This is WESA Politics, a weekly newsletter by Chris Potter providing analysis about Pittsburgh and state politics. If you want it earlier — we'll deliver it to your inbox on Thursday afternoon — sign up here.
Suffering anxiety and profound uncertainty about the upcoming election on Tuesday? Let me offer you this bit of comfort: No one else knows what’s going to happen, either.
Feel better?
I’ve talked to politicos and read multipage analyses, spilled out sheep entrails and cast stalks of yarrow. And none of it points to a clear leader. That’s just another way of saying your vote really counts — which ought to feel good, right?
Some quantifiable data points — the stuff we can measure — suggest an edge for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania. Party registration numbers in the state have trended decidedly red, for example, though Democratic voters still have the numeric advantage. And recent Pennsylvania polling has gone from a situation in which — for the most part — Kamala Harris had “leads” within the margin of error over Trump to a situation in which — for the most part — Trump has “leads” within the margin of error over Harris.
On the other hand, as we’ve seen before, pollsters make judgments about who will actually vote, and that prediction is more art than science. (A Franklin & Marshall College poll this week, for example, showed Harris leading Trump by 4 points among all registered voters in Pennsylvania, but trailing by 1 point among voters it deemed likely to cast a ballot. Pollster Berwood Yost defended that shift but acknowledged that “there are many ways to create a likely voter screen.”)
Still, on the other other hand, one can see some indicators from key early-voting states such as Georgia and Nevada that the areas most likely to show up, at least so far, are rural conservative areas where you expect Trump to do best.
On the other other other hand, though, the question is whether those early voters represent an expansion of a party’s base, or just the frontloading of it as supervoters beat the Election Day rush. That’s a thing we won’t know for sure until Tuesday. Another potential wildcard is whether the “shy Trump” voter — who didn’t show up in polling data but did show up on Election Day in 2016 and 2020 — has been replaced by a “shy Harris” voter in conservative areas who has misgivings about Trump but will express them only at the polls.
Those of us who were around in 2016 remember similar claims: that women and more moderate Republicans would be drawn to Democratic flag-waving rather than the dark worldview Trump offered. We know how that worked out.
Still, we are seeing massive gender gaps, no doubt exacerbated by concern over reproductive rights: A recent Quinnipiac poll showed that Pennsylvania men back Trump by a 20-percentage point margin, while women support Harris by 16 percentage points.
One thing that seems pretty clear is that no matter what happens on Tuesday, Democrats made the only call they could by swapping President Joe Biden for Harris. Poll tracking in Pennsylvania shows the election getting away from Biden after a disastrous early-summer debate, a trend Harris’ entry reversed just by firming up support within her own party.
Findings from a recent WESA/Campos Pulse Survey bear that out. When we asked voters when they decided who they would support for president, 76% of Republicans said they had their minds made up more than six months ago, compared to just 61% of Democrats. But nearly one Democrat in four said they made up their mind after Biden dropped out. And while it’s possible some of those Democrats made up their minds to vote for Trump, the percentage who said they planned to vote for their party’s nominee (87%) was slightly higher than the percentage of Republicans who did (79%).
In fact, our survey panel findings suggest that Harris should have made herself more visible out here.
Clearly, exhausted reporters did not take part in our survey panel. But when we asked panelists about the impact of candidate visits to the region, 40% of Republicans said visits by the candidates made them feel much more supportive of Trump as a result, while 41% said they made no impact. Among Democrats, 31% said candidate visits made them much more supportive of Harris, while 49% said they made no difference — an 18-point gap.
Democrats, in other words, seemed a little less fired up by the appearances. Of course Trump’s rallies are perhaps the defining element of his candidacy. Harris’ visits to the region have been a different kind: She’s done massive rallies in other places, but her visits to Western Pennsylvania have been smaller-bore events, tightly choreographed and limited to smaller crowds.
But another factor in Tuesday’s outcome is something no poll can predict: whether people who intend to vote will be hindered from doing so.
One of the most depressing developments in this pre-election week is news that upwards of 20,000 mail-in ballots intended for Erie County voters — a critical battleground — may never have been received.
The county is scrambling to provide alternatives. But the problems “have caused registered voters substantial delays and hardships in casting ballots in the 2024 Election, potentially violating the right to vote,” the state Democratic Party argues in a lawsuit filed over the matter this week.
If nothing else, this fiasco should offer some evidence against Republican conspiracy theories about Democrats using mail-in ballots to cheat. If Democrats were engaged in a nefarious and attempt to stuff the ballot box with fraudulent ballots, after all, they probably wouldn’t have to file an 11th-hour lawsuit to ensure they got to where they were supposed to go.
Then again, we’ve already seen an inexplicable move in swing-y Bucks County to send voters home who showed up on Tuesday to apply for a mail-in ballot: A judge quickly told the county to make amends after Republicans rightly objected … but that hasn’t stopped Trump from accusing the state of having “cheating … at large scale levels rarely seen before.”
That kind of rhetoric prompts the biggest fear of all about Election Day: that it won’t really be the end of the election. But no matter who wins Tuesday, we are all still going to be here, stuck with each other. Let’s hope that on Election Day people think about that, too.
I’ll see you on the other side of it.
