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Lara Putnam Profile picture
Lara Putnam
@lara_putnam
Historian. Mom. Knocks on doors and talks politics. https://t.co/lPAqXtA1qm
Sep 4 • 16 tweets • 6 min read
This🧵is going to be about PA voter registration trends but let me start here. The thing about our beautiful commonwealth is: it's made up of a bunch of different kinds of places whose politics are being pulled in opposite directions. Start w this map, using @AmcommPro categories Image @AmCommPro Teal=Rural. (Fun fact: PA has the 3rd largest rural pop., in absolute terms, in the whole USA!)
Green="Middle Suburbs." Think Rust Belt: aging ex-industrial.
Orange=Urban suburbs: diverse, dense, educated.
Yellow=exurbs: less dense, less diverse, relatively wealthy.
Pink=Big City Image
Nov 9, 2023 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
to appreciate the scale of Dems' statewide success this wk you have to cast your mind back to the distant past of... Nov 2021, at whch point it looked fully possible the PA electorate would keep speeding rightward twice as fast as it had lurched left after the election of DJTrump Here's an even clearer metric I ended up with, one that captures turnout shifts as well as vote choice swings: change in net votes by county, averaged across statewide candidates each year to create something close to generic Dem v generic Rep results Image
Nov 13, 2022 • 14 tweets • 7 min read
It was certainly plausible to think that John Fetterman would have a uniquely strong performance among white working-class or rural Pennsylvanians but... that didn't turn out to be the case at all?🤷‍♀️ The results are especially striking because surely holding everything equal, one would expect Doug Mastriano's appeal to be strongest in the rural+rust belt areas that swung hard in support of Donald Trump: & Oz to be more appealing in the upscale/moderate/cosmopolitan suburbs?
Nov 11, 2022 • 20 tweets • 8 min read
Return of the 2018 Coalition, On Steroids (A Quick Thread on 2022 in Pennsylvania Before this Website Collapses).

tl;dr After Dobbs, the suburbs' anti-Dem realignment screeched to a halt & the anti-Trump realignment returned Image Lots of things happened around the end of June: Dobbs, bipartisan bills, gas prices coming down, Jan 6 hearings gaining news. The exact proportions of which had an impact on who may remain up for debate. But what's clear is things changed & stayed changed
Nov 9, 2022 • 13 tweets • 7 min read
This👇is not wrong! But note it's not just a demographic thing. The state & local organizations created/recreated by the anti-Trump grassroots ran through the tape for downballot Dems this year: even while hearing (& believing!) national voices foretelling doom National voices #onhere have not yet processed what a stunning year this was for downballot Dems in PA. The inverse of 2020, when the presidential result distracted attention from PA Dems' grim downballot slide. PA lived the midterm backlash 2 ys early!💪
Nov 9, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Because you are all about to realize you need to know this: in 2021 Democratic PA Supreme Court candidate Maria McLaughlin's share of provisional ballots in both Lehigh & Northampton counties was exactly 20 ppt higher than her share of EDay+Mail votes in each. ...& likewise in Montgomery County. fwiw. 👀
Nov 9, 2022 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
So back in August @Mlsif & I wrote a thing. Most normal people who read it only focused on what we said about apocalyptic emails (& agreed), while natl groups that run postcard-writing programs only focused on what we said about postcards (& disagreed) BUT nytimes.com/2022/08/01/opi… ...the core of the piece wasn't about either of those things. It was about what a better way of building Democratic connections to volunteers AND to voters would look like: one in which communication runs laterally between them, building local knowledge & local capacity over time
Nov 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Me, in @PennCapitalStar: Hard-working, sincere, Republican county officials may face pressure to refuse to count mail-in votes that have no legal defect but that local vigilante activists find suspect. We can't let this become part of the partisan toolkit. penncapital-star.com/commentary/why… Nearly 1/4 of the votes last year's Democratic Supreme Ct nominee netted from mail voters came from counties Donald Trump carried. It's telling that people pushing false fraud claims only want to talk about Philly: in fact Philly is where Dems are *least* likely to vote by mail🧐
Nov 7, 2022 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
We are already seeing predictable efforts to spread doubt about PA's mail-in ballot counting process, & to focus those doubts on Philly in particular. When in fact, the modal mail-in voter in Pennsylvania is someone's grandma in a mid-sized city's suburbs🤷‍♀️ Image As a reminder, here is where the 1,053,805 voters live whose mail ballots had already been received and tallied by their counties as of 11/4/22. Image
Nov 5, 2022 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Urgent task for community groups and voting rights groups in Philly: Help voters cure unsigned ballots *now* 👇👇👇
