It’s no secret that if Donald Trump is going to win the 2016 election, he’s going to have to win Pennsylvania. That’s a problem considering that the current Real Clear Politics average of polls showing him losing both a 4-way race and a head-to-head matchup with Hillary Clinton by nine percentage points. Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball site has moved the Keystone state from the “leaning” to the “likely” Democrat column.
But when Trump campaigned there on Friday, he declared he didn’t trust the polls. That’s ironic since he spent much of the year boasting about their accuracy when they showed him winning primaries. Now that he’s on the short end, the GOP candidate says the only way he can lose is if he is cheated. His campaign even began an effort to turn out supporters to be poll-watchers to prevent the vote being “rigged,” a theme Trump has sounded elsewhere as he seeks to both underline his status as the outsider and begin the explanations for defeat in November.
For Democrats and other Trump critics, this is just more of the same antics from the billionaire that they despise. Calling into question the integrity of the electoral process strikes them as more than a sore loser’s bad behavior. They see it as further evidence of his unfitness for office and willingness to undermine American democracy for the sake of riling up his supporters.
But there’s more to this argument. Pennsylvania Republicans have been complaining for years about voter fraud in Philadelphia, which provides Democrats with an unfair edge in statewide races. Trump’s cryptic allusions to cheating center on the allegations that there are districts in the city where vote totals have exceeded the total of registered voters. It is that belief that voter fraud—which city officials and judges in this one-party town have never treated as seriously—is committed with impunity by the Democratic machine in the City of Brotherly Love that fueled the long fight over a voter ID law in the state. Indeed, prior to the 2012 election, the GOP Majority Leader in the state legislature claimed voter ID would ensure a fair count and guarantee that Mitt Romney would win the state.
In the end, the courts first postponed the enforcement of the law and then ruled it unconstitutional. Romney put up a fight, but the demographics of a changing electorate doomed him as President Obama carried the state by a 52-47 percent margin. But Trump denigrates Romney’s effort and thinks he can do better by generating a massive turnout of white voters who stayed home in 2008 and 2012, meaning that Hillary Clinton can only beat him if her party employs dirty tricks to inflate the vote in Democratic strongholds.
But there are two problems that make that unlikely.
The first is the question of the mythical “missing” millions of white Republican voters. Their existence is a matter of faith for some on the right who believe many conservatives stayed home because of their lack of enthusiasm for John McCain and Romney. The data shows that the percentage of conservatives showing up in 2008 and 2012 wasn’t lower than in 2004 when the GOP won under the banner of George W. Bush. But there is a school of thought, articulated by the New York Times’ analyst Nate Cohn, that holds there really are a lot of white working class voters out there who didn’t vote in 2012. That gives Trump some real hope since he does so well with that group. In theory, that might make a difference in a state like Pennsylvania where much of the state’s population outside of the urban centers are white working class people bringing to my James Carville’s quip that the state was Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle.
But even if Trump-loving whites do turn out in record numbers, that advantage will be offset by the massive desertion of the GOP by educated whites, especially women, in the suburbs. The counties that surround Philadelphia were historic Republican bastions but, in recent elections, Democrats have won them. The polling shows that trend being accelerated by Trump, whose behavior and positions are anathema to the moderate GOP voters that used to keep the state competitive.
The second is that while widespread corruption in Philadelphia is all too real and allegations of voter fraud–and the need for voter ID—are far from baseless, the reality of the city’s demography also can’t be denied. There are probably as many Whigs as Republicans in some African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods and Trump’s “law and order” pitch aimed at working-class whites and calls for his backers to head to the city to ensure that blacks and Latinos don’t steal the election won’t increase their number. Even if the count in Philadelphia is pristine, Hillary Clinton is going to emerge from the city with a several hundred thousand vote lead that will, as was the case for every Republican candidate since George H.W. Bush last won the state for the GOP in 1988, put it in the Democratic column.
In Pennsylvania this year, reality trumps invective. Trump will cost the GOP more votes in terms of Republican defectors and heightened minority turnout than he’ll gain. That will mean that with or without cheating, in 2016 the Keystone state has shifted from purple to solid blue.
