Polls carry margins of error that render most of them meaningless. But registration and mail-in ballot counts suffer from no such malady.
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. ( Where Did All the Yard Signs Go?)
There are three other sets of numbers that carry far more significance than polling and these numbers 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.
