Let’s Return to Election Day

Let’s Return to Election Day: There should be no excuse why Americans cannot return to a national electoral snapshot, with appropriate procedural guardrails in place, on one day.

Tennessee-hating candidate goes down in flames in congressional special election

Tennessee-hating candidate goes down in flames in congressional special election: Good news for the Trump team, but there are things that will give them pause.

The Republican Off-Cycle Election Challenge

The Republican Off-Cycle Election Challenge: The Republican base will turn out in presidential election years in sky-high numbers.  Still, many of them will pay little attention to an election for an attorney general or a judge, whom they don’t see as having much impact on their lives.

2026 Midterms: Trump Is Just Warming Up

2026 Midterms: Trump Is Just Warming Up: Mark your calendar: November 3, 2026.  Midterms soon become the primary focus to produce solid Republican congressional majorities.  Republicans are preparing to turn Congress increasingly red.  Musk brings the cash.

Presidential Polling Postmortem Winners and Losers

Presidential Polling Postmortem Winners and Losers: Election 2024 is in the rearview mirror. Pollsters won’t be bombarding voters anymore. Today’s entertainment is liberal heads exploding on social media or the latest Democrat threatening but not actually following through on everything from drinking cyanide to setting themselves on fire to leaving the country if Donald Trump won the election.

So far, few have followed through on their promises, although a handful have left the country. Good riddance to them.

Missing Mail-In Ballots Spark Voter Anger in Crucial Pennsylvania County

Missing Mail-In Ballots Spark Voter Anger in Crucial Pennsylvania County: Voters in Erie County, Pennsylvania, are dealing with the second major glitch in the election this season, and they are not happy.

Women Deserve Better Than Hillary ... or Kamala

Women Deserve Better Than Hillary ... or Kamala: America will one day have a female president.  She will be smart, articulate, prudent, and brave.  She will treat her campaign for office as a chance to prove to the American people that she has their best interest at heart.  She will be thoughtfully prepared to answer any and all questions.  Nobody will say it’s “her turn” or pretend she is more talented than she really is.  Nobody will hold her to a lower or higher standard because of her sex.  She will rise to the top because she earns it.  Americans will listen to her speeches, watch how she conducts her personal life, and conclude that she is the right leader for the time.  And when she is elected, no one will mumble, “She won only because she’s a woman.”  She will win on her own merits.

Lowman S. Henry: Forget the Polls These Are the Numbers that Matter

By Lowman S. Henry

The 2024 presidential election is rapidly becoming the most polled election in Pennsylvania history. As the most important battleground state political observers scour every poll taken in Penn’s Woods for some hint as to the status of what again is likely to be a very close battle for the commonwealth’s 19 Electoral votes.

Almost without exception, every poll has Donald Trump and Kamala Harris within the margin of error. As such, the drama that surrounds every point or half point change in the polling has made for interesting parlor speculation. But, polling is so imprecise and the race is so close that the polls are in fact meaningless in terms of discerning who is winning the horse race.

There are three other sets of numbers that carry far more significance than polling and as such should be watched far more closely than opinion polls.

One of the key predictive factors as to how a person will vote is their party registration. At one time there were over 1.1 million more registered Democrats than there were registered Republicans statewide in Pennsylvania. By the November 2020 presidential election, the Democrat voter registration advantage had shrunk to 685,818 voters.

Fast forward to September 2024 and the Democrat voter registration edge has been sliced in half since the 2020 election – down to just 338,396 voters. Tellingly, 48,618 Democrats have switched their party affiliation to Republican; two and a half times more party switches than Republicans to Democrats. 

Although Democrat registrations gained steam after the party switched out Joe Biden for Kamala Harris Republican registrations climbed even faster. Putting a cherry atop the registration sundae for Republicans Beaver County near Pittsburgh, Bucks County in the Philadelphia suburbs, and Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania flipped from blue to red. No county has flipped from red to blue. 

Democrats have dominated Republicans in mail-in balloting since the advent of no excuse mail-in voting in 2020. Here too Democrats are underperforming. As of September 23,  there are 360,101 fewer Democrat applications for a mail-in ballot than at the same time in 2020. Republican mail-in ballot requests are down by 60,963 giving the GOP almost a 300,000 voter net advantage. 

Another major change is the GOP’s approach to mail-in balloting. While the party fought and attacked mail-in voting in 2020 it is embracing the practice in 2024. In 2020 many Republicans – 141,000 – who applied for and received mail-in ballots failed to follow through and vote. It is likely some number of those voters instead went to the polls in person, but there is no doubt a large number of GOP votes were literally left lying on the table.

There are concerted efforts to ensure those votes are cast this year. Projects like the Pennsylvania Chase have deployed an army of 120 full-time paid door knockers who are fanning out across the commonwealth to make sure voters send in their ballots.

Finally, there is the impact of the Green Party. In 2020 Democrats successfully convinced the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to strike Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein from the November ballot. The Green Party’s nominee for state Auditor General received 78,588 votes in the 2020 General Election while the Green Party nominee for state Treasurer received 81,984 votes.

Keep in mind Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes. Making the plausible assumption that most of the Green Party presidential votes ended up in the Biden column with Stein off the ballot and that decision alone contributed significantly to the Biden victory.

All else being equal, which of course it is not, these three sets of numbers must be causing great angst in the Harris campaign. Further, polling shows that inflation/the economy and illegal immigration are the top concerns of voters – and Trump consistently leads when pollsters ask who can best address those issues.

Most polls are subject to a margin of error of at least +/-4% which means that any lead of four percent or less is essentially meaningless. But registration and mail-in ballot requests are not subject to a margin of error and therefore represent a far better snapshot of where the election stands.

