FORGET ABOUT THE ADS and the polls. The presidential race in Pennsylvania has three variables which will determine who wins the state.
First, which campaign best understands the complex voting process governing vote-by-mail in Pennsylvania.
Second, how do the Green Party and Libertarian Party candidates for President impact the chances of Kamala Harris or Donald Trump winning the Keystone State.
Third, what has changed from four years ago that could determine the winner.
During the height of Covid, 2.6 million Pennsylvania citizens voted by mail, representing 39 percent of all votes cast in the 2020 election. Joe Biden received almost 2 million votes by mail while Trump earned almost 600,000 votes.
Trump railed against voting by mail in 2020 despite the fact it was the Republican state Legislature in Pennsylvania that passed Act 77 in 2019, which allowed mail-in voting (a priority for Democrats) and eliminated straight-ticket voting (a priority for Republicans) in the state.
Despite the fact that it was a Republican state legislature in Pennsylvania that passed Act 77, Trump continues in 2024 to bring negative attention to voting by mail, recently stating that “20 percent of votes by mail in Pennsylvania are fraudulent” without any evidence to support his claim.
With Biden winning Pennsylvania by over 80,000 votes, the Democrats’ efforts to organize a large mail-in voting program during the Covid pandemic—despite limited door-to-door campaigning—were crucial to his victory in the state. In 2020, while there was no Green Party candidate on the presidential ballot, the Libertarian candidate received over 79,000 votes, representing 1.15 percent of the vote, close to Biden’s margin of victory over Trump.
There are some important statistics to consider. Party registration in Pennsylvania has been moving Republican for the last 15 years, with Democrats now having 44 percent of registered voters, Republicans 40 percent, and Independents 16 percent.
In March 2021, registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans in Pennsylvania by 630,000. On the eve of the 2024 election, that edge has been cut to 300,000.
Experts on Pennsylvania politics expect 1.85 million votes to be cast by mail in the presidential election in 2024, with Democrats expected to capture over 70 percent of all mail-in ballots cast, down from 80 percent in 2020.
And unlike 2020, Jeffrey Yass, the billionaire founder of Susquehanna International Group, and Elon Musk are self-funding almost $50 million in an effort to substantially increase Republican vote-by-mail efforts in Pennsylvania despite Trump’s continuing public opposition.
VOTING IN PENNSYLVANIA
Pennsylvania citizens can vote by mail in two ways, but voters who want to vote by mail must sign up on an annual basis. The first option is the so-called over-the-counter voting, where a voter requests a mail-in ballot in person at a county election office, completes the ballot on-site, and then places the ballot in a county drop box—all in the same trip.
If a Pennsylvania voter chooses to vote by mail, that voter will be mailed a packet to his or her registered address. That packet will contain the envelope it was mailed in, known as the “Return Envelope,” which voters must sign and date or their vote will not be counted. It also contains the “Secrecy Envelope,” which is where a voter places his or her completed ballot in the “Returned Envelope.”
Unlike urban areas which have multiple drop box locations, many voters in the rural counties in Pennsylvania have no drop boxes other than their county election office–making mail-in voting more difficult for rural voters.
One recent decision in a September ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court concerns the date on the outside of the “Return Envelope” with the court stating that writing a date before mail ballots were printed, writing dates on the envelope after Election Day, or no date written at all, will cause those ballots to be rejected.
And all mail ballots must be received at the local county election office by 8 p.m. on November 5 – a mail ballot postmarked on November 5 but received after that date will not count.
Just to make this even more complicated, if you have any errors in the filing of your mail ballot, a voter should be able to correct any mistakes at a county election office before Election Day, but certain Republican controlled county election officials made their own judgments in 2020 as to what ballots were allowed to be corrected.
But in another decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court last week, the court ruled against the Butler County Board of Elections by a 4-3 vote, stating that voters who submit mail-in ballots that are defective for any reason, must be allowed to vote in person on Election Day.
The case in Butler County, 35 miles north of Pittsburgh (a Republican controlled-county where there was an assassination attempt on former President Trump in July) centered on voters whose ballots were rejected by the Butler County election board for lacking the mandatory “Secrecy Envelope.”
Under this recent ruling by the state Supreme Court, a voter whose ballot is rejected as a “naked ballot”–meaning it has no outside “Secrecy Envelope”–will now be allowed to vote in-person on Election Day.
Those voters can now cast a “provisional vote,” but the county election board must verify that the voter is in good standing and ensure that they have not voted twice. In the 2020 presidential election, there were 105,000 “provisional ballots” cast, with 21,800 rejected by county election boards. The standards for rejecting “provisional ballots” will now be more objective and not governed by the political allegiances of local election officials.
