GOP hunts for new voters in Trump territory

SLIPPERY ROCK ( Pennsylvania): President Donald Trump’s campaign has a bold theory for how he will win re-election: It can tap a universe of millions of supporters who did not vote for him in 2016 but will do so this time.

Supposedly, these voters are overlooked by polls that show Trump consistently trailing Democrat Joe Biden.

They are mostly the white working class from factory towns, farms and mining communities that Trump has elevated to near-mythic status as the “forgotten Americans.”

They are disaffected and disconnected from conventional politics.

Yet they flock to the president’s rallies, plaster their yards with signs and have been filling up voter registration rolls, the campaign insists.

This strategy will be tested in Pennsylvania, a critical state that Trump carried by only 44,292 votes out of 6.1 million cast in 2016.

To hold on to Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, the president needs to prove that a hidden groundswell of supporters exists – and will vote.

“Trump has to drive turnout,” said Terry Madonna, a professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster who has conducted polls in the state for almost 30 years.

“I don’t see any evidence that he’s expanded his base.”

The strategy is more difficult to execute given the stunning disruption wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, both in terms of a public health crisis and nationwide economic dislocation.

So his fate lay in large part in places like Butler County, an overwhelmingly white, conservative county north of Pittsburgh.

There are nearly two Republicans for each registered Democrat.

Most adults did not graduate from college. The economy rests on manufacturing and fracking, as well as from suburbs creeping in from the city. Republican turnout in Butler County was an impressive 80% in 2016.

But local Republicans say the goal is to push that number as high as 90% this year. Republican turnout in Butler County was an impressive 80% in 2016. But local Republicans say the goal is to push that number as high as 90% this year. And they’ve spent several months registering new Republicans, adding 9,043 of them this year alone, for a 12.8% increase.

Trump’s campaign is trying to replicate those kinds of numbers in other rural and exurban counties in the state.

Al Lindsay, the 74-year-old trial lawyer and farmer who leads the Butler County Republicans, says that registration push has been made easy by frustrations over pandemic lockdowns and a growing belief that Democrats no longer understand people who are religious and rural.

But given the shift to Democrats around Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, his pitch is simple: “Look, there’s an urgency here. We need you.”