Pennsylvania has become real battleground state in 2020 presidential elections
Pennsylvania becomes a key state to win for both Trump and Biden
With less
than 40 days to go, Pennsylvania is poised to emerge as the most crucial battleground;
one President Trump may not be able to be win another term without. The
president is travelling to the state for the second time in a week, hoping to
attract the same rural and white working-class voters who delivered him a
narrow victory here in 2016.
President Trump is focusing on Pennsylvania as the race in the other swing
states has become much closer and tighter. In at least three swing states which
Trump won in 2016, now he is narrowly trailing.
Pennsylvania
looks like the single most important state of the 2020 election. According
to the Five Thirty Eight elections prediction, Pennsylvania is by far the
likeliest state to provide either President Trump or Joe Biden with the
decisive vote in the Electoral College.
This state
has become crucial for both candidates. The polls indicate that if Trump wins
this state, he has 84% chance of winning the presidency. If Biden
wins Pennsylvania then has 96 % chance of winning the presidency. It shows the
importance of 20 electoral votes of this state.
Few could
have guessed that the Keystone State would eventually become the “keystone” of
the Electoral College. Pennsylvania had voted for the Democrat in straight
six presidential elections since 1992. More impressively, Pennsylvania had been
more Democratic-leaning than the national popular vote in every presidential
election since 1952. But both streaks were snapped in 2016, when Trump carried
Pennsylvania by 0.7 percentage points — making it 2.9 points redder than
the nation as a whole.
Pennsylvania’s
run to the right, however, has been a long time making. For much of the
20th century, blue-collar, white Pennsylvanians were considered part of
the Democratic base. But the share of workers in Pennsylvania affiliated
with trade unions (which have historically played a huge role in
organising and campaigning for Democratic candidates) has fallen from 27.5
percent in 1983 to 12.0 percent in 2019. The Democrats pushed for globalisation
and neoliberal economic policies, as the result manufacturing and mining
declined in the state.
The
conventional wisdom was that western and eastern Pennsylvania were Democratic and
central Pennsylvania was solidly Republican (memorably summarized by Democratic
strategist James Carville’s quote that, between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania was just Alabama). While this may have been true (at least
politically) in, say, 2000, working-class western and northeastern
Pennsylvania have slowly but surely been getting redder.
As a result,
Pennsylvania’s new geographic divide is between southeastern Pennsylvania and
the rest of the state — in other words, the parts of the state that are
culturally Northeastern and the parts that are culturally Midwestern or
Appalachian.
Trump
narrowly won three Great Lakes states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin —
from blue to red in 2016. He has virtually no path to reelection without
keeping at least one of those states in his column. His campaign has long
viewed Wisconsin as his best option, but aides who requested anonymity to
discuss strategy said their thinking has begun to shift.
There are growing concerns inside the campaign, the aides said, about Trump's
ability to retain Wisconsin. Even winning that upper Midwest battleground
wouldn't provide the needed votes if Trump's Democratic challenger, Joe Biden,
claims Arizona.
"With Pennsylvania, I don't have to make a play, we've got
Pennsylvania," boasted Trump at a rally Tuesday night just outside
Pittsburgh.
Despite fervent Republican efforts, no GOP nominee since George H.W. Bush in
1988 had captured the state until Trump did four years ago, winning by just
44,000 votes out of nearly 5.9 million cast. And as someone born in Scranton,
Joe Biden is also heavily focused on the state.
Some pools are indicating that this state almost tied between Trump and Biden
but few polls showing slight advantage of Biden over Trump. It is still difficult
to predict the state.
With 3
million or more voters expected to cast ballots by mail, lawmakers, party
officials and election officials are warning that the conditions are ripe for a
presidential election result to be left hanging in limbo on a drawn-out vote. A
partisan stalemate and lawsuits have held up fixes to glitches in the state's
fledgling mail-in voting law, and Democrats are warning that as many as 100,000
or more mail-in ballots — dubbed "naked ballots" — could be
invalidated if they aren't put in the proper place.
Pennsylvania also is where a federal prosecutor's announcement that nine
mailed-in military ballots had been found in the trash at a local election
office was seized upon by Trump and his supporters. But there was little
explanation of what had happened or whether investigators believed a criminal
act had occurred in a county controlled by Republicans.
PENNSYLVANIA
since 1952 |
|
||||
YEAR |
DEM. |
GOP |
MARGIN |
NAT’L
MARGIN |
PENN.
LEAN |
1952 |
46.9% |
52.7% |
R+5.9 |
R+10.5 |
D+4.6 |
1956 |
43.3 |
56.5 |
R+13.2 |
R+15.9 |
D+2.7 |
1960 |
51.1 |
48.7 |
D+2.3 |
D+0.2 |
D+2.1 |
1964 |
64.9 |
34.7 |
D+30.2 |
D+22.4 |
D+7.9 |
1968 |
47.6 |
44.0 |
D+3.6 |
R+1.1 |
D+4.7 |
1972 |
39.1 |
59.1 |
R+20.0 |
R+23.0 |
D+3.0 |
1976 |
50.4 |
47.7 |
D+2.7 |
D+2.1 |
D+0.6 |
1980 |
42.5 |
49.6 |
R+7.1 |
R+9.4 |
D+2.3 |
1984 |
46.0 |
53.3 |
R+7.4 |
R+18.0 |
D+10.7 |
1988 |
48.4 |
50.7 |
R+2.3 |
R+7.6 |
D+5.2 |
1992 |
45.1 |
36.1 |
D+9.0 |
D+5.8 |
D+3.2 |
1996 |
49.2 |
40.0 |
D+9.2 |
D+8.5 |
D+0.7 |
2000 |
50.6 |
46.4 |
D+4.2 |
D+0.5 |
D+3.7 |
2004 |
51.0 |
48.5 |
D+2.5 |
R+2.4 |
D+4.9 |
2008 |
54.7 |
44.3 |
D+10.3 |
D+7.3 |
D+3.1 |
2012 |
52.1 |
46.7 |
D+5.4 |
D+3.9 |
D+1.5 |
2016 |
47.9 |
48.6 |
R+0.7 |
D+2.2 |
R+2.9 |
Khalid Bhatti
Expected changed in favour of Democrates
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