'A Significant Shift': Blue Collar Democrats Switching To Republican In 'Deep Purple' Pennsylvania
Nearly 59,000 registered Pennsylvania Democrats left the party in 2023; that makes more voters than fans needed to fill the capacity of the Franklin Field Football Stadium at the University of Pennsylvania.
Of those nearly 59,000 who left the Democratic Party, 36,950 switched to the Republican party, and 21,644 switched their party affiliation to “other,” the category the Pennsylvania Department of State uses in its data to cover parties such as Green and Libertarian.
“As the Democrat Party tilts further to the progressive left, more historically traditional, working-class families are moving to the Republican Party, both in terms of how they vote and how they’re registered,” conservative political strategist Charlie Gerow told the Epoch Times.
There is a significant shift going on in the base of the party, he said.
“The stuff we were taught in civics class simply is no longer the case—where the Republicans are the party of the country club set and the brie and Chablis crowd—now to a greater extent, the Republicans are the party of working men and women and the Democrats are the party of the privileged elite.”
And black voter registration was once reliably Democratic, but now many have turned to the Republican Party.
“Brown voters are increasingly Republican, in huge numbers, at a time when the media constantly tells black and brown people that Donald Trump is a racist. And he’s running up numbers [of black voters] unheard of by a Republican.”
This exodus from the Democratic Party is not new, but it has accelerated, Mr. Gerow said.
“People have been switching from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party for quite a while in Pennsylvania,” he said.
“There was, at one time, a 1 million vote advantage to the Democrats by registration, and now it’s down to about a third of that.”