Pennsylvania - 2024 Election Compendium
Topic: 2024 Election Analysis
Pennsylvania 2024 Presidential Election Review
Author’s Note: All 2024 Election Reviews can be found here.
Outcome
Trump +1.7% (+120,266)
Trump +2.8% (+194,333)
Preface
Pennsylvania was clearly the most important battleground of the 2024 election simply because it has the most electoral votes of the bunch – 19. If Trump were to hold his 2020 states, Georgia plus the Keystone State would equal an even 270 electoral votes, making that his quickest path and by default, the quickest punch through any potential effort to throw things off course like when Arizona was abruptly called in 2020.
I had zero doubt Pennsylvania was a Trump state in the making except for one thing – chronic electile dysfunction. As you sift through this report, you will come to understand why Pennsylvania is among the greatest offenders against the cause of free and fair elections, and you may even come to give thanks that Governor Josh Shapiro’s fiat enshrining Automatic Voter Registration wasn’t plunked down sooner than it was.
Here is a graphic showing the shifts in voter registration by county in Pennsylvania, which shifted from D+7.5% in 2020 to just D+3.1% in 2024:
Since 2020, just 3 counties – Cumberland, Montgomery, and Delaware – shifted toward Democrats by registration; however, in the immediate run-up to the election, even those counties were showing a GOP shift. 404,727 registrations net shifted toward Republicans in four years, the largest single-cycle shift yet on a trend that began during Barack Obama’s first term in the White House. My call of Pennsylvania (Trump +2.8%), split the difference between my pessimistic analysis (Trump +1.0%) and the registration analysis (Trump +4.6%), and I left it there instead of doubling back toward registrations because I was looking to account for the inevitable, which kept Trump from a convincing win in 2020 in the Commonwealth.
Analysis
· Party registration shifts since 2020 (64 counties shifted toward the GOP) suggested Trump would improve in 64 of 67 counties. The party registration indicator went just 53 for 67 (79.1%) in Pennsylvania, with margins in 54 counties more favorable for Trump than they were in 2020 by percentage margin. Trump improved by raw vote margin in 64 of 67 counties. 14 of 54 counties shifting more Republican in percentage margin shifted by less than one point, suggesting ballot stuffing occurring and thereby holding back margin progression, particularly in large counties in Westmoreland, Allegheny, Lancaster, and York. Full margin results by county below:
· Cumberland, Montgomery, and Delaware Counties are the only counties that shifted Democrat by registration since the 2020 election. Only Cumberland County shifted Democrat in the vote in keeping with its projected registration forecast, and only by 955 votes in margin (1.1%). Trump’s gains with minorities overrode the slight Democrat shifts present in registration in Philadelphia’s collar counties Montgomery and Delaware. Of the 64 counties with a Republican registration shift, Trump improved by percentage margin in 52, which makes this year’s registration index forecasting tool far less accurate than in the 2016 election, when 60 counties shifted Republican between 2012 and 2016, and 62 counties shifted to the Republican right for Trump. These indicators were also significantly disparate in the highly corrupted 2020 election thanks to the high levels of corruption present.
· Trump made substantial gains in Philadelphia and its collar counties, drawing almost exactly even to his 2016 margin of defeat by raw votes in those five counties and flipping Bucks County, despite rampant cheating there that was focused on trying to pull back Bob Casey’s Senate seat:
· I correctly predicted Trump would flip statewide bellwethers Erie and Northampton Counties, along with Monroe and Bucks Counties. I also called for Trump to flip Lackawanna County, but Harris held it by 2.7%.
