PENNSYLVANIA — "Rocking the vote" has been a progressive campaign slogan touted and primarily championed by the left in American elections for years.
Yet in Pennsylvania, it's the Republicans who have more effectively used new voter registration to expand the reach of their party in the lead up to the 2020 election. And though it may not seem like the GOP is winning this voter drive by a lot, in a state which Hillary Clinton lost to President Trump by just 44,000 votes in 2016, the "every vote counts" mantra may have never been so apt.
Since the primary back on June 2, Republicans have registered 135,619 new voters, according to the latest campaign statistics made available by the Pennsylvania Department of State. Democrats have registered less than half of that, with 57,985 new voters. And it's not just this summer. From Nov. 2019 to June 2020, Republicans out-registered Democrats 44,965 to 32,829.
There's likely a very simple reason for the GOP's success: their approach to what's safe and what isn't during the pandemic.
President Trump's campaign has been canvassing door to door in Pennsylvania and other crucial swing states for months now, with Republican spokespersons saying they've made more than 116 million new voter contacts through canvassing. They argue they've done it safely despite the pandemic by taking health precautions. This comes as President Trump himself tested positive for the virus early Friday morning.
Meanwhile, citing coronavirus concerns, former Vice President Joe Biden's campaign has knocked on zero doors. The Democrats have opted entirely for virtual events in a campaign strategy move all but unprecedented in modern politics.
But that's about to change.
Biden's campaign is preparing to launch its own canvassing effort in battleground ground states including Pennsylvania, the Associated Press reported Thursday, reflecting concern over the growing discrepancy in registrations. It's a sharp change in course for Democrats, who leveled scathing critiques at the GOP when Trump's canvassing drew media attention over the summer.
"The Trump campaign is risking the lives of their staff, the lives of voters, and risking become a super spreader organization during the middle of a pandemic," Lily Adams, a Democratic Party spokesperson, said in August.
"First the Biden campaign said door knocking endangered people’s lives," Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign communications director, said on Twitter on Thursday. "Then just a couple of weeks ago, they said door knocking didn’t have any impact in elections. What changed? They know they’re being hopelessly outworked on the ground and downballot Democrats in key states have been freaking out about it. The Biden campaign has been nowhere while the Trump campaign is everywhere."
Democrats do still comprise a significant majority of all registered voters in Pennsylvania. There are 4,150,678 registered Democrats, and 3,426,563 registered Republicans, along with 1.2 million registered independent and third party voters.
In terms of exactly where this canvassing has been most effective for the Trump campaign, statistics show small GOP victories in new voter registrations in nearly every single county statewide. Unsurprisingly, the many sparsely populated rural counties around the state show the greatest gains.
And not only are Democrats not registering voters, they're suffering a net loss in many of the mid-state counties. It's a likely indication that Republican canvassing is not merely reaching Pennsylvanians who never voted; it's reaching Democrats who are turning Republican.
Since June, the Democrats have only been more successful than the GOP in six of Pennsylvania's 67 counties.: Chester, Dauphin, Delaware, Montgomery, Philadelphia, and Sullivan. The vast majority of all their gains — some 20,000 of their 57,000 new voters since June — are in the traditionally liberal bastions of Philadelphia and Montgomery counties.
Below is the county by county breakdown of total new voters registered from June through Friday, Oct. 2:
As he has since the beginning of the campaign, Biden continues to hold a polling lead over Trump in Pennsylvania. His lead is at 7.2 points as of Friday, according to a RealClearPolitics aggregate of a dozen major national polls run over the past two weeks.
But it's a lead that has slowly but steadily narrowed over the course of the summer, and GOP canvassing may be part of why. In early July, Biden's lead in that same aggregate of polls was nearly 12 points.
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