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Lara Putnam Profile picture
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6 Nov, 8 tweets, 3 min read
In an election that came down to every last vote, incl. every mail-ins, need to notice some huge efforts that ensured things didn't go wrong: incl massive push to spread updated info re changing-because-lawsuits formal requirements. Eg the banner I copied fr @PragmatcRadical
👇
And @bethanyhallam: Single. Handed. Force.
I kept adding to this thread 👇as a public service, but what resulted is a pretty useful census of all the MANY civic groups & actors, new & old, who worked overtime to get accurate voting info out day after day, in constantly shifting terrain
And: Local and state news media MATTER
.@1hood played a critical role bridging btwn some old-line orgs & their resources, & communities they'd become disconnected from. Getting accurate info out that last mile
Also: non-partisan voter protection/Common Cause/ACLU did AMAZING work, both manning hotline for months in advance, and training and deploying vast (I mean, really vast) numbers of volunteers on voting day. Huge impact keeping down the numbers of provisionals that had to be cast
Again: shout out to the impressive, many-stranded collective effort that ended up getting accurate voting info out to the good people of Allegheny County such that 682,000+ ballots could be cast & received on time & by the book: in the face of everything
👇👇

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More from @lara_putnam

Lara Putnam Profile picture
7 Nov
Beaver County PA—the setting of a good deal of "How will X play with the [implicitly male] white working class in the Rust Belt?" drive-thru reporting since 2016—today.

(You'll notice many celebrating are not white or not men. But apparently live there too and have votes too!)
Joe Biden's margin was one point better than Hilary Clinton's here. Which may not sound impressive until you realized that Dem vote margin had declined here in **every single election since 1988** by 5-10 points every time. So actually, reversing that is a Big Deal! Image
I tweet a lot about Beaver County: like weirdly a lot, for someone not actually employed by the local chamber of commerce. Nested threads (interspersed with election night ranting, sorry) available here if of interest
Read 6 tweets
Lara Putnam Profile picture
6 Nov
So I tweeted earlier today about Trump being uniquely impactful vis a vis two groups of voters👇. But one could as easily argue, looking at PA county results, that the remarkable thing is how un-unique 2016 & 2020 look. [quick thread]
Here's the GOP share of presidential votes from Bill Clinton's first race to today. (The counties are non-metro western PA, w/ a few large counties from the non-Philly-suburb east.) They're arrayed from least rural to most rural. Trump's two runs are in blue ('16) and green ('20)
If any candidate looks consistently unusual it's Barack Obama, who in quite a few places (inc. some very white & rural ones) momentarly clawed back a trend of steady GOP gain. Trump 2016 largely just jumped GOP totals back to where you wouldve thought, pre-Obama, they were headed
Read 14 tweets
Lara Putnam Profile picture
5 Nov
Big picture 🔥take: Donald Trump is uniquely toxic among upscale GOP voters in cosmopolitan suburbs, & also uniquely successful in getting would-be GOP voters to the polls in less affluent & less engaged places. Hence contrasting down ballot results 2018 vs 2020
The full picture, much less granular data, is still to come. But consistently disappointing results for Dem candidates of widely varied ideology across the country should I hope inspire rethinking that goes beyond usual "moderate" vs "Left" or mobilization vs persuasion sniping
The kitchen sink was thrown at this election, and in a context of extremely narrow victories of course anything & everything mattered: "the 10,000 votes due to [x] were crucial!" is a defensible take for any single x people tried, in a world where key states are won by 20,000
Read 17 tweets
Lara Putnam Profile picture
4 Nov
With so many eyes on PA let me offer a thread of threads pointing to reporting by amazing journalists here in the last 6 months or so, which capture some of the contradictory forces pushing in opposite directions. 1st: @CharlotteAlter on the COVID/disinfo epistemic fracture
2nd @Chris_Maag on the swirl of false rumors & fears spread on social media regarding #BlackLivesMatter . northjersey.com/story/news/col…
3rd an earlier piece from @Chris_maag capturing the fraught navigation and deep courage of young people of color in Central PA doing their best to become movement builders in spite of that
Read 7 tweets
Lara Putnam Profile picture
4 Nov
Gonna re-up this article now for the midnight obsessing about Pennsylvania county level results crowd: Wrote it 16 months which is to say a century ago but holds up pretty well americancommunities.org/in-pennsylvani…
As a reminder this is what Pennsylvania looks like through @AmCommPro's very helpful categories. Many "rural middle America" counties, lots of ex-industrial/partly recovered "middle suburbs", then exurbs & urban suburbs in the Philly collar & around Pittsburgh
Fully half of the population of PA lives in a Middle Suburb or Rural Middle America county. But also: fully half does not: concentrating instead in Urban Suburbs, Exurbs, College Town, or Big City (=Philadelphia) counties
Read 33 tweets
Lara Putnam Profile picture
3 Nov
Re-upping this thread...
... in the light of this:
Aggregate two-party presidential margins held rock steady in Allegheny county from 1996-2016, hovering between D+14.5 & D+16.5 as upscale suburbs turned from red to purple, while working-class Dem strongholds lost population, Dem allegiance, or both democracyjournal.org/magazine/57/ru…
Read 5 tweets

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