Pennsylvania threatens to be just as consequential this year. Democratic
strategists and polling analysts at
FiveThirtyEight have said that the winner of Pennsylvania, whether it be Scranton native Joe Biden or Trump, will then have more than an 80 percent chance of winning the White House. An
analysis of election returns over the last 100 years from Lehigh Valley Live, a local Easton paper, in September put Northampton at the center of that equation, showing that the county has backed the winning presidential candidate all but three times since 1920.
As the election nears, Biden’s advantage among Pennsylvania voters has continued to grow. Early fears that Biden would be hurt by the Democratic Party’s slightly-less-friendly posture toward fracking than the GOP’s have not been borne out, said Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who had earlier
raised the alarm on that issue. Biden, he said, is much less disliked than Clinton and hasn’t had a problem consolidating the support of the progressive base, as she did. There will be no Green Party candidate on the ballot. Combined with the realignment of the state’s suburbs and its elderly population, both of which have swung dramatically, Biden is in a strong position to overwhelm the upsurge in voter registration and excitement among white, working-class voters over the age of 30 without a college degree. Polls have begun to show clearly that if everybody who plans to vote is able to, Biden has the upper hand. But particularly in Pennsylvania, that’s far from guaranteed, and
Republicans have been
working overtime to make sure it’s not the case. That could turn Pennsylvania’s election into a street brawl, and it’s one that progressives worry the state party simply isn’t built for.