Philadelphia Turnout

There has undeniably been a shrinking of the percentage of the vote coming out of the City which has been replaced by suburban areas in Allegheny and the Philly suburbs. For Democrats it’s been replacing a 82% county with 65% counties. It’s not great but also not horrible. The question is what are we looking at in Philadelphia for next Tuesday.

Right now they have 156,000 mail ballots returned and 236,000 requests for a 66% return rate. The statewide return rate is 71.2% as of yesterday so Philly is trailing the state average by around 5 points.

Its really hard to know because we do not have a lot of trend data but I think its pretty safe to assume that Philly will be under 10.7% and possibly into the 9s like they did in 2022.

Almost 750,000 people came out and voted in 2020 in Philadelphia. The assumptions are turnout down maybe 5% statewide vs 2020 so if so Democrats probably need to keep Philly around 700,000 votes. Likely 200,000 will be returned mail ballots if we extrapolate return rate, so Democrats are looking for roughly 500,000 Election Day voters. That’s a lot but not impossible. This would be about 28.5% mail vs 72.5% on Election Day, which

This would seem to say that they are likely to get close to their goals IF the 2.75:1 or so metric holds. So the Democrats have a path to getting the numbers they need in Philadelphia but they will need to bank 500,000 or so votes on Election Day at least. Something they have not done since before covid.