Pennsylvania residents obtaining new or renewed driver’s licenses and ID cards will be asked a series of questions about their voting registration unless they decide to opt out of the process. There are more votes up for grabs in 2024 resulting from the new automatic voter registration enacted by Gov. Josh Shapiro in September of 2023.
Both the Harris and Trump campaigns see the potential of another 150,000 new voters arising from the new automatic voter registration law–with these voters viewed as marginal voters, meaning they have to be located, spoken to, and then persuaded to either vote “over the counter” at their county election board, vote-by-mail, or vote in person on Election Day.
The latest numbers show over 51,000 new Democratic registrations, over 56,000 Republican registrations, and almost 58,000 Independents. These are historical stay at home and disinterested voters, but now the Harris and Trump campaigns both see some portion of these voters as perhaps the difference from winning or losing Pennsylvania and the Presidency.
However, this class of voters will be very difficult to encourage to vote by mail or at the polls on Election Day, with the best Election Day operation having a reasonable chance of achieving measurable success with these new voters.
THE EFFECT OF MINOR PARTY CANDIDATES
The other factor in who wins Pennsylvania is minor parties, with Jill Stein’s Green Party joining the Libertarian Party on the 2024 Presidential ballot. Stein is polling about 2 percent in the latest NY Times/Siena Poll. (While the Green Party was not on the ballot in 2020, the Harris campaign recognizes the threat that Stein poses to Harris winning Pennsylvania. Stein was on the 2016 presidential ballot and received almost 50,000 votes while Hillary Clinton was losing Pennsylvania to Trump by 44,000 votes.
The Democratic National Committee recently began running an ad attacking Stein in Pennsylvania as well as Wisconsin and Michigan. The ad contends that a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump and the video includes a comment from Trump that states “Jill Stein? I like her very much. She takes 100 percent from them.”
Stein’s primary pitch to Pennsylvania voters centers on Israel’s war in Gaza, telling the Washington Post that “The Kamala Harris campaign is looking for a scapegoat–they could change their policy right now. The problem is they would rather lose the election than end the genocide.”
There are 62 colleges and universities in the Greater Philadelphia area, with over 300,000 students; 25 colleges and universities in Allegheny County, with almost 90,000 students; and the largest university, Penn State, located in Centre County, with over 75,000 students. At the University of Pennsylvania, located in Philadelphia—one of the early centers of protest over the war in Gaza—there are almost 10,000 undergraduates and over 13,000 graduate students.
While the aftermath of October 7 is not the only issue Gen Z voters will consider in deciding which candidate they vote for, making the case to these younger voters that a vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump at every opportunity increases Harris’ chances of a win in Pennsylvania.
Chase Oliver, the Libertarian candidate for president in 2024, was on the Georgia ballot in 2020 for the US Senate seat. Oliver received 81,000 votes in that contest, forcing Warnock and Republican Hershel Walker into a runoff election ultimately won by Warnock.
One question about the “spoiler” effect of the Libertarian Party in Pennsylvania in 2024 will be whether the trend of self-described Libertarian voters will continue to protest the Trump candidacy by voting Democratic or by voting Libertarian.
According to Reason Magazine, a Libertarian friendly publication, Libertarian voters in 2020 “repeatedly said a majority of them preferred Biden to Trump by more than two to one.”
Kamala Harris is deploying high profile Republican surrogates like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger in an attempt to woo a portion of those 79,000 Libertarian votes from the 2020 presidential election to vote for her instead of the Libertarian candidate. Leaving no stone unturned is the unspoken rule in fights this close.
Finally, one last big obstacle on how quickly Pennsylvania counts mail ballots. Under current law, no pre-canvassing of mail ballots is allowed until 7 a.m. on Election Day and vote by mail ballots cannot start to be counted until after the polls close at 8 p.m.
In 2020, Joe Biden was not declared the victor in Pennsylvania until the Saturday after Election Day due to local election officials being unable to process and start counting mail ballots until Election Day.
The delay in the official counting of votes, pushed by Republican state legislators in Pennsylvania, allowed Trump to claim during a 2:30 a.m. press conference on the Wednesday morning after Election Day that the election was being stolen from him. Trump’s argument was based on his lead in the vote count on Election Night, which reflected only the ballots cast by in-person voters on Election Day.
I watched that rant by Trump in the Logan Hotel in Philadelphia, the headquarters for the Voter Project, where I was serving as the national communications director. We had already determined by 2 a.m. that Joe Biden would win Pennsylvania by between 80,000 and 90,000 votes based on the number of mail ballots requested by Democrats, Republicans, and Libertarians.
After Trump concluded his conspiracy-laden tirade, we ran the count again at 3 a.m. in all 67 counties on the whiteboard and concluded that Biden was indeed the winner and began feeding the facts to state and national news media.
