seeing are commercials that say how awful the other one is, rather than saying how good they're going to be. And it bothers me,” she said.
She does have a strategy in one area, though: When she makes up her mind, she’s not telling her husband which candidates she picked.
“I don’t want to get into an argument over it!” she said. “He doesn’t see the other side. I’m trying to look at both sides.”
90.5 WESA partners with Spotlight PA, a collaborative, reader-funded newsroom producing accountability journalism for all of Pennsylvania. More at spotlightpa.org.
