Obama Headed to Philadephia, and the Reason Is in the Numbers — Bad Numbers for Joe Biden by Patriot Outlook
Ocober 19, 2020
The media is attempting to capture the public’s attention with poll numbers in the hope that Trump partisans will become despondent about a looming loss, and then not take the trouble to vote.
Four years ago the conventional wisdom was that Hillary Clinton’s massive organizational advantages when combined with incumbency of the Democrat Obama Administration, validated the near-universal view of pollsters that Clinton was going to cruise to an easy victory.
But the combination of “conservatism,” “nationalism”, and “populism” that Trump combined together, and then took directly to the electorate over the heads of media produced an “electorate” remarkably different from the one predicted by the pollsters in their models. But polling is polling, it’s an art, not a science. One thing not factored into the model changes from 2016 to 2020 is how changes in party registration alter the composition of the electorate that shows up at the polls.
Pennsylvania reflects a bad series of numbers for Joe Biden in this regard, and it explains why Pres. Obama is headed to Philadephia this week.
As a general proposition, having more new voters register for your party than the opposition party is a good thing because only a very small fraction of new party registrants are likely to vote for the candidate of the other party. Party switchers are great, but they are generally less plentiful. New voter registrants tend to vote as a higher percentage than other registered voters. This is why both major parties work so hard at voter registration.
So, what does the recent history of voter registration in Pennsylvania reflect? Let’s look at the numbers of the last four Presidential election outcomes in Pennsylvania as our backdrop — both the percentages and the raw vote totals:
2004 — Kerry 2.938 million (50.9%); Bush 2.794 million (48.4%): +144,000 for Democrats
2008 — Obama 3.276 million (54.5%); McCain 2.656 million (44.1%): +620,000 for Democrats
2012 — Obama 2.990 million (52.0%); Romney 2.680 (46.6%): +310,000 for Democrats
2016 — Clinton 2.926 million (47.5%); Trump 2.970 (48.2%): -44,000 for Democrats
In the last two election cycles, the Democrat gross vote total declined 350,000 votes.
In the same two election cycles, the GOP gross vote total climbed 314,000.
This wasn’t just a matter of who the candidates were, however, it was also a matter of who the voters were. And that is where the voter registration numbers become important.
In 2008, there were 4.480 million registered Democrat voters in Pennsylvania, and there were only 3.243 million registered GOP voters.
That was an advantage of 1,230,000 more registered voters for Democrats. But even with the wildly popular Barack Obama making his historic first run, he captured a vote total equivalent to only 73% of all registered Democrats.
The less-than-wildly-popular John McCain, on the other hand, captured a vote total of 82% of the number of registered Republicans.
Obviously, there were cross-overs — GOP registered voters cast their vote for Obama, and Democrat registered voters cast their votes for McCain. But just as a function of the raw relationship between the number of registered voters for each party, and the number of votes cast for each party’s candidate, Obama underperformed McCain while Obama was receiving more votes than any candidate ever in Pennsylvania.
The same calculation got worse for Democrats in both 2012 and 2016. In both election cycles, the number of votes for the Democrat as a percentage of Democrat registered voters went down, while the same number for the GOP went up in both years.
In 2012, Romney’s vote total of 2.680 million represented 86% of the number of GOP registered voters.
In 2016, Trump’s vote total of 2.970 million represented 90% of the number of GOP registered voters.
Pres. Obama beat McCain when the numbers were 73% v. 82%, and Romney when the numbers were 70% v. 86% — with his margin of victory cut in half from 2008 to 2012.
Hillary Clinton lost when the numbers went to 69% v. 90%, and the respective vote total differential went from a comfortable 310,00 vote win for Obama to a narrow 44,000 vote loss for her.
The mantra is that Biden only needs to do a little better than Clinton did in a few Pennsylvania counties where Democrats dominate, and that will be enough to flip the state back narrowly into the Democrat column on Nov. 3. That is a wild oversimplification that ignores what has been happening in Pennsylvania the past 20 years — and more importantly, ignores what has been happening in Pennsylvania the last 4 years.
Here are the final registration numbers for 2020, and the change from the 2008 “high water” mark from Obama’s first run.
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