· Harris gained ballots over Biden’s totals in 33 of 67 counties, including gains of more than 2,000 ballots in each of Butler, Westmoreland, Cumberland, York, and Lancaster Counties (qualified as “Grade 2” gains). She lost ballots from Biden’s count in 34 counties, including Philadelphia, where she had the lowest Democrat ballot count since 2004 (John Kerry) - suggesting the cheat was directed elsewhere (perhaps by Josh Shapiro) and lower minority turnout cratered her there. Her gains were contiguous throughout central Pennsylvania and in counties that almost exclusively had heavy GOP registration trends in every Trump cycle. See map below outlining counties with gains and losses:
· Now, contrast that map with a map contrasting these counties in Pennsylvania all bordering counties in West Virginia, Maryland, New York, and Delaware, plus a larger adjacent section in Ohio and all of New Jersey:
· I have already made my assessment that there appears to have been no concentrated effort to manipulate ballot counts in any of these states adjacent to Pennsylvania. Without manipulation, it appears almost all of the Keystone State would be headily steadily rightward, especially with Harris failing to gain in any of the selected counties in Ohio, West Virginia, New York, or New Jersey, with minimal gains in Maryland; however, she managed to hold Trump to percentage margin gains in just 52 of 64 counties with a GOP registration shift, and in 14 of them, the shift was less than a single point. Notice how disparate the following numbers in Pennsylvania are compared to surrounding states (excluding Delaware, which has just three counties):
· While 96.8% of all counties in New Jersey, New York, West Virginia, Maryland, and Ohio moved to the Republican right, only 80.6% of counties in Pennsylvania did (despite 95.5% of them suggesting a shift to the right by registration index). Again, 14 of those that did shift Republican were held to a shift of less than a point right. The three most suspicious in that category are York, Lancaster, and Westmoreland Counties. As for the smaller counties throughout the heart of Pennsylvania, it is important to understand their role in providing large enough GOP margins to blot out the massive losses in Philadelphia and its collar counties shown above. Here is how the “Philly Five” track with the rest of the state in all three Trump races (Trump’s gains in eastern Pennsylvania proved critical):
· I have highlighted Westmoreland County specifically for its ludicrous 2020 election results, which have carried forward into 2024 despite a complete collapse of the Democrat Party in the county and region, and subsequent realignment under the Republican banner in these largely depopulating counties. It is obvious to me, after reviewing two Pennsylvania elections with no-excuse mail-in balloting and with the state now operating Automatic Voter Registration, that ballot collection rings scrape the same names (whether real or fictitious) for ballots every cycle. Here is a selection of 25 counties, all small except for Allegheny County – notice how nearly identical Biden and Harris’ ballot counts are, four years apart and with Trump flipping the state:
· Similarly configured working-class counties in Ohio, West Virginia, New York, and New Jersey saw starkly different results with margin shifts and Democrat collapses. In Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), Harris lost just 0.2% of Joe Biden’s ballot count and had a margin of victory over Trump just 1,525 lower than Biden’s. Here is how Harris performed in other industrial metro areas throughout the region:
o Erie County, NY loss of 18,169 (-7.0%)
o Cuyahoga County, OH loss of 39,792 (-9.6%) – lowest Democrat ballot count since 2000
o Lucas County, OH loss of 9,091 (-7.9%) – lowest Democrat ballot count since 1996
o Mahoning County, OH loss of 7,005 (-12.2%) – lowest Democrat ballot count since 1932
o Marion County, IN loss of 26,053 (-10.5%)
o Lake County, IN loss of 15,784 (-12.6%) – lowest Democrat ballot count since 2000
o Cook County, IL loss of 278,152 (-16.1%) – lowest Democrat ballot count since 2004
Allegheny County likely has at least 30,000 fraudulent ballots for Harris alone, assessing Erie County’s (New York) 7.0% decline only.
Quality Checks
Statewide Presidential Ballot Count
· 2004 5,769,590
· 2008 6,015,476 (+245,886, +4.3%)
· 2012 5,755,620 (-259,856, -4.3%)
· 2016 6,166,938 (+411,318, +7.1%)
· 2020 6,940,449 (+773,511, +12.5%)
· 2024 7,055,946 (+115,497, +1.7%)
You’d have to be blind or simply unintelligent not to recognize the massive jump in Pennsylvania’s ballot count from 2016 to 2020, after the state had fluttered around largely stagnant ballot counts for four cycles. Should we blame the Democrats and their massive cheat fest for Biden in 2020? That’s always an expedient course of action, although not one in this case that addresses the issue at its core. Most of the blame lies with the Pennsylvania Republican Party for helping ram through Act 77, which allowed for no-excuse mail-in balloting in Pennsylvania.
The massive spike in ballots from 2016 in a state that has begun to depopulate since the COVID scam is a direct result of Act 77 and led to hundreds of thousands of likely fraudulent requests that can be harvesting up through one of the longest early voting periods in America. Ballot harvesting is not legal in Pennsylvania, but all available precinct-equivalent data, the presence of known voter registration fraud rings, and the disruption of trends, indicators, and predictors all suggest this sort of illegal activity is rampant and enabled by the 2019 passage of Act 77. While the climb in ballots from 2020 to 2024 is not abnormal given previous jumps, the two-cycle jump of 889,008 ballots since 2016 absolutely is, and suggests most of the ballot gathering activities undertaken by Biden’s ground troops went to work for Harris, who finished 55,186 ballots behind his totals from four years ago.