(Lowman S. Henry is Chairman & CEO of the Lincoln Institute and host of the weekly American Radio Journal and Lincoln Radio Journal. His e-mail address is lhenry@lincolninstitute.org.)

In Detroit, 93% of Republican applicants were rejected as poll watchers

In Detroit, 93% of Republican applicants were rejected as poll watchers: The American system worked for over two centuries because, for the most part, people played by the rules, which meant trying to make the more persuasive arguments that would result in honest election victories. However, socialism isn’t a “play by the rules” ideology. It is a “win at any cost” ideology. That brings us to Wayne County, Michigan (i.e., Detroit), which may be making up the rules as it goes along when it comes to poll watchers.

Memorably, during the 2024 election, when Republican poll watchers tried to keep an eye on the ballot counting—which had shut down on election night only to resume for days afterward—poll workers covered up the windows.

Lowman Henry: Photo Voter ID Will Restore Election Integrity

 Recent polling suggests the upcoming General Election re-match between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will be a closely fought contest especially here in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. The Real Clear Politics average of publically released polls gives Donald Trump a scant one-half of one percent lead in the battle for the state’s electoral votes.

The closeness of the race places a bright spotlight on the Commonwealth’s electoral process. Questions continue to linger over the integrity of the 2020 election. There may or may not have been outright fraud, but there is no doubt rulings by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and rule changes by the Pennsylvania Department of State at a minimum were a factor, if not the deciding factor in Joe Biden’s “win.”

Exacerbating voter skepticism over the integrity of the 2020 vote were the many rule changes enacted supposedly in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, chief among them the advent of no-excuse mail-in voting. In perhaps the biggest political miscalculation in the history of Penn’s Woods Republicans agreed to allow mail-in balloting in exchange for eliminating the straight party-line vote.

There appears to be scant evidence that the elimination of the straight party-line vote has been politically beneficial to the GOP, but there is ample evidence that the party has suffered widespread defeats due to mail-in balloting.

Many in the Republican Party have, with some degree of justification, questioned the integrity of mail-in balloting. That depressed the use of mail-in ballots by Republicans while Democrats embraced the method to build often insurmountable leads in local and statewide races. Conservative groups are now organizing to compete more effectively for mail-in votes, but the continued use of such balloting perpetuates a lack of voter trust in the integrity of the election process.

And so, with confidence lacking in changes made four years ago along comes Democratic Pennsylvania House Speaker Joanna McClinton with proposals to sew even more seeds of distrust. She recently proposed to allow same-day voter registration at polling places. Unregistered voters could simply show up on Election Day, register in the party of their choice and be allowed to cast a vote. No up-front verification of their eligibility, no check to see if they are already registered elsewhere, just show up, register and vote. The opportunity for fraud such a change would unleash is breathtaking.

A more realistic McClinton proposal would be to establish a two-week period of time in advance of Election Day when voters could go to a secure polling place, such as the county voter registration office, and cast an early ballot. Eliminating unsecure mail-in voting and replacing it with early voting at secure polling locations would be a reasonable trade-off. That would require logic and compromise. Given the hyper-partisan bent of the House Democratic majority that is unlikely to happen.

There is one change that could be made that would make our elections significantly more secure, and go a long way toward allaying voter qualms about the process: that would be the passage of a state constitutional amendment requiring photo voter ID.

Such a proposed state constitutional amendment was approved during the last session of the state legislature. But, to be placed on the ballot for a voter referendum proposed constitutional amendments must pass two consecutive sessions of the General Assembly. In the current session, the state Senate did pass the amendment, but it has languished in a state House committee.

House Republican leaders this past week began a procedural process aimed at getting the photo voter ID bill out of committee and brought to the House floor for a vote. Almost all Republicans and some Democrats support the bill. Polls show photo voter ID has broad bi-partisan voter support.

Democrat leadership, however, continues to peddle the false narrative that a photo voter ID requirement would somehow make it more difficult for people to vote. Given the fact you need a photo ID to buy cough syrup at your local drug store, it would only disadvantage those whose intent it is to commit voter fraud.

In the wake of the 2020 election, the state of Georgia passed significant reforms aimed at restoring the integrity of its electoral system — including a photo voter ID requirement. The result was the voter participation rate actually increased as more people had confidence that their vote mattered.

Photo voter ID is critical to restoring public confidence in Pennsylvania’s electoral system. It is time for We the People to be given the opportunity to make the decision via referendum at the ballot box. To deny us that opportunity is to put Democracy at risk.

Lowman S. Henry is Chairman & CEO of the Lincoln Institute and host of the weekly Lincoln Radio Journal. His e-mail address is lhenry@lincolninstitute.org.

Reform candidates for Pennsylvania Legislature

There are links at the TONY PHYRILLAS blog to Web sites for reform candidates running for the Pennsylvania Legislature in 2008.

Some are running in the April 22 primary, others will be on the ballot in Novemeber, challenging incumbents.

If you live in any of the legislative districts below, do yourself a favor and learn more about these candidates.

REFORM CANDIDATES FOR PA LEGISLATURE

Aaron Durso for 130th House District
Anne Dicker for 1st Senate District
Chris Voccio for 72nd House District
Doyle Heffley for 122nd House District
Doug McLinko for 23rd Senate District
Gary Hornberger for 125th House District
Greg Hopkins for 50th House District
James E. May for 117th House District
Jason Owen for 3rd House District
Jim Christiana for 15th House District
John Schickram for 124th House District
Lance Rogers for 17th Senate District
Lowell Gates for 88th House District
Richard A. Stine for 187th House District
Richard Gokey for 130th House District
Ron Shegda for 136th House District
Russ Diamond for 101st House District
Shannon Royer for 156th House District
Steve Kantrowitz for 19th Senate District
Steve McDonald for 13th Senate District
Wally Zimolong for 182nd House District