Lifetime Pennsylvania Democrats are becoming Republicans

TYRONE, Pennsylvania — Shirley Hall has always lived in this charming Blair County borough, located a few miles from the big city of Altoona and once the home of booming coal and paper mill industries. She has also been a Catholic all of her life and for most of it a registered Democrat , two attributes she says are, or at least were, a profound part of her identity .

She is still a Catholic, faithfully so, but last week when watching former President Donald Trump walk into the convention hall in Milwaukee just two days after being shot, she changed her voter registration on the spot.

In short, she is not just a Democrat voting for Trump come November, but she is now a Republican and will be voting so up and down the ballot. How solidly Democrat was Hall? The retired administrator for a local Catholic church voted for Barack Obama twice and Hillary Clinton in 2016 and did not vote for Donald Trump in 2020.

“I didn’t vote for Biden either. I just didn’t vote for either man that year,” Hall said.

Hall said a number of things led to her pivotal decision last week. “The last three years had really disheartened me in how my party had handled inflation, never recognizing that it is really impacting people’s lives, but also the border and how that has made accessing drugs even easier for people,” she said.

But the 78-year-old grandmother of two said she has great concern for the younger generation because of her grandsons, “not just because of them but because of all young people, with the debt, higher taxes, our education system, our immigration system, and I’ve been really frustrated with the whole thing.”

She adds, “I want to tell you, oh, I'm not a big Trump fan when he goes on too much, but I also recognize he can also be very likable. But after the shooting, as an American citizen, I really felt bad.”

Hall says she was curious to catch Trump at the convention, something she would not normally watch.

“I wanted to see his demeanor, and I was really moved by him when he came in,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I had tears in my eyes when he did. He really looked like he took a blow, not only physically but emotionally, which I'm sure he did.”

She added, “I used to work for a priest [who was] a bit gruff and a pain in the butt, and he grumbled and growled and shouted and yelled. And yet he had the wherewithal to feel for people. He did that. Well, that was what I saw in Trump. And I thought, 'I'm changing my party.' Click, click, click, click, click. I went into my computer and did it.”

The choice of Vice President Kamala Harris to replace President Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket after last weekend’s dramatic turn of events changed nothing for Hall, who said, “First, I like her less than Biden. She is much further left than I am comfortable with for our country. And second, she was shoulder to shoulder with Biden on every big policy decision that has been made the past three years, so she is the same as him only more removed from now former Democrats like me.”

Hall’s decision is notable, Chris Borick, political science professor at Muhlenberg College, explained, in that she is not just a Democrat voting for Trump but “she has shed her Democratic Party identity in its entirety, that is as personal to her as her identity as a Catholic.”

And Borick said her experience is not anecdotal. “She is part of a shift in party registration in Pennsylvania that has been seismic in this past state that began in 2016 and has accelerated in the past 18 months,” he said.

In 2008, the same year Obama won this state by a resounding 10 percentage points, Democrats held a sizable 12% registration advantage over Republicans.

In 2022, that number had shrunk in half to a 529,000 Democratic registration edge, and by this year, that number had shrunk even further to 360,982, which is barely a 4% advantage. Republicans have actually surpassed Democrats in the all-important counties of Bucks and Beaver, for the first time ever in the latter.

And Borick explains that sometimes registration numbers are lagging indicators.

“What I mean by that is that voters have changed their voting patterns before they change their registration,” he said. “So they might vote, have been voting Republican for a long time, or at least since 2016 with the ascension of Trump and the GOP.”

“By the way, this is not an easy decision for a voter to make, especially for legacy Democrats in this case that might've had family for years be Democrats to say, ‘OK, well, I'm no longer a Democrat,’” he said. “That's part of our identity. There's lots of research, by the way, that shows we hold fast to our political identity more so than some of our other identities like religion.”

Borick said the effect in Pennsylvania of Harris’s entry into the race is going to be highly scrutinized because of the importance of the state’s 20 electoral votes. While most recent polling showed Trump favored to varying degrees over Harris, CNN polling expert Harry Enten warned on air that number might be tough for her to overcome.

“Beating Trump won't be easy,” Enten said. “His favorable rating is higher now than it has ever been [per two polls taken over the weekend].”

Harris may poll better than Biden did against Trump, but Trump is running 5 points further ahead nationally against her than he finished against Biden in 2020.

Borick said Harris’s challenges are much the same as Clinton faced in 2016 in that she doesn’t connect with them where they are.

“We always try to quantify likability and how people relate to others in the political realm,” he said. “The vice president certainly has contended with those challenges and will, in terms of her connection.”

Borick said Harris has opportunities based on identity and her demographics to maybe make some connections that Biden was struggling with.

“That's unquestionable with younger voters, with voters of color. At the same time, does her ability to resonate with voters that are often older and older in a state like Pennsylvania, are those going to be new challenges she faces?”

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Overall though, Borick said Harris’s challenges with voters here are no different than Biden’s in that they rarely addressed the issues in a way that voters needed them to be meaningful, and “inflation is of course front and center.”

“That is part of why I changed my registration,” Hall said. “They never saw me, they never heard me. It was hard for me to leave until I realized they didn’t want me anymore, and then it wasn’t hard to leave at all.”