Pennsylvania

It can now be said that Gov. Tom Wolf has driven reform in Pennsylvania — and no matter that it checks his own authority. That reform consists of amendments to the state constitution, approved last week by referendum and intended to halt the string of emergency orders that Wolf has issued since the start of the COVID epidemic. Although legislatures across the country have entertained a flurry of bills to curtail the reach of executive lockdowns, Pennsylvania is the only state to put such a stay on a governor to a popular vote. It isn’t as if Wolf has been the most arbitrary governor in the country, not in view of Cuomo in New York, Whitmer in Michigan and Newsom in California. The competition for that distinction is too stiff.

To say out-loud that you find the results of the 2020 presidential election odd is to invite derision. You must be a crank or a conspiracy theorist. Mark me down as a crank, then. I am a pollster and I find this election to be deeply puzzling. I also think that the Trump campaign is still well within its rights to contest the tabulations. Something very strange happened in America's democracy in the early hours of Wednesday November 4 and the days that followed. It’s reasonable for a lot of Americans to want to find out exactly what. First, consider some facts. President Trump received more votes than any previous incumbent seeking reelection. He got 11 million more votes than in 2016, the third largest rise in support ever for an incumbent.

The 2020 election has already kicked up myriad allegations of fraud. From dead people voting in key states to late Biden ballots magically showing up, recounts and the courts will determine fact from fiction. Along with those issues, there were other five outcomes that should cause reasonable people to scratch their heads.First, Colorado. Just a few years ago, Colorado was considered a purple battleground state. Donald Trump even vocalized a belief he could win there in 2020. But this month's results should end Republican dreams of winning statewide top-of-the-tickets races in Colorado for the foreseeable future. As a former Coloradan who ran a congressional campaign and served as a deputy on Sen.

Within the last year, election officials and judges in a few key swing states reduced the Green party’s erstwhile ballot access to write-in only. They likely intended to reduce the Greens’ vote share to the benefit of Joe Biden and the Democratic party.Voters in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin might have noticed the unusual absence of the Green party’s presidential ticket from their 2020 ballots. Democrat-controlled courts and Democratic election officials denied Green presidential candidate Howie Hawkins and his VP pick Angela Walker a place on those states’ ballots.

Will a Republican senator from Nebraska be the man who hands Joe Biden the White House? Ben Sasse has tried his best to do that. Sasse easily won reelection in the safe red state of Nebraska on Tuesday, leading his Democratic opponent by nearly 30 points with 85 percent of the vote in. But President Trump has not fared so well; in fact, he lost the vote in Nebraska’s Second Congressional district. Since Nebraska, like Maine, divides its Electoral College votes by district, that means Joe Biden gets an elector from Nebraska. And for that, Biden can thank Sasse, who next to Mitt Romney is the sitting Republican senator who has been most outspokenly critical of President Trump.

Pittsburgh On the eve of the 2020 election, as President Trump and former VP Joe Biden are neck-in-neck, Pennsylvania is emerging as the most significant state. Pollsters and pundits predict that, as this crucial swing state goes, so will the nation. On Saturday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the city’s leading local newspaper, endorsed Donald Trump, the first time it has endorsed a Republican presidential candidate since 1972. Four years ago, talking with Western Pennsylvanians at random revealed unlikely pockets of support for Trump. Synthesizing interviews, voter registration patterns and breaking news, I speculated Pennsylvania would pivot red — and it did.

Rioters and looters in Philadelphia may have just paved Trump's road to victory in Pennsylvania. Biden helped last week when he admitted during the final presidential debate that he wanted to phase out US oil production. It was a boneheaded thing to say while trying to court blue-collar Americans in swing states, many of whom work in the energy sector. Now, Trump also has the 'law and order' narrative on his side. Walter Wallace Jr, a 27-year-old black man, was shot and killed by police in Philadelphia on Monday. It only took until that evening for protests to turn to looting and rioting. Just like in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Portland and other major cities, businesses were destroyed and individuals were harmed.

Suburban women are understood to be one of the most crucial demographic groups in the presidential election on November 3. Many pollsters currently predict that President Donald Trump will lose due to his unpopularity with that category of voters. But have the Democrats really reclaimed the suburbs? Or are there more likely Republican voters than the polls suggest? The Spectator tracked down a series of so-called ‘closet Trump’ voters, women from the suburbs who would never publicly voice their support for the President for fear of recrimination in their social circles. These are their stories.

'Protest' often feels inadequate as a characterization for the public exhibitions that have erupted nationwide over the past several weeks. The term 'protest' carries a connotation of actions carried out in opposition to existing structures of power; hence, you 'protest' against forces that are arrayed against you (even if some municipal bureaucrat might have reluctantly granted you a permit). However, at least in many jurisdictions, events which were presented as 'protests' should more rightly be labeled as something along the lines of 'state-backed demonstrations.' For instance, in my otherwise sleepy hometown of Caldwell/West Caldwell, New Jersey, high-school students organized what turned out to be an astonishingly large protest march.

One of the largest obstacles standing in the way of Donald Trump’s re-election is his weakness in every big city in America. Some cities produce such large vote advantages for the Democrats that a Republican simply can’t make up those votes across the rest of the state. That disadvantage is a write off in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago because Trump is guaranteed to lose the deep blue states those cities are in. It will matter, however, in nine battleground states that will decide who wins the 2020 election. Specifically, in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the vote totals in the big cities and counties could make it nearly impossible to win those states in the suburban and rural areas.

Here’s a riddle for you, and if you solve it, the Democrats will nominate you for president: how does one candidate carry both Cambridge, Mass. and Luzerne County, Penn.? Sure, the former’s a cake-walk. Hillary Clinton could stand in the middle of Harvard Square and shoot somebody, and she wouldn’t lose any voters from the People’s Republic of Taxachusetts. But the latter, which Obama won in 2012, went to Trump in a whopping 25-point swing. This was the big story in 2016: the defection of blue-collar voters to the Republican party. Now, as the 2020 election draws nigh, Democratic office-holders in ‘Purple America’ are feeling the heat. Speaking to Politico at the National Governors Association’s winter meeting, Gov.

Donald Trump’s reputation took a battering during the shutdown. He said he would own it, and he did. He took the blame and then he took the hit when he agreed to end the partial federal closure without winning funding for his border wall. So what was the point? A new set of polling figures reveals the point with hard numbers. It turns out that while his stand was broadly unpopular across the country, his no-nonsense stance resonated with one critical cohort of voters – people in key battleground districts, those that voted Trump in 2016 but swung Democratic in the midterms. They gave him the win on the wall and border security.

One interpretation of the midterm election results in the Rust Belt, where Democrats made substantial gains (though not across the board), is that Trump’s unpopularity dragged down Republicans. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania propelled Trump to victory in 2016, and his inability to sustain a base of support there cost Republican candidates for state and federal office – or so the interpretation goes. There’s probably a measure of truth to this. Trump’s approval in Michigan, for instance, lags at 44 percent, according to CNN exit polls; the state re-elected a Democratic senator without much fanfare, as well as a new governor, and several well-established GOP House incumbents were ousted.