Pennsylvania Is Going to Make Us All Sweat Once Again
In the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, a ton of attention will be focused on my home state of Pennsylvania—and rightly so. The swing state has outsized importance in determining who wins the presidency, and it also has a crucial Senate race this year.
Four years ago, during the height of the pandemic, all eyes were on Philadelphia as election workers spent days dutifully counting a flood of mail-in ballots since 375,000 people voted absentee, versus just 6,000 in 2016. The presidential race wasn’t called until Pennsylvania finally determined that Joe Biden won the state and had clinched the Electoral College—which was the Saturday morning after Election Day. Cable networks memorably called the election while Rudy Giuliani was in the middle of a surreal press conference in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia, not the Four Seasons Hotel.
Election Day turned into “election week.” It was a very sweaty, sleepless, and carb-heavy time for people and I’m here to inform you that it could happen again.
That multi-day delay was the result of a Pennsylvania law that prohibits election workers from opening and processing mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day, even if they’ve been sitting around for weeks. State lawmakers have had plenty of time to fix this problem, but they've chosen not to, partly because the Republican lawmakers and operatives can use the lag to sow doubt in elections and let conspiracy theories fester.
It works like this: Since Democrats are more likely to vote by mail and Republicans are more likely to vote in person, results coming in from ballot scanners on election night could show a temporary, misleading advantage for the GOP. Based on this so-called “red mirage,” a lying sack of shit like Donald Trump could declare victory before every ballot is counted and then file lawsuits and foment violence.
Seth Bluestein, a Republican city commissioner in Philadelphia who helped oversee the 2020 vote, told the Washington Post that he and his colleagues worked in the city’s convention center around the clock with pro-Trump protestors outside. He said they received death threats and had hoped the state would change the law. “That larger window of time when the final result is not known—that is where a lot of this harassment and threat environment can come about,” Bluestein said. “If we had pre-canvassing, it would really limit that window of opportunity for the spread of mis- and disinformation.”
State lawmakers could have changed the law at any point in the last four years to allow “pre-canvassing,” aka early processing of mail ballots, but they haven’t, largely due to political gridlock. The Democratic-controlled Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed a bill in May to allow pre-canvassing to start a week before Election Day, but the Republican-led Senate never even held a vote on it. (A bill did pass the Republican-controlled legislature in 2021 that would have permitted ballot counting five days early, but it tacked on voter ID restrictions and limits to ballot drop boxes, so then-Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, vetoed it. Democrats flipped the House the following year.)
There may not be quite as many mail ballots this year as there were in 2020, and Philadelphia in particular is better prepared to handle a high volume. But officials say it’s still likely the count will take a day or more. People should prepare themselves for the fact that results in Pennsylvania—and maybe Wisconsin, the other swing state that doesn’t allow pre-canvassing—will not be final in any way on November 5. The vote tallies will not “change” after election night; they simply weren’t complete then.
Adding to the national stress is the fact that the margins in the last two contests have been razor-thin. Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania by 0.7% in 2016, or about 44,000 votes (and third-party candidates received more than 200,000 votes). In 2020, Biden beat Trump by 1.2%, or 81,000 votes. The elections site Fivethirtyeight forecasted that Pennsylvania will most likely be the tipping-point state this year—that is, the one that gives a candidate their 270th Electoral College vote, the majority needed to win out of 538. (Yes, that’s where the site’s name comes from.)
The race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris remains uncomfortably close nationwide and in Pennsylvania polls. Both the campaigns and supporting super PACs are spending gobs of money, dropping $250 million on ads between July 22—Harris’s first full day as the candidate—and September 30. That’s the highest amount spent in any battleground state. There’s also a Senate race between incumbent Bob Casey (D) and Dave McCormick, an anti-abortion former hedge fund CEO who lived in Connecticut until June of this year. More than $317 million has been spent on that race alone.
The Trump campaign sees Pennsylvania as key to a potential victory: The New York Times reported that his “advisers and allies believe that a Trump win in Pennsylvania would block Vice President Kamala Harris’s path to the White House.” As of mid-September, the Trump campaign spent more there than in any other state.
Harris faces some political inertia in the Keystone State: Per NBC News, Pennsylvania is “the only front-line battleground state where a woman has never won a race for president, governor or senator.” She could win without Pennsylvania, but she’d have to beat Trump in either Georgia or North Carolina, though thankfully not both. (Biden won Georgia in 2020, and North Carolina—which a Democrat hasn't won since 2008—is competitive this year thanks in part to the imploding GOP gubernatorial campaign of self-described “Black Nazi” Mark Robinson. If Harris wins there, it could be game over for Trump.)
Unfortunately, the final campaign sprint means Pennsylvanians will be subjected not just to nonstop election ads, but also to addled billionaire Elon Musk.
On Sunday, Trump went back to Butler, PA—where a bullet grazed his ear in an assassination attempt in July—and held another rally. Musk joined him on stage and awkwardly leaped in the air while wearing a black MAGA hat and a shirt that read “Occupy Mars.” Musk said that “President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America.” (What Musk isn't saying is that he's facing scrutiny for his alleged drug use that could impact his security clearance as a government contractor and Trump would clearly sweep that under the rug, as well as renew tax cuts for obscenely wealthy people like him.)
Politico reports that Musk will make more visits to the state in the coming weeks. Musk attended the University of Pennsylvania, located in Philly, and claims to root for both the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers, which is an impossibility for anyone who isn’t pandering for votes. He attended a Steelers game after the rally, and in 2023 he watched the Eagles in the Super Bowl in a box seat with right-wing media goblin Rupert Murdoch.
Pennsylvanians, I’m sorry for the deluge of ads in the final weeks and for the presence of creepy pro-natalists. But you know what happens if you stay home or vote third-party: You get Trump. And this time around, with Roe v. Wade already gone, he could ban abortion nationwide and come after birth control.
As for the rest of us, I recommend stocking up on stress-eating snacks for election week. Because, again, we’re likely not going to know on November 5 who won. That is unless Harris notches an early win in North Carolina, a state that allows early processing of mail ballots—what a concept.