Key Counties
Philadelphia County
Low inner-city turnout this year cost Philadelphia County the honor of having the most certified ballots in Pennsylvania this year. It lost out to Allegheny County by a measly 189 ballots; however, the impact to Republican candidates from Philadelphia County is much graver than the losing margins from Allegheny County thanks largely to the voting habits of urban blacks and affluent white liberals who populate the county. Trump’s performances have been steadily better each run, and his 2024 performance was the best for a GOP presidential nominee since 1992. That should continue if the Republican Party stays focused on populist solutions and the minority population continues to diminish in its Democrat voting reliability. Not getting obliterated in Philadelphia County will all but ensure Republicans are the party to beat in Pennsylvania presidential races for decades, and it will hinge on further efforts to upend voter registration corruption.
Montgomery County
The largest of Philadelphia’s collar counties is responsible for the third most ballots in Pennsylvania statewide elections. The GOP presidential nominee won all but one race from 1916 through 1988 here, but the county has steadily shifted with increasing urbanization, migration from Philadelphia County by minorities, and the left drift of the white professional class. Here is how the GOP losing margins have moved since 1992:
1992 -10,868
1996 -22,617
2000 -32,367
2004 -46,307
2008 -87,841
2012 -58,975
2016 -93,351
2020 -134,051
2024 -118,792
You may notice, with the exception of 2012, a steady trend constantly expanding in Montgomery County, which finally took a bit of a reprieve this year. Trump’s progress with minority voters (existing registered Democrats) negated the slight Democrat registration lean in progress since the 2020 election and sent the county 3.5% to the right. The county is still over 70% white, so effort must be made to reach them and deliver economic offerings that dent Democrat gains. If this county’s left shifting can be curbed as part of a trend, combined with the likely Democrat dwindling down next door in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania will consistently redden.
Allegheny County
The blue bubble in the heart of Trump Country in western Pennsylvania, Allegheny County is almost certainly the number one fraudulent ballot contributor in all of Pennsylvania. I determined it was exactly that in the 2020 race, and unfortunately things look almost identically bad this year with a nearly unchanged margin. This county, which contains Pittsburgh, is all that stands between keeping the state competitive for Democrats and within reach of the Philadelphia area counties and their large margins, and an Ohio-style blowout. The county is very industrial and has continued to hemorrhage Democrat membership, but Democrat ballot counts are at numbers far exceeding what seems possible based on past performance, working-class trends, and population data. Getting this county under control will place pressure on Philadelphia to overproduce, which I’m not confident is possible given that I think it is at a Democrat apogee point.
Opportunities for Election Manipulation
Familiarize yourself with the grading criteria for my election ratings. Here is how Pennsylvania rates with regard to the most common election demerits and its own unique traits:
· Voter ID – Pennsylvania has no Voter ID requirements.
· Same Day Registration – Not permitted in Pennsylvania.
· Excessive Mail-In Balloting – Act 77 (2019) allowed for no-excuse mail-in balloting in Pennsylvania, which has destroyed election integrity in the state within two cycles and created an adult Easter egg hunt out of elections.
· Excessive Early Voting – Pennsylvania has very little in-person early voting, but the sending out of mail-in ballots begins 50 days before Election Day, and this lengthy period is the reason why Democrats pile up such a large returns advantage by party registration, as it is used by registration fraud and harvesting rings to collect all the phony requests.
· Ballot Harvesting – Not allowable under Pennsylvania law but is prevalent as indicated in the next point below since Act 77 became law.
· Unique Corruption – Several large Pennsylvania counties reported the discovery of major voter registration corruption rings, which use the fraudulent registrations for mail ballot requests, then harvest those ballots and return them over a lengthy early voting period. Additionally, Bucks County went to great lengths to suppress its own voters during the limited early voting window and was reprimanded in court. After Election Day, one of the county’s commissioners ordered the counting of illegal ballots.
· Automatic Voter Registration – Governor Shapiro ordered AVR to be implemented in September 2023, ensuring Pennsylvania’s voter rolls will become more flooded with fraudulent voter registrations than they already are. If left without remedy, this will create further corruption within the mail-in heavy voting system Act 77 created, which has drastically and negatively impacted the past two presidential elections and the 2022 midterm races.
