Pennsylvania Republicans registered more new voters than Democrats in July, a month when former President Donald Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in the battleground state.
Republicans added 19,127 new voters to their rolls last month, compared to the Democratic Party’s 17,495, according to an Axios report.
A gunman opened fire on the former president during a Butler County rally on July 13. Far from dampening enthusiasm for the Trump campaign, Pennsylvanian Republicans projected energy and enthusiasm as they coalesced to support their party’s leader.
“As soon as we saw him get up and raise his fist, we saw that as a call to action,” Ed Sheppard, the chairman of communications for the Doylestown Republican Committee, told WHYY News a week after the shooting.
“That moment, I think, crystallized for a lot of Republicans exactly how hard he’s fighting for us. And we now have to fight just as hard for him,” Sheppard continued.
Both Trump’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaigns have geared up to increase voter turnout in Pennsylvania, a state that is widely viewed as crucial to winning the presidency this election cycle.
July’s voter registration report isn’t the first time Trump has nudged out Harris in Pennsylvania. Between November 2023 and April 2024, the number of new Republicans registering to vote consistently increased while Democrats’ new voter rolls declined, according to a NOTUS report.
Democrats continue to hold an advantage of roughly 400,000 people in the state overall, but the number marks a significant drop from just over a decade ago when Pennsylvania had over 1 million more registered Democrats than Republicans.
But the battle is far from over in a state President Joe Biden won by approximately 80,000 votes four years ago. Biden’s narrow victory in 2020 came after Trump flipped it red during the 2016 presidential election. His surprise upset made him the first Republican presidential candidate to clinch a win in the Keystone State since 1988.
State Sen. Sharif Street, the Pennsylvania Democratic Party’s chairman, said his party lost the battleground state in 2016 because it didn’t “message out to rural Pennsylvania enough” in recent comments to NBC.
Street made the remarks as he vowed that Democrats wouldn’t make the same mistake this election cycle. The Harris campaign has opened nine campaign offices this year in rural Pennsylvania counties that Trump carried by double digits in 2020, according to the outlet.
Speaking at a Democratic event geared toward Pennsylvania’s rural voters last weekend, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) noted the important role they played, calling them “unsung heroes.”
“You are the secret. Real power is in red counties with all of you,” the Pennsylvania Democrat declared, telling the outlet later that winning Pennsylvania comes down to “rooms like this.”
Even as Fetterman fights to help lock in rural support for Harris in his home state, some of his colleagues worry that another key Democratic voting bloc is on shaky ground with the Harris camp.
“The black vote is challenging right now,” Democratic Pennsylvania state Rep. Gina Curry told the Pittsburg Post-Gazette last week.
Recent polling in Pennsylvania indicates Trump holds significantly more support from black voters than past Republican presidential hopefuls. However, the head of BlackPAC, an organization mobilizing black voters for Harris in Pennsylvania, downplayed the polling data.
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“I have not seen any indication that black voters are en masse in any way moving toward Trump,” Adrianne Shropshire told the outlet. “I don’t have any concern that we’re seeing any racial political realignment right now. That’s not what we’re hearing.”
National polling shows former President Donald Trump is in a dead heat with Vice President Kamala Harris to win the battleground state.