By Wednesday evening, the state and national press corps understood the math and Biden would soon be recognized as the winner in Pennsylvania and the next president.
WHAT TO WATCH FOR ON ELECTION NIGHT
In 2024, given how close this election is, whoever wins Pennsylvania will have the superior understanding of the complexities of the Pennsylvania voting process, and the most extensive field operation which identifies, persuades, and mobilizes their respective voters to either vote by mail or vote on Election Day. If you have ever been in a major campaign, you would know how difficult a task it is to get people to vote by mail in Pennsylvania.
Given a recent ruling by the Federal Election Commission this past March that “permits campaigns for the first time to coordinate directly with their donors, including political action committees (PACs),” Trump has outsourced his Election Day operation to several third-party groups, including one run by Elon Musk. Musk is now offering cash to registered voters and using third-party vendors to manage Trump’s vote-by-mail effort and Election Day voter program.
The sheer amount of money geared to a Trump vote-by-mail effort, self-funded by Musk, is revolutionary in American politics and is a significant advantage for Trump in Pennsylvania.
The Harris campaign, by contrast, has over 50 field offices and paid staff in Pennsylvania, along with more than 50,000 volunteers from inside and outside the state. The decision by the Trump campaign to contract its Election Day operations carries significant risks, as no presidential campaign has ever moved its field and Election Day operations to third parties not under the direct control of the campaign.
With the Musk vote-by-mail project expected to add 250,000 new voters from Trump’s 2020 totals, look carefully at Trump’s vote on Election Day, as experts predict a net loss of 200,000 Election Day votes from 2020, as the Musk operation is chasing reliable Election Day Republican voters to vote by mail instead of on Election Day. Expect to see a closer contest between Trump and Harris in the early returns Tuesday evening and early Wednesday morning.
And also look for the result of the Harris campaign’s efforts to pursue Nikki Haley voters in the counties around Philadelphia. Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery counties added over 170,000 more votes in the 2020 presidential race compared to 2016.
These are the “collar counties” around Philadelphia, with thousands of suburban college-educated Republican women. Haley received between 19 to 25 percent of the vote from “collar counties,” totaling almost 42,000 votes in the Pennsylvania primary against Trump. Any conversion of Haley voters to Harris will matter in an election this close.
Finally, watch the returns in Philadelphia, where Election Day returns will be processed faster than 2020 due to new voting machines. Biden received 603,000 votes (81 percent of the total) against Trump in Philadelphia in 2020.
But Trump increased his vote total in Philadelphia by more than 24,000 votes in 2020 compared to 2016, bringing his vote total to 127,000. Trump won three wards, one in South Philadelphia (ward 26) and two in North Philadelphia (66 and 58).
Will Harris match or exceed Biden’s margin or will her vote total be closer to Hillary Clinton’s 584,000 votes in Philadelphia in 2016? An increase in Trump votes in Philadelphia will be an indicator of his campaign’s efforts in reaching out to the white working class and Black and Latino voters.
Will there be an October surprise that impacts the election results? If there is one, perhaps historians will point to Trump’s rally at Madison Garden where comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made vicious comments about Puerto Ricans, Blacks, and Jews, calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage in the ocean.”
There are 472,000 Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania and a total Latino population of 620,000, mostly residing in Philadelphia County, Lehigh County, Berks County, and Lancaster County. In the 2020 Biden-Trump race, Biden won Philadelphia County 81 to 18 percent and Lehigh County 53 to 45.6 percent , while Trump won Berks County 53.4 to 45.2 percent and Lancaster County by 57.2 to 41.3 percent.
Will this controversy last until Election Day or dissipate quickly like every other Trump outrage? With Pennsylvania this close, there may be enough Puerto Rican voters motivated to vote on Election Day and flip a close election to Harris. We-shall see.
While Pennsylvania is too close to call, there is just one certainty. Donald Trump will claim victory on Election Night notwithstanding that all the votes will not have been counted. With his vote-by-mail totals likely to show a significant increase, expect Trump to rail against the votes coming from Philly on Election Day as evidence of fraud, despite the lack of any supporting evidence.
Once the votes on Election Day are counted by late Tuesday night, I’ll head back to my whiteboard looking at the vote-by-mail registrations by Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, and Green Parties throughout the 67 counties in the state. Then, I will know who really won Pennsylvania.
And if you do the same, you will be in sync with John King as he reports the vote-by-mail results from Pennsylvania on his interactive CNN whiteboard during what has now become election week instead of Election Day.
Joe Baerlein is a principal at Baerlein & Partners in Boston and was the national communications director of the Voter Project in Pennsylvania in the 2020 presidential election.
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