The Road Ahead
Ultimately, I don’t think Josh Shapiro wanted Harris to carry Pennsylvania, or to win the Presidency with or without the Keystone State. She is now out of his way, and he can waltz out to the first Democrat presidential debates in 2027 and proclaim that he is the only candidate on the state that can carry his rapidly reddening home state. Did he play a role in Harris’ loss? Based on the shifts map of the state, and considering the artificially left-moving or shortened Trump gains in the heart of Pennsylvania, it seems to me that Trump’s gains in the eastern portion of the state may be more pronounced because Shapiro’s personal ballot harvesting rings laid low and Philadelphia ran a tighter ship than they usually do. In fact, Philadelphia County produced the lowest Democrat presidential ballot count since 2004 for John Kerry.
Democrats have known Pennsylvania’s working-class was bound to turn it into a red state once the GOP voter base reoriented the party to a socially conservative, but economically populist, working-class magnet. That is why they rushed to pass Act 77 and then institute Automatic Voter Registration. Without these cheats, Pennsylvania would resemble a poor man’s Ohio, which is turning into Indiana, which is turning into Kentucky, which is turning into West Virginia. While they all know this to be true, John Fetterman is apparently the only prominent Democrat to act like it publicly.
Other Republicans won on the ticket with Trump, including state-level candidates by impressively high margins. If voter registration and mail-in balloting corruption can be exposed, litigated over, and remedied, Pennsylvania has all the makings of a reliably Republican state - the Trump DOJ must pay close attention to the voter registration corruption rings that have been identified in Pennsylvania and understand the role registrations have in influencing mail fraud. Having the Keystone State as a reliable part of the GOP fold would remove pressure on Georgia, which is slipping, and suggest major party traction in Pennsylvania’s political cousin, Michigan, as well as adjacent New Jersey, also on a hard working-class shift to the right. Getting to this position will require major effort out of election-integrity minded organizations, volunteers, and office holders in the state. There is no shortage of great patriots in Pennsylvania that I’ve worked beside who have barely thought to rest since the 2020 election who will ensure this work is carried out.
Final Grade and Closing Commentary
The Top 5 Election Integrity Targets in Pennsylvania are (in no order):
· Philadelphia County
· Montgomery County
· Allegheny County
· Bucks County
· Delaware County
Most Suspect Outcomes
· Pennsylvania U.S. Senate – excessively tight margin (McCormick +15,115) brought about by front line cheating, more cheating after Election Day, and the orders from Bucks County to count illegal ballots. Democrat Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia belongs in jail and must be brought to justice for attempting to steal Dave McCormick’s Senate victory over Bob Casey, which also led to a shorter margin for the following race:
· Presidency – artificially reduced Trump margin of victory, brought about not only by attempts to deprive him of Pennsylvania’s 19 electors, but to keep Bob Casey in the U.S. Senate. Considering the likely retention of most fraudulently cast Act 77 ballots from the 2020 race, Trump’s margin in Pennsylvania should likely exceed 6 points in a fair race, especially with Ohio having gone to Trump by over 11 points and New Jersey closing to within 6 points for Harris.
Pennsylvania receives a Grade of 4 - Highest Concern – based on its demerits, known troubles, indication of concentrated manipulation in 2024, blatant suppression tactics, corrupt magistrate rulings, and corrupt elections infrastructure codified in law. Pennsylvania qualifies as one of just five states that will receive the most serious negative rating regarding election integrity and the administration of the 2020 election. The positive news is that the Bob Casey fiasco and the immediate aftermath of the election showed many millions in the general public how corrupt elections in Pennsylvania are, giving us a mandate to fix them.
Demerits: Voter ID, Excessive Mail-In Balloting, Ballot Harvesting, Unique Corruption, Automatic Voter Registration
Seth Keshel, MBA, is a former Army Captain of Military Intelligence and Afghanistan veteran. His analytical method of election forecasting and analytics is known worldwide, and he has been commended by President Donald J. Trump for his work in the field.
I continue to be amazed at the amount of labor you have put into you election reporting. America should be eternally grateful to you
As usual, excellent, comprehensive, enlightening. I forwarded to my state rep (Joe Hamm) and state sen (Gene Yaw). I suggested they invite you to present your both houses.
Thx for your good work.