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Ruffini on Registration Trends
Mark Harris
October 11, 2024
My friend Patrick Ruffini had a great article on his excellent newsletter (subscribe here) about the consistent Republican gains on voter registration that I have also written about, but Patrick did a much better and more in depth job than I did.
I asked Patrick’s permission to reprint some of it here just because I do think it is pretty enlightening.
Patricks first point is that largely, but not entirely, these appear to be rural registered Democrats who haven’t voted Democratic in years just re-aligning to match their real party.
The Democratic registration advantage in Pennsylvania is mostly a function of rural counties being far more Democratic by registration than they vote. That makes rural registered Democrats who haven’t switched yet one of the most coveted persuasion targets for Trump—especially if they voted in-person on Election Day in 2020 and haven’t voted in Democratic primaries recently.
He provides this excellent chart showing the movement as the dots converge closer to the line that is the correlation between 2020 presidential results and voter registration. Everything above the lines are more Democratic than registration would predict and everything below the line is more Republican than predicted.
Voter Registration vs. 2020 Performance - Patrick Ruffini
Much of the registration shift is simply voter registration coming into stronger alignment with how people actually vote. But there also may have been a slight Republican shift on top of that. But beyond that, was there a pattern to how counties shifted more or less than expected that can tell us about the potential for changing coalitions in 2024?
So if there is indeed a Republican shift on top of registration re-alignment what can we infer from the geography? Patrick says that a Trump 2 point shift would manifest in a map roughly looking like this.
Projected 2020→2024 Swing - Patrick Ruffini
What jumps out to me here is Chester County at moving 5 points right, Philadelphia, Bucks, and Montgomery moving 3 points right and Allegheny being the only county moving left.
We won’t know if this is real until election day but Patrick makes a compelling case that there may be a little more to the voter registration surge in PA than meets the eye.