The 2024 election will come down to a handful of battlegrounds.
The margins look like they were on a razor’s edge.
And now Kamala Harris just got the worst news ever in the biggest swing state.
Working class voters in Philadelphia shift right
The latest poll out of Pennsylvania from Emerson had the race tied at 48 percent.
Pennsylvania looks like it will be the tipping point state.
And the local media is sounding the alarm about voter registration patterns and shifting allegiances in Philadelphia, the state’s largest city.
A Philadelphia Inquirer piece, headlined “In deep-blue Philly, working class voters are shifting toward Republicans,” set off warning bells that Donald Trump held far greater appeal to traditional portions of the Democrat base than pollsters and pundits think.
The article quoted multiple working class Democrats who now support Trump because the economy boomed on his watch and they suffered the consequences of Kamala Harris’ inflationary policies.
“Democrats keep saying [Trump] is going to bring down the economy, but he was already president for four years, and taxes were lower,” 27-year-old Gabriel Lopez told the Inquirer. “We’re tired of the same politics. We got a different type of guy, and the people actually love him.”
Retired truck driver Jim Kohn was also a life-long Democrat voter who defected to Trump over the economy.
“When Trump was President, everything was cheaper,” Khon said in his interview with the Inquirer. “Now, everything is so sky high.”
Political realignment
The political realignment that Donald Trump accelerated in 2016 continued apace this year.
Local GOP leader Charlie O’Connor told the Inquirer that as members of the professional managerial class – voters with college and advanced degrees – drifted into the Democrat Party – the work force moved Right.
“When I first started in politics in 1978, the managerial class was Republican — no one votes the way their bosses vote,” O’Connor stated. “Now, most people in the managerial class vote Democratic and no one is voting the way their boss is. So it’s been a flip. Most of the bosses are Democrats and the Democratic Party has become the party of the upper middle class.”
The numbers in terms of voter registration and turnout showed Democrats had good reason to be concerned about the shift among working class Philadelphians.
The Inquirer reported that “the GOP gained more than 10,300 registrants in Philadelphia, while Democrats netted about 9,800.”
In the 2020 election, Donald Trump gained votes in 41 of the city’s 66 wards.
The Inquirer found that Donald Trump gained the most votes among what Democrat concentrations were traditionally working-class residents.
“The shift was most stark in working-class communities. An Inquirer analysis of election results found that, in 2020, Democrats lost the most ground in neighborhoods where education levels were lowest and poverty rates were highest,” the Inquirer reported.
Heading into the election, most pundits thought Pennsylvania would be won in the suburbs.
But if Trump pulls off the win, the working-class realignment in the GOP that cuts down on the margins Democrats typically rack up in Philadelphia could prove decisive.
