Record turnout benefited Biden more than Trump
Pennsylvania, the perennial swing state, has handed the reins of the nation to a native — Joe Biden, son of Scranton, who came out of retirement to take on the most pugnacious president in history and managed to outpunch him.
In keeping with 2020 — and the last four years, really — it was a tense and disconcerting path to victory for Biden, who surpassed the necessary 270 electoral votes Saturday morning by winning Pennsylvania’s 20.
Election Day became Elec
tion Days — an agonizing fourday slog through numbers as the counting of in-person votes transitioned to the counting of an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots, a situation spurred by the coronavirus pandemic that hovers over every aspect of life these days.
NowBiden will spend the next three months preparing for the role of a lifetime. He left politics with two terms as Barack Obama’s vice president and four decades as a senator from Delaware on his resume. Moving into the White House under current circumstances, however, with the pandemic still raging and a large portion of the American electorate furious over his win, will challenge the 78-year-old Biden in extraordinary ways.
He will also be distracted from the task of transition by the likelihood that Donald Trump will try to wrest the presidency back through litigation. He vowed to do so in a Thursday night news conference in which he insisted the electoral process was rife with fraud. He claimed to have evidence. He produced none.
Pennsylvania’s importance was abundantly clear through the race.
Trump pulled off a narrow and unexpected win over Hillary Clinton in the Keystone State four years ago, the first Republican to do so in 28 years. And during one rally after another here in the past month, the president predicted Pennsylvania would once again deliver him the election, no matter what the polls suggested.
But on Saturday, with Biden holding a 34,000-vote lead, Associated Press called the race in the Democrat’s favor around 11:30 a.m.
Biden and the Democrats benefited from record turnout in regions across the state, at least in part because of Trump’s divisiveness. Barack Obama’s former vice president reclaimed two of the three counties won by Democrats in 2008 and 2012 but by Trump in 2016. He built on burgeoning advantages for Democrats in the suburbs, and profited from get-out-the-vote efforts by grassroots organizations.
The 2016 campaign saw 14% of Pennsylvania voters undecided between Clinton and Trump, two historically unpopular candidates. A Franklin & Marshall College poll released days before Election Day 2020 found that number had slipped to 6%.
While both sides saw historic turnout in the race, the matchup between Biden and Trump presented stark differences that voters latched onto, said Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster.
“The lines were really hardened. Because of the polarization, there weren’t too many people who hadn’t made up their minds,” Madonna said.
Trump’s base held strong, Madonna said. But among those outside that base, Biden proved a more attractive candidate than Clinton, he said.
The final statewide Morning Call/Muhlenberg College poll, released the Saturday before Election Day, showed Biden up 49% to Trump’s 44%. The president did not crack 45% in any of the three polls conducted since August by Muhlenberg pollster Chris Borick. That suggested he would need a boost from infrequent voters or “shy” voters reluctant to share their support of Trump with pollsters — coupled with a lack of turnout among the many Democrats who described themselves as less than enthused Biden voters.
It appears Trump pulled off the former task. Pennsylvania Republicans cast more than 330,000, or at least 11%, more votes than in 2016, impressive even after accounting for a 6.2% increase in party registration over the past four years. Locally, he received nearly 11,000, or 15%, more votes in Northampton County than in 2016 and 8,444, or 11.5%, more votes in Lehigh County, with thousands of provisional ballots still to be counted.
“Those registration and outreach efforts among voters traditionally unlikely to go to the polls do appear to have paid dividends,” Borick said.
Unfortunately for Trump, Democratic turnout was even better, with 13% more voting statewide this year compared to four years ago. Biden turned out about 27% more Democrats in Northampton County, appearing to flip it back to blue. Lehigh saw a 17.5% increase in total votes cast, with Biden winning by a larger margin than Clinton.
Biden appears to have built upon the party’s gains in suburbs, particularly Philadelphia’s, and among college-educated voters, Borick said. He also reversed Clinton’s tumble in swing counties such as Northampton and Erie, which flipped back to Democrat, as well as counties like Lackawanna and Monroe, where Clinton won narrowly and Biden won comfortably.
“It’s not like this was a sea-change election — it was very close in 2016, and it was very close this year,” Borick said. “But Biden performed marginally better than Clinton in all these little ways, and their accumulated effect was to push the needle from a narrow Trump win to a narrow Biden win.”
Matt Munsey, Northampton County Democratic Committee chair, believed the opportunity to vote by mail kept people engaged. With COVID-19 cases spiking to record levels as Election Day approached, mail-in ballots allowed people to safely participate in democracy.
“They were critical during a pandemic, so voters didn’t have to feel like they were choosing between their health and voting,” he said.
Munsey thinks Trump’s record was a driving force in the high turnout. While people may have been willing to give him a chance in 2016, many were increasingly turned off by his policies and behavior in office.
Lehigh Valley Stands Up, a grassroots organization that sprouted since the last election, tried to break the mold on getting people to show up to the polls. Too often, organizer Ashleigh Strange said, pressure is put on people to feel obligated to participate, even if they don’t feel strongly about the candidates.
“It’s not about shaming them into voting,” she said. “It’s been tried in the past, and we’ve seen that it doesn’t work,”
Instead, the group used “deep canvassing,” where organizers conversed with people about how government could work to improve their lives. Aside from visiting neighborhoods and encouraging people to register or vote by mail, the organization engaged in difficult conversations with people about why they don’t vote.
“I had a woman on Election Day tell me, ‘I don’t care who the president is. I’m going to still be on food stamps and living paycheck to paycheck either way.’” Strange said, “We’ve got to connect people’s pain to the politics and the policy that they are seeing.”
The approach is time-consuming but can engage more people in politics and their community, she said.
Getting more people to the polls may not have worked in Trump’s favor, but it did help other Republicans on the ballot.
Stacy Garrity, a retired Army Reserve colonel, is poised to oust Democratic State Treasurer Joe Torsella and become the first Republican to defeat an incumbent in a statewide race in more than two decades.
Pennsylvanians also elected a Republican, Timothy DeFoor, for auditor general. His predecessor, Democrat Eugene DePasquale, ran instead for Congress, but was unable to knock off Republican incumbent Scott Perry in the 10th District. And in another closely watched race, U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Bucks County Republican, held off his Democratic challenger, Christine Finello, in the 1st District.
In the Lehigh Valley, Republican Lisa Scheller fell short of defeating Democratic U.S. Rep. Susan Wild, but the 7th District race was closer than polls had suggested. Scheller also outperformed Trump, earning more combined votes (165,812 as of Saturday night) in Lehigh and Northampton counties than he did (164,964).
Also at the state level, Republicans expanded their majority in the Pennsylvania Senate and maintained control of the House.
“The relatively positive performance of Republicans down-ballot from Trump this year is an interesting phenomenon,” Borick said. “It’ll be interesting to look at the data closer to see how much hedging by moderate Republicans came into play.”