Pennsylvania Democrats say they are optimistic after leading early voting for women and seniors

Women and seniors are pulling away from Democrats in Pennsylvania’s early elections, a split that has some party leaders cheering even as others temper their enthusiasm.

More than 1.6 million Commonwealth voters cast early ballots by mail for the November 5 presidential election. An Inquirer analysis of early ballot returns found that women made up 56 percent of mail-in returns, with men trailing at 43 percent, according to voting data obtained from the Pennsylvania Department of State this week.

Democrats have historically held a mail-in voting advantage, and while that lead has narrowed this year as Republicans have increasingly embraced the voting method, women who are registered Democrats were still responsible for most of the early votes.

The partisan divide was even greater among senior voters: Of the 716,000 early voters over age 65, nearly 59 percent were registered Democrats.

The early returns come with big caveats: About 300,000 mail-in ballots were returned by voters who did not indicate their gender on voter registration forms. And of course, it’s hard to predict how independents will vote or how turnout will break on election day.

Still, the early news about the gender divide is a glimmer of hope for Democrats amid polls showing a two-way race, with female voters a key to Vice President Kamala Harris reclaiming Pennsylvania next week.

“Every woman is not going to have a Kamala T-shirt or her kids to dress up as Kamala on Halloween,” said state Rep. Joanna McClinton, Democratic leader and the first woman to run the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, “but the return rates are very significant and show how much enthusiasm there is.”

Sarah Niebler, an associate professor of political science at Dickinson College, cautioned against reading too much into a gender divide based on past electoral trends.

“We know that women are more likely to be Democrats, and Democrats are more likely to request mail-in ballots,” she said, adding that 1988 was the last time women voted by a higher percentage for the Republican nominee in presidency than the Democrat. candidate.

Women are also leading in both major parties, with Republican women far outnumbering men as of this week.

Stephanie Sharp, co-founder of Women4U.S., a PAC that has focused on getting Republican women in swing states to vote for Harris, noted that early voting has become an important tool for women who could balance jobs and families.

“Advance voting makes it easy to check ‘practicing democracy’ off the list and get to work, community and family lists,” she said.

Between 2016 and 2020, Trump did make inroads with women voters, increasing their vote share from 39% to 44% nationally. But these efforts were likely to be complicated by the after-effects of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022 — which returned questions about abortion access to the states. The abortion bans that followed coincided with the worst midterm election performance for Republicans in generations.

“Especially for younger women, it’s closely tied to issues like abortion access and the Dobbs decision,” Neibler said. “In some polls, women voted by 15 to 20 points against Trump.”

Meanwhile, Republicans’ hopes rest on narrowing Democrats’ overall advantage in early voting. GOP voters are increasingly taking advantage of in-person vote-by-mail options, overwhelming election offices across the state as voters waited in long lines to cast their mail-in ballots.

These efforts seem to be paying off. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, left-wing voters overwhelmingly preferred to vote by mail rather than in person. Of the 2.6 million ballots returned, 1.7 million — nearly 65 percent — came from Democrats. In 2022, this figure has increased to 70%.

But as of Thursday, the Democratic share had fallen below 57 percent.

Niebler said the drop was related to the effective end of the pandemic era, as well as local Republicans vocally encouraging early voting — but still working against years of messages from Trump that mail-in ballots figured in unsubstantiated claims regarding elections. rigging.

“Trump is still sending messages that they were related to fraud,” she said. “The message is still dominant. It’s started to talk a little bit more about postal voting being OK, but it’s going to take a while to go away.”

But early vote returns are also concentrated around densely populated urban centers.

Robert Speel, an associate professor of political science at Penn State Behrend in Erie, noted that most counties in the state do not have multiple satellite election offices, such as Philadelphia and its counties, which make it easier to vote by mail before Nov. 5. .

“It’s certainly too early to tell,” he said, of the mail-in ballot dates. “What you get from the early voting numbers is from Philly and the collar counties and may not be representative of the rest of the state.”