Why Pennsylvania's Push for Automatic Voter Registration is Standard Democrat Playbook

Topic: Elections

Yesterday, in an announcement that caused a major commotion on National Voter Registration Day, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro declared the Keystone State would become the 24^th state to create an automatic voter registration (AVR) system.  Pennsylvania, as with most states operating an AVR system, will use “motor voter,” which automatically registers an individual to vote when receiving a new or updated driver’s license.

Shapiro said the following about this move, referencing an estimated 1.7 million Pennsylvanians who are eligible to vote but are not registered:

It’s a safe, secure, streamlined way to get them to register and participate in our democracy.

Aw, shucks, Josh.  That’s so kind of you to take the high road and allow for a massively Trump-trending state, one that has been trending Republican for nearly a decade and a half now, to potentially onboard even more of that stubborn anti-Democrat non-college white vote, even upwards of a third of the hunting population in the state that is not registered, to your diminishing “blue” voter roll.

It's a very surprising move, indeed, especially since Shapiro failed to cloak his bias when discussing the indictments against President Trump last month:

“We had a front-row seat here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania – and I certainly did as Attorney General – to see all of the efforts of the former president, and some of his enablers here in Pennsylvania, undertook to try and overthrow the last election (and) to try to thwart the will of the good people of Pennsylvania.  Ultimately, as we all know, they failed – and it’s a good thing that they failed. Our democracy survived … and now the rule of law is showing that – as it has always been in our nation – it is applied equally and fairly across the board, no matter how powerful you are. The former president will now have to answer in a court of law for the crimes that he allegedly committed. That process will be underway in our court system, which is where it should play out.”

Whoa – did he just call Trump supporters, or at least a large swath of them, enablers?  Josh, you do know that in order to serve up the lie that the 2020 election in Pennsylvania was fair, that you have to ignore the fact that the Republican Party of Pennsylvania outregistered the Democrat Party at a ratio of 21:1 (over 242,000 net new Republican registrations to just 11,000 Democrat) during President Trump’s term in office, which completely counters the narrative that President Trump was unpopular in a state that he won as GOP nominee for the first time since 1988 for his party?  Let me explain it to you with a visual:

Back in reality, Pennsylvania has been trending Republican since the 2010 midterms.  Barack Obama had just carried the state by 10.3% two years earlier, with eastern Pennsylvania resembling the densely populated eastern seaboard politically, negating the Republican trend in much of western Pennsylvania that year.  In the Tea Party wave, Republican Tom Corbett flipped the governor’s mansion in a romp (9%), and Pat Toomey won his Senate seat for the first time in a tighter race.

Pennsylvania lost just a single percentage point of Democrat voter registration advantage going into 2012, and that was enough to foreshadow Obama’s winning margin plunging to 5.4% over Mitt Romney, with Obama dropping more than 286,000 votes in the state as the non-college white voter fled the Democrat plantation in droves.  Romney, however, was unable to appeal to them, so they stayed home.  They didn’t stay home in 2016, though, because Donald Trump’s trade message appealed to them so heavily that the Democrats lost another three points in ground on registrations, suggesting a major rightward lurch in the result that would explain Trump’s campaign presence in a state many had written off.

Pennsylvania was redder than diaper rash for Trump, with 62 of 67 counties more Republican than they were in 2012, and Trump gaining over 290,000 votes, with many of those coming from two-time Obama voters who switched coalitions thanks to better trade policy.  Of course, with the Trump term registration trend, shaving another three points off the Democrat registration advantage, the writing was on the wall: Biden would be absolutely shellacked with more of the same, with Democrats unable to muster support from their traditional white, non-college voter base, and without help from nonexistent woke white tech workers who are flooding into more hospitable and inviting states of refuge.

Trump’s gain in net new votes in a state he was supposedly unpopular in was 40 percent larger than his gain in 2016, reaching beyond Barack Obama’s vote total in 2008, with the Democrats having lost net votes in two consecutive elections.