FiveThirtyEight.com (Nate Silver’s Website) Says PA Could Decide Election
Nathaniel Rakich, writes in fivethirtyeight.com, “Right now, Pennsylvania looks like the single most important state of the 2020 election.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential forecast, Pennsylvania is by far the likeliest state to provide either President Trump or Joe Biden with the decisive vote in the Electoral College. According to Rakich, Pennsylvania is so important that our model gives Trump an 84 percent chance of winning the presidency if he carries the state — and it gives Biden a 96 percent chance of winning if Pennsylvania goes blue.”
Rakich points out that Trump and the Republicans snapped a losing streak in Pennsylvania that dated back to 1992, when the commonwealth flipped from Red to Blue, having voted for George H.W. Bush in 1988, and then for Bill Clinton in 1992.
Pennsylvania was more Democratic than the nation as a whole, from 1952 until 2012.
Another even longer streak also fell to the wayside in 2016.
In 1948, while Harry Truman was getting himself elected to a full term, he lost Pennsylvania to Thomas E. Dewey by 4%, while Truman won the national poplular vote by 4.5%. So Pennsylvania was 8.5% more Republican than the country as a whole.
That changed in 1952. Dwight D. Eisenhower won the national popular vote by 10.5%, but he only won Pennsylvania by 5.9%. So that year, Pennsylvania was 4.6% more Democratic than the rest of the country.
From 1952 through 2012, Republican presidential candidates carried Pennsylvania, and Democratic candidates carried Pennsylvania. But regardless of which party won Pennsylvania, the state had always voted more Democratic than the rest of the country – until 2016 – when Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.7%, and Donald Trump won Pennsylvania by .7%.
In 2016, Pennsylvania was 3.4% more Republican than the rest of the country.
As Rakich sees it, two major factors put Pennsylvania in Trump’s column in 2016. First, Trump won Non-Hispanic White voters (25 or older) by 28.6%. Mitt Romney only won that demographic by 20.3%. Second, the percentage of Pennsylvania voters belonging to labor unions has been steadily declining. According to Rakich, in 1983, 27.5% of all Pennsylvanians belonged to a labor union. In 2019, only 12.0% of the state’s population were union members.