Hanover Township<\/a>, Lehigh County, which is the only thing non-partisan or third-party voters can participate in this time around.<\/p>\nHere is a quick look at Pennsylvania\u2019s electorate, as well as a deeper look at Lehigh Valley districts, including the 7th Congressional District, where there are competitive primary races.<\/p>\n
Voter registration statewide<\/p>\n
There were 8,952,839 Pennsylvanians on the voter rolls as of the May 4 registration deadline, about 217,000 more than were registered for the 2022 primaries. We looked at a four-year gap to eliminate the registration rush that the presidential election from 2024 might have caused. Here is a breakdown:<\/p>\n
Although Democrats still maintain a narrow registration edge, it has decreased from 6.3% to 2.1% in four years. For the primaries that edge is inconsequential, since only registered Democrats can vote for Democrats and only registered Republicans can vote for Republicans, but it gives an indication of changes in voter sentiment through time.<\/p>\n
Democrats and third-party adherents have fallen in both actual numbers and as a portion of the total electorate, while unaffiliated voters and Republican have grown in both number and percentage, accounting for 40.7% and 13% of the electorate, respectively. Unaffiliated voters have grown more than twice as fast as Republicans, currently accounting for more than one out of every 8 voters.<\/p>\n
Looking at voter registration by county is deceptive due to Pennsylvania\u2019s skewed population density. There are more red counties than blue on a map, but the blue counties generally have higher populations.<\/p>\n
For example, the 56 counties that have a Republican registration edge have a total of 4,414,195 voters, while the 11 counties with a Democratic registration edge, which include Lehigh and Northampton, have 4,538,644 total voters, almost 125,000 more.<\/p>\n
A similar pattern appears in the Lehigh Valley. Republicans have a registration edge in 38 of the 63 cities, townships and boroughs in Lehigh and Northampton counties, covering the majority of the land area in the region. Democrats have a registration edge in the remaining 25 municipalities. But those 25 places have 311,477 registered voters compared with 172,713 in the Republican-leaning places, a 1.8-to-1 ratio.<\/p>\n
Allentown has 38,384 Democrats among its 71,073 voters, making it proportionately the bluest municipality in the Lehigh Valley. Lynn Township, in the northwest corner of Lehigh County, has 1,917 Republicans in its 3,161 total voter count, giving it the highest concentration of Republican voters locally.<\/p>\n
Two Northampton County boroughs, West Easton and Northampton, have the most evenly balanced electorate, both with a Democratic margin of less than 1%. In tiny West Easton, there are four more Democrats than Republicans among the 848 registered voters: 329 (D) to 326 (R), for a 0.47% blue edge. Northampton Borough has a 0.71% Democratic edge among its 7,335 voters: 2,958 (D) and 2,906 (R).<\/p>\n
Listen to your elders<\/p>\n
One of the consequences of Pennsylvania\u2019s closed primary system is that younger voters are disproportionately shut out of the decision-making process for who is going to be on the ballot in the general election in November, because they are less likely to register with a particular party.\n<\/p>\n
The 764 Green party adherents in the 7th District boundaries are the youngest voters for any party with at least 100 local members, averaging 39.77 years old. The large group of 96,500 unaffiliated voters average 44.59 years, while Democrats and Republicans together average 52.91 years, with Republicans skewing older than Democrats. The average for everybody who isn\u2019t a D or R is 45.17 years old, meaning that those choosing who will run in the general election are, on average, 8 years older than those on the sidelines this May.<\/p>\n
Welcome to the party<\/p>\n
Here is a party breakdown of newly-registered voters in four local districts with competitive Democratic primary races: the 7th district, which includes Lehigh, Northampton, Carbon and part of Monroe County; state House district 22 in parts of Allentown and Salisbury Township; House District 187, in northwestern Lehigh County; and state Senate District 22, in parts of Lehigh and Bucks counties.\n<\/p>\n
Democrats have the edge in all four districts, but the 187th District, which covers the Republican-leaning northwestern part of Lehigh County, is the only place where voters who have registered since the last election have chosen the GOP in higher numbers than being unaffiliated or a member of a minor party.<\/p>\n
The most dramatic disparity is in the 22nd District, where most of the voters are in blue-leaning Allentown \u2014 only about one out of 14 new voters decided to align themselves with the Republican party, less than half the number who decided to skip the parties altogether.<\/p>\n
Finally, one way to gauge the interest in a particular race is to examine how many new voters it attracts. Lehigh County\u2019s 22nd District is the clear winner, where the 616 new voters account for almost 1.9% of the total electorate. That\u2019s far ahead of the 1.3% new voters in all of the U.S. 7th, while the 187th House and 16th Senate districts both attracted about 1% new voters in the last six months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While the number of Lehigh Valley voters grew almost 5% in the four years since the last midterm…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":141788,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,902,50],"class_list":["post-189123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-elections","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189123","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=189123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}