(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk and other Donald Trump allies are working to exploit a crack in rival Kamala Harris’ Blue Wall: the thousands of Pennsylvania voters who have drifted over the past decade away from her Democratic Party.
As Harris and Republican rival Trump increasingly train their focus on the battleground, a once substantial lead for Democrats in party registration is dwindling from a 685,000 edge over Republicans in 2020 — when President Joe Biden carried the state — to just 281,000 this year, Pennsylvania records show.
That figure, which marks a drop in registration advantage to less than half of what Democrats enjoyed four years ago, represents a purge of inactive voters from the rolls, some voters simply switching sides and efforts from billionaire-backed groups, including one funded by Musk, to recruit new Republicans.
Pennsylvania, the most populous of the swing states with 19 electoral votes, could be decisive in the presidential election. It’s perhaps crucially important for Harris, however, whose most direct path to victory includes winning the battleground, along with Michigan and Wisconsin, the other manufacturing-heavy states that make up Democrats’ Blue Wall.
Democrats now command around 43% of Pennsylvania voters compared to Republicans’ 40%. Another roughly 1.5 million people in the commonwealth are registered as unaffiliated or with minor parties, according to Pennsylvania records.
That leaves a closely divided state even more narrowly split than in the last presidential contest, and only raises the stakes for each campaign to turn out as many potential voters as possible.
The growth in Republican registrations reflects a “broader realignment since Trump came to the fore, especially among working class and low-propensity voters,” said Kush Desai, the campaign’s Pennsylvania communications director. A Harris campaign spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Voters don’t necessarily support candidates that align with their party affiliation. In fact, party registration is a lagging indicator of individual voters’ actual behavior in the privacy of the voting booth, said a Republican operative familiar with Pennsylvania and its voting patterns. While the billionaires and conservative activists, like Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, behind voter registration drives may seek credit for closing the party gap in the state, the shift actually happens organically and slowly, the operative said.
In this case, it may reflect registered Democrats who had long been open to voting for Republicans, the person said. Still, registration is a sign of enthusiasm, the operative added, and it is raising hopes among Republicans that fervor for Trump has led voters to switch their registrations and will translate into actual votes for the former president.
Democrats once held a much larger nominal partisan advantage. In 2012, the year former President Barack Obama won his second term, Democrats had more than 1.1 million voters than Republicans in Pennsylvania. That advantage has steadily slipped in the years since, even as some suburban counties where Republicans once dominated have gone solidly blue.
For Democrats, the problem is twofold, said Adam Lawrence, an associate professor of government, policy and law at Millersville University. The surge of Democratic registrations that accompanied Obama’s campaigns has proved ephemeral — more a product of enthusiasm for the candidate than longterm allegiance to the party. And the decline of the state’s manufacturing base, and with it labor union membership, has hurt Democrats’ numbers.
“That cohort has aged a bit, and some of that cohort has died,” Lawrence said. “As unions and manufacturing have been decimated, the natural advantage Democrats have enjoyed has faded.”
Registration Drive
Musk has given at least $132 million to super political action committees supporting Trump and other Republicans, with a portion of that going into efforts to register and turn out voters across Pennsylvania. It’s part of a play by supporters of the former president to harness enthusiasm for Trump from among low-propensity voters, like young men.
The Tesla Inc. and SpaceX CEO has taken to posting on X about increases in voter registration, and tracking the submission of mail ballots — though those figures show that Democratic voters so far significantly outpace Republicans in returning mail ballots.
It isn’t clear how much of an effect Musk’s spending has had, but the gap between the parties continued to tighten through the Oct. 21 voter registration deadline. In all this year, more than 70,000 voters switched their registrations from Democratic to Republican — compared to fewer than 28,000 who went the other direction. State records also show that almost twice as many Democrats as Republicans dropped out of the party altogether, changing their registrations to “unaffiliated.”
Experts like Lawrence and the Republican operative tend to doubt the effect of paid voter registration efforts, which pale in comparison to the shifts triggered by organic enthusiasm for candidates like Obama and Trump. “It’s the bubbling up” that moves voters to shift their registrations, Lawrence said.
The changes may not all be cause for alarm for Harris. Tom Bonier, a senior adviser to the left-leaning firm TargetSmart, said that there had been “massive increases” in new voter registrations among cohorts most likely to support the vice president, including younger voters, women and people of color.
“What you’re seeing is, from a partisan perspective, a fairly substantial Democratic advantage in these battleground states,” Bonier told reporters about the voter registration figures. Bonier also said the large blocs of unaffiliated voters could be good news for Harris, since his firm projects they will “lean heavily Democratic.”
Desai, the Trump spokesperson, disputed that, citing voters’ continued concerns in state polls about inflation and the economy. “It’s very clear who has Americans’ trust on those issues, and it’s not Kamala Harris,” he said.
Partisan Fight
Musk was feeling bullish about the more than 450,000 Republicans who have already returned mail ballots in Pennsylvania, and posted to X that the figure dwarfed Biden’s 80,000-vote margin of victory in 2020 and presaged a Republican victory.
Democrats see the opposite. Four years after Democrats dominated vote-by-mail during the pandemic, the party is expecting the bulk of its voters to show up in person on Election Day, and is pleased by its mail margins. Nearly 58% of the 1.4 million ballots returned in Pennsylvania so far have come from Democrats.
Bonier took the case to Musk directly, annotating one of the billionaire’s triumphal posts with a reference to one of Tesla’s more divisive vehicle designs:
“This,” he posted this week, “is the cybertruck of early vote analysis.”
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