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.

Non-Hispanic white people without bachelor’s degrees make up 55 percent of Pennsylvania’s population age 25 or older, and Trump accelerated their migration to the Republican Party in 2016. According to the ‘Center for American progress’, the turnout rate among these voters increased from 53.0 percent in 2012 to 57.4 percent in 2016 — and they went from voting for Mitt Romney by 20.3 points to voting for Trump by 28.6 points.

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





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