Even before the Leader of the Free World decided to politicize mail-in voting, the Philadelphia Inquirer (January 27, 2020) identified something called the “Blue Shift.” According to the Inquirer, “As more voters began using nontraditional voting methods such as absentee and provisional ballots in recent years, a partisan split emerged in many states: Democrats tended to vote using those methods more often than Republicans.”
At the same time, before a single case of Covid-19 had been reported in Pennsylvania, the Inquirer predicted that “The number of absentee ballots is expected to balloon this year and continue growing after that.”
We saw the Blue Shift play out earlier this month in the Pennsylvania Primary (June 2), although unlike what we’ll be seeing in November, the only thing at stake in our recent election was “bragging rights.”
In the days immediately after the primary , some Republicans were eager to point how how well President Trump had done, as compared to Joe Biden. But by the time the mail-in votes were all counted, the Blue Shift had moved Pennsylvania Primary Election bragging rights, for what little they were worth, to Joe Biden. He received 1,250,016 votes to Trump’s 1,043,720. And if you throw in the votes that Trump’s two token opponents (Rocky De La Fuenta and William Weld) received, along with the votes for Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard, then Trump only won 38.5% of the votes cast in the Pennsylvania Primary.
With that information in hand, you can safely take the pennies that are filling up that souvenir mug, and use them to wager that Biden will win Pennsylvania in November. But please don’t bet the house on it.
Did Trump have anything to do with a lower percentage of PA Republicans voting by mail?
The day after his candidate lost decisively in a Wisconsin race for State Supreme Court (April 8), one where Democrats had unsuccessfully lobbied to have the date of the election moved back because of concerns about the the Covid-19 Virus (or Chinese Virus, if you prefer), the President spoke out during a White House briefing, against mail-in ballots.
And since then, Trump has challenged the legitimacy of mail-in voting on a regular basis. So it’s easy to imagine that at least some of the president’s supporters in Pennsylvania chose to show their loyalty to him by not using the mail-in vote option.
Then again, PA GOP did send mixed Messages
On the one hand, you had Joe Gale, on April 19 (before he was famous), proudly standing with President Trump in saying NO to all vote-by-mail elections. And on the other hand, you had, and still have the official website of the Pennsylvania Republican Party extolling the virtues of mail-in of mail-in voting. And take note, they do not use the presiden’ts preferred term for the practice – absentee voting.
Conclusion
As the Inquirer noted in January, for what appeared to be non-ideological reasons, Pennsylania Republicans were less inclined to vote by mail than Democrats.
I’ll leave it to more capable analysts to try to figure out how much or less of the Blue Shift we saw on June 2 was a result of the president’s War on Mail-in Voting. But I think we can all agree, it was not nothing.