One County Could Swing 2024’s Most Important Battleground State — Is Trump Positioned to Win It?

(DCNF)—It is nearly impossible to find a street in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, that does not have Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz signs lining the sidewalks.

The county is widely considered to be one of the most important battlegrounds within 2024’s most important battleground state as one of the last swing areas left in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to win Bucks County by less than 2,000 votes in 2016, when former President Donald Trump carried the state, and President Joe Biden won it by about 17,000 votes on his way to winning Pennsylvania and the general election in 2020.

With days to go until Election Day, Republicans and Democrats are doing their best to run through the tape and deliver the county — and the Keystone State writ large — for their respective parties. Both parties and aligned outside groups are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the presidential race, as well as down-ballot contests. 

By The Numbers

Bucks County also provides a cross-section of the state at large, containing urban, suburban, exurban and rural areas. The county’s composition and its demographic breakdown make it a decent indicator of how things may turn out statewide and a county to watch closely as returns start rolling in, a Trump campaign official told the DCNF.

Nearly every prominent pollster and pundit in the country is projecting that Pennsylvania will be as competitive as can be, with Bucks County right in the middle of the partisan tug-of-war. However, Barry Summers — a data engineering consultant by day who has meticulously analyzed Bucks County voting data in efforts to help elect Republicans — believes current early voting and vote-by-mail data suggests Trump will win the county by several percentage points, he told the DCNF.

Relative to the 2020 cycle, Republican mail-in votes are up by about 20,000 — or 60% — in Bucks County, while Democrats have so far managed to secure 98% of the approximately 79,000 mail-in ballots they did in the 2020 cycle, Summers told the DCNF. Meanwhile, Bucks County has seen a 21% increase in mail-in ballots from independent and unaffiliated voters in the 2024 cycle relative to the 2020 cycle, according to Summers.

Summers has also observed that the volume of GOP mail-in votes has accelerated since early October while the pace of Democrat early votes has decelerated since then, and that independent and unaffiliated voters are sending in their votes later “almost in the exact same pattern that the Republicans are,” said Summers. While the pattern alone does not prove anything about voters’ intentions, it suggests to Summers that these unaffiliated and independent voters may be breaking favorably enough for Republicans.

While some of these early votes could cannibalize the Election Day GOP vote, Summers has reason to believe that many of these early votes are coming from lower-propensity voters and that dependable Republican voters will mostly show up to vote on Nov. 5, he told the DCNF. Additionally, Summers sees what he believes to be clear indications that enthusiasm in some key Democratic constituencies, such as young people, is not robust.

“The Democrat propaganda says the youth are outraged and that they’re voting in droves. That is not happening in Bucks County. I looked at voting by age, for 18-year olds, for 19-year olds and so on, what percentage of the people who voted by mail-in ballot are Democrats by each age,” Summers told the DCNF. “The peak share of the Democrat voters are people in their 30s. So, in other words, people in their 30s have registered as mail-in ballot voting Democrats more than any other age of life, the college turnout is very comparable to the Democrat average for the whole county.”

“So what does that tell us?” Summers continued. “That tells us that college age Democrats in Bucks County were as motivated to turn into mail in ballot applications as the average Democrat was overall. There isn’t some surge in the youth vote where they’re all excited and everybody else can’t be bothered. That is just not happening. There’s no passion in the youth vote.”

Moreover, the unaffiliated and independent early vote has skewed toward males so far in Bucks County, a trend that benefits Trump if it holds given that Trump is polling better with men than women in the 2024 cycle, Summers said.

Just now: Voters are lined up around the block here in Doylestown, PA, to bank their votes. @DailyCaller News Foundation pic.twitter.com/bR73fQILMW

— Nick Pope (@realnickpope) October 29, 2024

‘We Feel Pretty Confident’

Other Republicans on the ground in Bucks County are also feeling confident to the extent they can, albeit with more anecdotal supporting evidence than the numbers Summers cites. Several Bucks County Republicans pointed out that Trump can theoretically lose Bucks County by a margin of about two percent or less and still be in good shape statewide, as occurred in the 2016 race.

“I am cautiously optimistic. What we’re seeing on the ground here in Bucks County, it’s a wave like we’ve never seen, even in 2020 and 2016,” Ed Sheppard, the communications chair for the Doylestown Republican Committee, told the DCNF. “We’re seeing people who’ve never voted before register to vote, to come out to vote for the Republicans. And I think in Bucks County, the top of the ticket is going to drive the down ballot.”

Bucks County Trump voters who convened on Wednesday at the McDonald’s franchise in the county where the former president campaigned earlier in October also told the DCNF that they sense a level of enthusiasm and urgency from grassroots Republicans that they did not feel in 2020. Numerous local GOP officials and volunteers working to turn out voters also said they are feeling and seeing strong levels of enthusiasm for Trump on the ground in conversations with the DCNF.

Local Democrats, meanwhile, are putting stock in suburban women and the issue of abortion access to help carry Vice President Kamala Harris and down-ballot candidates to victory in the county.

“Women have been underestimated for a very long time, but we could be the reason that Bucks goes blue and we elect a President Harris,” Anna Payne, the local Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania State House, told The New Yorker in October. Nationally and in Pennsylvania, Democrats are betting that campaigning hard on access to abortion could be the key to winning over enough suburban female voters to secure electoral victories, TIME recently reported.

While some Bucks County Republicans are concerned about college-educated women showing up in force for Democrats, others, like Jim Worthington — a longtime Trump donor and ally who led Pennsylvania’s delegation at the Republican National Convention this summer — believe that abortion is not as salient of an issue for the Bucks County electorate as it may have been in the 2022 midterms, which occurred just months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

“It’s the issue that cost Dr. Oz the election in the Senate race, as well as vote by mail. They were the two issues that cost him the election, and because they just came off the overturning of Roe,” Worthington told the DCNF. “The Democratic Party used that as a weapon, because people didn’t understand it. And as time went on, more people understood that the power has been put back to each state and the voters of each state. So I don’t think it is nearly the issue it was.”

Worthington’s small army of volunteers mobilizing voters has consistently heard from female voters about the pressures of inflation and higher living costs, he added.

The Trump campaign, meanwhile, does not see a pressing need to tailor a specific message for suburban women in Bucks County beyond urging voters to consider whether they are better off today than they were four years ago, a campaign official told the DCNF.

“Our topline message is the same for whoever we’re talking to. That includes men or women, young or old, white, black, Asian, Hispanic, or whoever. And the message is, are you better off now than you were four years ago?” the Trump campaign official told the DCNF. “We’re bringing up kitchen table, bread-and-butter issues like inflation, cost of living, affordability. We’re talking about things like biological men playing in their or their daughters’ sports and sports leagues and using the same locker bathroom facilities. We’re talking about immigration and crime, especially in areas like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh … We’re not treating [suburban women] like an exotic other, but another group of voters who are affected by things like inflation, by crime, by these far-left pushes on things like biological men playing in women’s sports, and that sort of thing.”

“We’re not resting on our laurels or taking anything for granted, obviously, but overall, we feel pretty confident in Bucks County, and by extension, the rest of Pennsylvania.”

Featured Image: Screen Capture/CSPAN

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