With fewer than two weeks until Election Day, the deadline to register has passed.<\/p>\n
There has been quite a buzz for an off-year election, and numbers released by the Pennsylvania Department of State show interesting trends for voters in our viewing area.<\/p>\n
Lehigh County is one of eight counties in the region that has seen more Democrats switching to Republican than Republicans switching to Democrat.<\/p>\n
Pennsylvania remains a purple state, but the trend is shifting toward a deeper shade of red.<\/p>\n
From Bucks to Lehigh to Berks counties, more people are changing their party affiliation from Democrat to Republican than the other way around.<\/p>\n
In three counties, the difference is by a few dozen voters; in five others, it’s by several hundred.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it has to be put in conversation with the overall numbers,\u201d said Chris Borick, professor of political science at Muhlenberg College.<\/p>\n
He said the numbers largely align with trends he\u2019s seen in recent years. According to Borick, the trend is red.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an off-year election where we see turnout generally decline,\u201d Borick said. \u201cThe number of voters is much less than we\u2019d see in a midterm or presidential election. Therefore, small changes in this part of the electorate\u2014where it\u2019s not as big as it is in other years\u2014could have even more impact.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, thousands of voters, both Democrat and Republican, have left their parties this year and registered as unaffiliated. Pennsylvania has just shy of 9 million voters. Borick said these are important trends that could impact a state often decided on the margins.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou may look at these and decide they are only fractions of the overall registration numbers, but fractions matter a lot in Pennsylvania,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With fewer than two weeks until Election Day, the deadline to register has passed. There has been quite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13114,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,10066,10067,28,10069,10068],"class_list":["post-13113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-chris-borick","tag-muhlenberg-college","tag-pennsylvania","tag-presidential-election","tag-professor-of-political-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}