Nov 4, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Running into false or misleading claims about PA election integrity? Excellent answers and explanations to help you respond here👇! Another great resource: @LWVPGH brings you The Journey of an Election Ballot, walking through all of the safeguards that are in place to ensure the integrity of voting and vote-counting
Nov 4, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
📢🇺🇸⏱️🗳️🥳
En 👏Pensilvania 👏el Día 👏de las 👏Elecciones 👏No 👏Es 👏el Día 👏de los👏 Resultados👏
🤔¿Es segura la votación por correo en Pensilvania?🤔 ¡Excelente pregunta! Y la respuesta es que Sí.🗳️🇺🇸✉️🧑‍⚖️
Nov 3, 2022 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
PA mail ballot update: As of 11/2 over 960,000 voters' mail-in ballots had been received by their county election boards, for a return rate of 67%. Partisan breakdown of requests is similar to 2021, w/ Independents' share 2 percentage points higher than 2021 & GOP share unchanged As a reminder, PA mail ballots should *not* be treated as tea leaves to guess final results. All the important variance in this election is going to come from the groups least likely to vote by mail (young voters, urban core voters, GOP only-recent voters)
Nov 1, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
and...Oct 31 voter reg stats just dropped (into my inbox! because I emailed & asked for them. PA state bureaucracies are Good Actually). As a reminder Oct 24 was the last day to register to vote in this Nov's election, so assuming all county updates are in, this is where we stand Image Basic takeaway: post-Dobbs pattern held. Democratic voter registration finished strong, outpacing Republican net gains by just over 6,000 net voters statewide in the last two weeks. (Note these stats encompass not just new voters but party changers, deaths & relocations, etc) Image
Oct 31, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Happy Halloween from Pittsburgh’s 11th Ward, all! Where folks take both yard signs and holiday decor very seriously
Oct 30, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
A link shared in a SWPA community Fb group carried me to this site👇, which shares registered voters' full identifying information & gamifies the submission of challenge letters to local clerks. Weaponized transparency + crowdsourced procedural disruption. Are we ready for this? ImageImage omg it's like a nightmarish mashup of everything I worry about. Progressive grassroots Postcards to Voters here transformed👇into malinformation that furthers false claims regarding mail ballot voter fraud— pushed by shady Fb influencers crowdsourcing local political action 😳 Image
Sep 12, 2022 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
I was curious about how those first-months-after-Dobbs shifts in voter registration were holding up in PA, so I checked. The contrast with the GOP glory days back in the first 6 months of 2022 continues to be absolutely stark (as a reminder, more info that any human could want about long term patterns in partisan voter registration in PA is available to you here:
Aug 18, 2022 • 24 tweets • 13 min read
So @tbonier's thread on the predominance of women registering to vote in swing states in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade inspired me to check recent shifts in partisan registration in PA.
tl;dr New gains are neither Dem nor GOP but rather *overwhelmingly* Independents As a reminder, this is what long term registration trends in PA have looked like. On balance since 2015 Dems have made no gains, GOP have gained half a million voters, & Independent/Other parties have gained about 200,000 registrants Image
Jul 18, 2022 • 19 tweets • 8 min read
I was wondering what partisan voter registration trends in PA looked like—bc, candidate quality? vibes?🤷‍♀️?—so I checked in on change over the past 3 months & the answer is: totally disastrous for Democrats. Fwiw. From April-July 2022, Dems gained more total registrants than the GOP in 4 counties: Delco, Montco, Chester & Dauphin. Everywhere else Dems either gained fewer registrants than the GOP (eg Allegheny, Philly); lost while the GOP gained (most places); or lost more than the GOP lost
May 22, 2022 • 32 tweets • 13 min read
Meanwhile, the GOP governor primary race brought us: A tale of earned media, owned media, & paid media politicspa.com/gop-governors-… Image TV/Radio spending in PA GOP gubernatorial primary: McSwain $6.3M + $4.9M outside. White $5.5M. Corman $2.2M. Barletta $1M.
Mastriano $390K. Image
May 21, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Fetterman won every county in PA, but even more impressive is the consistency of his support across smaller geographic units. In Allegheny County he dominated in the precincts where Trump got 70% of the vote & in the precincts where Trump got 2%. & also won the swingy in-between On the GOP side, the top 3 all had some support everywhere. In part that's about Trump endorsing a candidate who was a poor natural fit for Trump's voters. +Barnette's bio & crossover appeal? Anyway, nothing here suggests Mc/Oz is going to have difficulty consolidating GOP votes