Pennsylvania’s white working class communities very well could be President Trump’s road to victory in the swing state if his campaign focuses on driving up their support on election day, a New York Times report indicates.
The Times — which highlights how former Democrats like 53-year-old former factory worker Dave Mitchko are supporting Trump’s economic nationalist agenda once again — detailed how the president could sweep a victory in Pennsylvania where decades of globalization have wrecked livelihoods.
The Times reports:
That number [of non-college-educated white voters who did not vote in 2016] is about 2.4 million, according to Dave Wasserman, an elections analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report who studies demographic data. Comparatively, he estimated that only about 500,000 college-educated white voters in Pennsylvania failed to cast ballots in 2016. [Emphasis added]
“The potential for Trump to crank up the intensity of turnout among non-college whites is quite high,” Mr. Wasserman said. According to his model, that demographic broke two to one for Mr. Trump in 2016: two million backed Mr. Trump and one million voted for Hillary Clinton. [Emphasis added]
…
“He’s going after a population that’s shrinking,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, who has produced similar models. “He just has to eke out even more of them than he did last time.” [Emphasis added]
Voter registration trends in Pennsylvania could be indicative of Trump’s standing in the state with voters. While Republicans remain behind Democrats with registrations, the gap has dwindled in recent months ahead of the November 3 election.
Breitbart News’s Haris Alic reports:
Since Trump carried the Keystone State narrowly in 2016, Republicans have seen their support grown substantially, according to a voter registration report released in June by Pennsylvania’s Department of State. That report found that between December 2015 and December 2019, the GOP gained approximately 258,705 new registrants. Over the same period, in comparison, Democrats only gained 85,779 new registrants. [Emphasis added]
Despite the advantage, Democrats still outnumber Republicans in Pennsylvania by more than 800,000 registrants. Although that split seems large, Democrats had an even larger registration advantage in 2016 when Trump bested former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by just 44,292 votes out of more than six million ballots. Trump’s one percent margin of victory, narrow though it was, made him the first Republican to carry Pennsylvania since President George H.W. Bush’s 1988 landslide. [Emphasis added]
As the Times notes, much of those gains for the GOP have been in rural, small communities where the white working class lives. Election analysts have previously said that if the white working class were the only demographic group voting in United States elections, the Republican Party would win in landslides.
Their economic standing is hugely benefited by Trump’s efforts to decrease foreign competition in the labor market and the party’s turn away from multilateral free trade that has put much of their communities out of work.
Some have suggested Trump intervene in outsourcing and offshoring cases hitting Pennsylvania in the midst of the election and Chinese coronavirus crisis.
In July, for instance, one of the state’s big employers, the Vanguard Group, announced it is outsourcing 1,300 American workers to India-based outsourcing firm Infosys. Industry insiders have said the jobs are likely to eventually be sent to India altogether.
Trump’s intervention in the case would be similar to that of his role in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) attempt to outsource about 200 American jobs to imported H-1B foreign visa workers. In that case, Trump fired a TVA official and forced the federally-owned company to commit to stopping the scheme.
Due to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and China’s entering the World Trade Organization (WTO), both supported by Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, Pennsylvania has lost at least nearly 310,000 manufacturing jobs since 1994.
Pennsylvania’s manufacturing employment dropped from almost 21 percent to 11.1 percent in less than 30 years due to NAFTA, China’s entering the WTO, and normalizing U.S. trade relations with China — all of which Biden supported.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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