Midterm Update: Will Battleground States Swing?

In advance of the Congressional midterm elections November 6, all eyes are on the swing states and perhaps especially those rust belt states, like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (pictured above), that surprised everyone by going red in the Presidential election of 2016.

As a Western Pennsylvania-born New Yorker, I conducted dozens of interviews at watering holes around Pittsburgh and surrounding areas leading up to the Presidential election of 2016 and, combining what I learned in those interviews with observations of patterns of voter registration, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign’s frequent last minute returns to the state, predicted Pennsylvania would flip in 2016. My field research/reporting on this for The New York Observer is documented here.

One thing I noticed last time around were a number of men who, when interviewed about their voting plans, told me, “I’m voting for him, but don’t use my name.”

It was that frequent reluctance to publicly identify as a Trump supporter among several of the approximately 30 individuals I interviewed at random that reinforced my suspicion Pennsylvania could flip. This time around, it will be interesting to see if, in light of public threats and much-noted recent incivility, toward Trump supporters in particular, the same phenomenon – more people voting Republican in the privacy of the voting booth – will occur.

This entry was written by Heather Robinson and posted on October 22, 2018 at 6:30 pm and filed under Blog. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: Congressional midterm elections 2018, Pittsburgh, rust belt, Western Pennsylvania. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>