Key: Navy – D+5,000 or more, Blue – D+1,001 to D+4,999, Light Skyblue – D+1 to D+1,000. Light Salmon – R+1 to R+1,000, Red – R+1,001 to R+4,999, Maroon – R+5,000 or more. (Map by Nick Field via Dave’s Redistricting)
We’re here at last, the final voter registration update before the 2024 Presidential election.
As you can clearly see from the map above, Pennsylvania Republicans continue to eat into the Democratic registration advantage that was built up during the Obama years. In late October of 2016, for instance, Dems held a 911,621 registration lead statewide.
Four years later, the GOP was able to reduce that down to 700,853. Today, the Democratic margin stands at just 281,091.
Now, such momentum doesn’t guarantee a victory for former President Donald Trump in the Keystone State. It’s worth reiterating, with Election Night days away, that voter registrations tend to be lagging indicators. Essentially, it’s not that new voters are necessarily joining the rolls to vote for Trump; instead we’re likely seeing ancestral Democrats who voted for Trump in the past now making their official switch to the Republican Party.
That being said, with the election nearly here – and this commonwealth favored to be the tipping point state – this is the perfect time to not only to dig into these latest registration numbers, but also to analyze what Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump will need to do in these regions in order to win Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes.
So let’s dive in.
A quick note: I explore our changing voter trends by tracking the gains one party accumulated in registrations over the other party. For example, R+500 means that the Republican Party gained a net 500 more registered voters in that county than the Democratic Party did over this period, while D+500 indicates the opposite.
Central
- Blair: R+1,444
- Bradford: R+793
- Cameron: R+56
- Centre: R+145
- Clearfield: R+1,055
- Clinton: R+491
- Columbia: R+755
- Elk: R+384
- Huntingdon: R+440
- Juniata: R+254
- Lycoming: R+1,128
- McKean: R+450
- Mifflin: R+541
- Montour: R+154
- Northumberland: R+945
- Potter: R+219
- Snyder: R+422
- Sullivan: R+70
- Tioga: R+478
- Union: R+276
Even with an influx of new students entering Penn State University, Democrats still failed to make gains in Centre County. Donald Trump is seeking to cut into Harris’ support with young men, and to that end, he made a visit to State College last week. While it would certainly be a surprise to see the GOP win this county for the first time since 2004, the margins will matter everywhere, even in this mostly rural central part of the Commonwealth.
Northeast
- Carbon: R+716
- Lackawanna: R+1,357
- Luzerne: R+2,904
- Monroe: R+792
- Pike: R+636
- Schuylkill: R+1,710
- Susquehanna: R+554
- Wayne: R+679
- Wyoming: R+364
Since my last update, we’ve seen Republicans overtake Democrats in registrations for Luzerne County, a development a long time in the making. After all, Trump’s already won Luzerne twice by double-digits. Despite that, Scranton Joe made real in-roads throughout the Northeast four years ago, benchmarks that Harris may well struggle to hit next week. To that end, the White House just approved nearly $9 million in Amtrak funds to give a late boost to Sen. Bob Casey and U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright here.
Northwest
- Clarion: R+506
- Crawford: R+1,020
- Erie: R+1,310
- Forest: R+55
- Jefferson: R+701
- Mercer: R+1,379
- Venango: R+592
- Warren: R+353
There’s a reason all four Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates – Harris, Trump, Vance and Walz – have all held rallies in the lakeside community of Erie. The bellwether county voted for the statewide winner in 18 of the 19 post-WWII Presidential elections, and I imagine it will be 19 out of 20 next week. In terms of registration numbers, Erie is like many of the most crucial counties in this commonwealth: Republicans have the momentum, while Democrats still maintain a lead.
South Central
- Adams: R+1,078
- Bedford: R+624
- Cumberland: R+1,061
- Dauphin: R+856
- Franklin: R+1,422
- Fulton: R+225
- Lancaster: R+3,987
- Lebanon: R+1,351
- Perry: R+533
- York: R+3,688
The South Central region contains the college-educated white voters that Harris is trying to reach with arguments about Trump’s threat to democracy and her long list of Never Trump Republican endorsements. Janelle Stelson is also depending on these voters to lift her to an upset over GOP firebrand Rep. Scott Perry in PA’s 10th Congressional District here. Nevertheless, the PA GOP continues to rack up registration gains in the region, particularly in highly-populated Lancaster and York Counties, where Dems were aiming to reduce Trump’s margins.
Southeast
- Berks: R+3,566
- Bucks: R+4,437
- Chester: R+1,391
- Delaware: R+298
- Lehigh: R+1,103
- Montgomery: R+2,002
- Northampton: R+712
- Philadelphia: D+8,146
The good news for Democrats is that they were able to pad their numbers in Philadelphia, yet the bad news is that Republicans still posted real gains in the collar county suburbs. As I’ll illustrate in a bit; Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery are the key to Harris’ path to the White House and she absolutely can’t afford to underperform here.
