Author’s Note: Today’s article is written in memory of my father, Lt. Colonel (U.S. Army, Retired) Donald Keshel, who left this life on September 7, 2010.
“10 percent of the people lead the way. 90 percent are just along for the ride.”
Catherine the Great, Empress of the Russian Empire in the 18th century, had a military advisor named Grigory Potemkin. His name is associated with the modern term “Potemkin village,” which is used to describe an artificial or deceptive display used to hide a reality. Legend has it that Potemkin built fake settlements with fake happy people in newly acquired territories to fool Catherine into believing she had acquired something worthwhile and of value.
Today, I’m going to put on a mathematics class to make my case as to what an artificial voter registration operation looks like. I’m not saying such an operation is patently illegal, but it’s also not what I would call organic and necessarily predictive of future outcomes. Allow me to use my book, The American War on Election Corruption, to illustrate my first point about just how far Republicans have come in Pennsylvania, now America’s most important political battleground:
Things used to be really bad in Pennsylvania. The Democrat high point in the past half-century came in 2008, when there were 1.236 million more Democrats than Republicans (D+14.1% by party registration) in the Keystone State. That was up by over 650,000 registrations from 2004, when there was a tight race for electoral votes between Bush and Kerry, and it projected a huge leftward lurch. The outcome was Obama +10.3%, the largest Democrat presidential win in Pennsylvania since Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 national landslide.
You can see that in 2012, Republicans had made up ground by virtue of Democrats losing even more registrants than they did, and the outcome was predictive. Romney only lost by roughly half of what McCain did in what amounts to a race to the bottom. The white working-class had abandoned Obama, and cities weren’t into him as much as they had been in 2008. The Trump revolution really lit the barn on fire for Pennsylvania Democrats:
The poll-obsessed still ignore party registration, at their own peril. When Trump won Pennsylvania by 1.7% in 2024, Democrats’ registration lead was down to just 286,283 total (D+3.1%), and 131,693 on the active voter roll (D+1.6%). You can also see the ill-fated 2020 election in there, which should have been a slam dunk for Trump if not for the fundamental overhaul in how the state votes occurring in 2019 (no-excuse mail-in balloting). This may be a shameless pitch, but you’ll really get a lot out of reading the book. It contains an entire 2004 through 2024 breakdown of these figures in Pennsylvania and why the bridge collapsed in 2020.
All of this is to say: Democrats finally get it, and know their demise has been foretold through their collapse of voter registration advantage.
They figured this out about a year ago, and now are spending big money to reverse the trend everyone is now watching out for. Now I’ll show you why I think it’s 100% Potemkin: