One county could swing the most important battleground state in 2024. Is Trump positioned to win it? – IJR

BUCKS COUNTY, Pennsylvania — It’s almost impossible to find a street in Bucks County, Pennsylvania that doesn’t have Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz signs on the sidewalks.

The county is widely considered to be one of the most important battleground states in the 2024 major battleground state, being one of the last remaining swing areas in the Philadelphia suburbs. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to win Bucks County by less than 2,000 votes in 2016when former President Donald Trump carried the state and President Joe Biden won it by about 17,000 votes on his way to winning Pennsylvania and the general election in 2020.

With days to go until Election Day, Republicans and Democrats are doing their best to roll the dice and deliver the county — and the Keystone State at large — for their respective parties. Both parties and aligned outgroups are full hundreds of millions of dollars in the presidential race as well as down-ballot contests.

By Numbers

Bucks County also provides a cross-section of the state at large, containing urban, suburban, exurban, and rural areas. The makeup of the county and its demographic breakdown make it a decent indicator of how things might play out statewide and a county to watch closely as the returns start coming in, a Trump campaign official told DCNF.

Nearly every prominent pollster and pundit in the country projects that Pennsylvania will be as competitive as it gets, with Bucks County right in the middle of the partisan tug of war. However, Barry Summers — a data engineering consultant who has painstakingly analyzed Bucks County voting data in efforts to help elect Republicans — believes current early voting and mail-in voting data suggest Trump will win the county by a few percentage points, he said. DCNF.

Compared to the 2020 cycle, Republican mail-in ballots are up about 20,000 — or 60 percent — in Bucks County, while Democrats have so far managed to get 98 percent of the roughly 79,000 mail-in ballots they cast. -they did in the 2020 cycle. Summers told DCNF. Bucks County, meanwhile, saw a 21 percent increase in mail-in ballots from independent and unaffiliated voters in the 2024 cycle compared to the 2020 cycle, according to Summers.

Summers also noted that the volume of GOP mail-in ballots has increased since early October, while the pace of Democratic early voting has since slowed, and that independent and unaffiliated voters are sending in their ballots later “in almost exactly the same pattern like the Republicans are,” Summers said. While the pattern itself doesn’t prove anything about voter intentions, it suggests to Summers that these unaffiliated and independent voters might be quite favorable to Republicans.

While some of those early votes could cannibalize the GOP vote on Election Day, Summers has reason to believe that many of those early votes come from less likely voters and that reliable Republican voters will turn out in large numbers to the polls on Nov. 5, he told DCNF. In addition, Summers sees what he believes to be clear indications that enthusiasm in some key Democratic constituencies, such as young people, is not strong.

“Democratic propaganda says that young people are outraged and are voting in droves. That doesn’t happen in Bucks County. I looked at voting by age, for 18-year-olds, for 19-year-olds and so on, what percentage of people who voted by mail ballot are Democrats for each age,” Summers said for DCNF. “The largest proportion of Democratic voters are people in their 30s. So, in other words, people in their 30s have registered as mail-ballot Democrats more than any other age of life, college voter turnout is very comparable to the county-wide Democratic average.”

“So what does that tell us?” Summers continued. “That tells us college-age Democrats in Bucks County were just as motivated to turn to mail-in ballot applications as the average Democrat was in general. There is no such thing as a youth vote surge where everyone is excited and everyone else can’t be bothered. That just doesn’t happen. There is no passion in the youth vote.”

What’s more, early unaffiliated and independent voting has so far tilted among men in Bucks County, a trend that benefits Trump if it holds, given that Trump is polling better among men than women in the 2024 cycle, Summers said.

Right Now: Voters are lined up around the block here in Doylestown, PA to put their votes in the bank. @DailyCaller News Foundation pic.twitter.com/bR73fQILMW

— Nick Pope (@realnickpope) October 29, 2024

“We feel pretty confident”

Other Republicans on the ground in Bucks County also feel confident they can, albeit with more anecdotal supporting evidence than the numbers Summers cites. Several Bucks County Republicans pointed out that Trump could theoretically lose Bucks County by a margin of about two percentage points or less and still be in good shape nationally, as was the case in the 2016 race.

“I am cautiously optimistic. What we’re seeing on the ground here in Bucks County is a surge like we’ve never seen, even in 2020 and 2016,” Doylestown Republican Committee Communications Chair Ed Sheppard told DCNF. “We’re seeing people who have never voted before register to vote, come out and vote for Republicans. And I think in Bucks County, the top of the ticket will determine the down vote.

Bucks County Trump voters who gathered Wednesday at McDonald’s franchise in the county where the former president campaigned in early October also told DCNF they sense a level of enthusiasm and urgency from grassroots Republicans they haven’t felt in 2020. Numerous local GOP officials and volunteers working for to present voters also said they felt and saw strong levels of enthusiasm for Trump on the ground in conversations with DCNF.

Local Democrats, meanwhile, are playing up suburban women and the issue access to abortion to help lead Vice President Kamala Harris and down-ballot candidates to victory in the county.

“Women have been underestimated for a very long time, but we could be the reason the Bucks turn blue and we elect a President Harris,” Anna Payne, the local Democratic candidate for the Pennsylvania State House, told The New Yorker in October. Nationally and in Pennsylvania, Democrats are betting that an intense campaign for abortion access could be the key to winning over enough suburban voters to secure electoral victories, TIME recently reported.

While some Bucks County Republicans are concerned that college-educated women are emerging in force for Democrats, others, like Jim Worthington — a longtime Trump donor and ally who led Pennsylvania’s delegation to the Republican National Convention in this summer – I think abortion is not as important. of an issue for the Bucks County electorate as it might have been in the 2022 midterms, which came just months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

“It’s the issue that cost Dr. Oz his election in the Senate race, as well as the mail-in vote. They were the two issues that cost him the election and because they just came out of the overturning of Roe,” Worthington told DCNF. “The Democratic Party used this as a weapon because people didn’t get it. And as time went on, more and more people understood that the power was returned to each state and to the voters of each state. So I don’t think it’s nearly the problem it was in.”

Worthington’s small army of voter-mobilizing volunteers has heard consistently from constituents about the pressures of inflation and the higher cost of living, he added.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign sees no pressing need to tailor a specific message to women in suburban Bucks County beyond urging voters to consider whether they are better off today than they were four years ago, a campaign official told DCNF.

“Our top message is the same for everyone we talk to. This includes men or women, young or old, white, black, Asian, Hispanic or anyone. And the message is, are you better off now than you were four years ago? the Trump campaign official told DCNF. “We’re bringing up kitchen table issues like inflation, cost of living, affordability. We’re talking about things like biological men playing in their daughters’ sports and sports leagues and using the same locker room bathroom facilities. We talk about immigration and crime, especially in areas like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh… We don’t treat them (suburban women) as another exotic person, but another group of voters who are affected by things like inflation, crime, even now. -the left is pushing things like biological males playing women’s sports and such.”

“We’re not resting on our laurels or taking anything for granted, obviously, but overall, we feel pretty confident in Bucks County and by extension the rest of Pennsylvania.”

Featured Image: Screenshot/CSPAN