All that being said, we shouldn’t underestimate the Lehigh Valley, especially cities like Allentown, where the Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported that Puerto Ricans make up 27% of the total population. The Harris campaign was already targeting these voters as a demographic where they could improve upon Biden’s performance, and that was before the racist comments at Trump’s MSG rally. Now Democrats are hopeful that the controversy could swing thousands of late-deciding voters their way.
Southwest
- Allegheny: D+2,134
- Armstrong: R+1,032
- Beaver: R+1,554
- Butler: R+2,431
- Cambria: R+1,509
- Fayette: R+1,849
- Greene: R+421
- Indiana: R+1,118
- Lawrence: R+985
- Somerset: R+1,002
- Washington: R+2,499
- Westmoreland: R+3,932
While the Southeast is bound to be pivotal, we still can’t overlook this vote-rich region. Trump’s 2016 upset was powered by the Southwest after all, and Biden’s efforts to eat into Trump’s margins here four years later were an integral ingredient to his success. To that end, the Harris campaign sent the VP to places like Aliquippa and Johnstown in the hopes of once again nullifying some of Trump’s support there.
Moreover, Harris will need to top Biden’s strong performance in Allegheny County, the only other place where Dems picked up registrations over the past month. The home to the Steel City has been a foundational piece of Democratic victories this decade – John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro both won big here in 2022 – so Harris will look to become the first Presidential nominee to break 60% in Allegheny since LBJ in 1964.
How many votes will Harris need out of Philadelphia and its suburbs?
Elections really are all about the margins.
The Trump team is trying to maximize its margins in the rural areas of Pennsylvania while aiming to reduce Harris’ margins in the urban and suburban areas. Conversely, Harris is trying to eat into Trump’s rural margins while running her numbers up as much as she can in urban and suburban areas.
Given the closeness of the 2020 result (50.01% to 48.84%) each campaign will be comparing how county vote totals on Election Night differ from the 2020 numbers.
Harris will seek to rack up gains in the South Central region of the Commonwealth whereas Trump is attempting to grow in the Northeast. Then there are the areas both campaigns are targeting, including: Erie, the Lehigh Valley and the counties surrounding Allegheny.
For all intents and purposes, however, one region stands out from all the others. Philadelphia and its four collar counties made up one third of the total vote four years ago, and Harris’ margin there is bound to be pivotal.
I compiled this list of SEPA margins that various statewide Democratic candidates have accumulated over the past few decades to illustrate.
SEPA Vote Margins (Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia Counties)
- 2022 Shapiro: 749,865
- 2022 Fetterman: 588,575
- 2020 Biden: 764,144
- 2018 Wolf: 754,020
- 2018 Casey: 704,428
- 2016 Clinton: 663,630
- 2016 McGinty: 504,264
- 2012 Casey: 639,536
- 2012 Obama: 615,666
- 2008 Obama: 682,392
- 2006 Rendell: 712,080
- 2006 Casey: 464,857
As you can see, for years Ed Rendell’s landslide gubernatorial re-election in the Democratic wave year of 2006 was the high-water mark. Hillary Clinton aimed for it in 2016, and while she did better than several others, she failed to reach Rendell’s high. In a race Clinton lost by 44,292 votes, that 48,450 vote gap with Rendell made all the difference.
In the 2018 midterms, however, Tom Wolf and Bob Casey both won landslide victories, with then-Gov. Wolf even managing to set a new SEPA vote margin record of 754,020. This list also allows you to chart Casey’s growth in turning out votes from this region, which will be critical for his re-election hopes.
Just two years after Wolf broke Rendell’s record, Joe Biden was able to top Wolf’s mark by running up a 764,144 margin. Biden accomplished this mostly through his performance in the suburbs, as his advantage in Philadelphia (471,050) not only fell off from Obama’s record 2012 margin in the city (492,339) but Hillary Clinton’s 2016 margin as well (475,277).
In his own 2022 landslide victory, Shapiro set a new mark in the suburbs (388,273) but with turnout down in Philadelphia (361,592), came up just a bit short (749,865) overall.
Ideally for the Harris campaign, she’d combine a Shapiro-like performance in the suburbs with a return to Obama’s margins in Philadelphia. That’s almost certainly too optimistic, but in a very real sense, Harris’ White House hopes depend on raising her ceiling in the Southeast.
While her campaign is smartly contesting the whole Commonwealth, that work will likely still go unrewarded if Harris ends up with a SEPA margin in the range that Hillary Clinton (663,630) received. Instead she’ll have to aim closer to the 800,000 vote margin range to give her as much leeway in the rest of the state as possible.
So that’s the state of play heading into Election Night. Considering the stakes of this election, and the importance of PA’s 19 electoral votes, a Pennsylvanian’s vote has never mattered more than it does right now. Choose wisely.
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