Here we are in an odd-numbered year, which means an off-year election. What is the attraction for people to turn up at the polls tomorrow? Not much? Yes, a mayor’s race or two. Local school board races. And the race for sheriff and DA.
But the county prothonotary? Two judges of the Commonwealth Court? The County Controller? Can anyone name the County Controller?
That’s bad news for the Republicans, whose hat trick is walk-in voters on election-day. What can they do on November 2 to stir up fervor for people to turn up at the polls? Create fear of closing down all the schools in the county? Tell them Critical Race Theory is going to be taught in kindergarten?
In the election last year, 38,506 GOP voters in Bucks County mailed in their ballots. But 145,843 Bucks Republicans went to the polls. Now that is being conservative or believing that mail-in ballots would somehow be stolen, corrupted, set on fire, thrown in a river, lost or miscounted. Democratic voters in Bucks County, by a wide margin (roughly 124,000 by mail versus 77,000 at the polls) preferred to stay home on election day.
It is fairly easy to assume that, although the weather looks mild for tomorrow, many Democrats will have already cast their ballots.
A story on our site noted that the GOP registered 504 more voters in this county than the Democrats did over the summer. The result is that, in October, the numbers looked like this:
Democrats had 202,697 registered voters.
Republicans had 192,454 registered voters.
Other parties had 79,539 registered voters (Libertarian, Green, Working Family, etc.)
Those 504 voters may feel strongly about voting for the prothonotary or have a write-in candidate for four-year term for Inspector of Elections. Probably they have a school board director in mind.
But the 79,539 independent voters (most of them Libertarians) are more than enough to make up the 10,000 difference between the still-dominant Democrats and the gaining Republicans. And you know whose ideas are in line the Libertarian party?
See the number of times Open Secrets has linked Paul Martino, the man who backed the PAC that funded $600,000 to mostly GOP school board candidates around the state of Pennsylvania, to donations to Rand Paul, a man dedicated to Libertarian ideas.
One rule of journalism is never end a story with only time will tell. In this case, only tomorrow will tell.
