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The Not-So-Secret Key to Biden’s PA Victory: Voters of Color
Evan Medina — Pennsylvania Data Director, Biden Campaign
Peter Dougherty — Pennsylvania Voter Contact Director, Biden Campaign
Following President-Elect Biden’s race-clinching win here in Pennsylvania, many members of the media have been quick to credit white working class voters that Hillary Clinton was unable to win over in areas like Lackawanna County (home to Biden’s hometown of Scranton) and Erie County as key to his victory. Having dedicated the last year and a half to working on this campaign together, we believe this narrative does not give full credit to the biggest difference-makers in this election: voters of color.
Redefining the Term “Persuasion”
When we started in Pennsylvania back in July, we were skeptical that a classic persuasion program was the best way to maintain the significant but tentative lead in our internal polling. Anecdotes coming from the field and our survey data both showed we had a lot of work to do with voters of color, particularly men.
We chose to listen to our organizers and not take voters of color for granted. Both here in Pennsylvania and nationally, the Biden team redefined what it meant to be a “persuadable voter” — away from just those in the middle of the political spectrum towards voters that moved the most in response to both negative and positive messaging. These voters looked very little like our preconceived notions of a persuadable voter. They were younger, independent voters, and men — particularly black and brown men. Many of them were unlikely to support Trump, but given enough negative and false information, we saw that they could be convinced to vote third party or not vote at all.
Through October we had more conversations with these voters than any other group — and the results of that work speak for themselves. The Pennsylvania Department of State won’t provide a full file on who voted this cycle for a few more weeks, but exit polls show some key differences between the 2016 results, the national averages, and Pennsylvania. Biden won 5% more of the African American vote and 4% more of Latinos in Pennsylvania than he did nationally. And unlike other states where Trump grew his support among black men, Biden improved on Clinton’s margins among black men in Pennsylvania by 6%. In a race won by roughly 80,000 votes, a few percentage points difference among these key demographics is the ballgame.
A New Way to Vote
Unlike states like North Carolina or Florida that have traditionally had early vote or vote by mail, Pennsylvania has primarily been an Election Day state. This was the first year in the Keystone State’s history where mail would be a major component of how people voted. Multiple studies show that voters of color are disproportionately more likely to have their mail-in ballots rejected compared to white voters. And with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that “naked” mail-in ballots would not be counted, we knew we needed a major voter education program.
Our organizing team completed thousands of in-person, volunteer-led voter education shifts at early voting sites in Democratic-leaning areas, and our Latino outreach ranged from regular bilingual phone banks toward voters with mail-in ballots to specific outreach to the Puerto Rican community displaced by Hurricane Maria (particularly those with phone numbers starting with 787, an area code closely associated with the mainland).
By the end of the campaign, over a third of our targeted voters with mail ballots had a personal conversation with a volunteer. And like our persuasion outreach, the election results show a marked drop in naked ballots to just 1.1% in Philadelphia. By comparison, naked ballots in Philadelphia constituted 6.4% of mail-in ballots during the 2019 municipal elections. Using the number of ballots returned in just that one county (371,000) and assuming the overall county results reflect these voters preferences, that drop of 5% alone is 16,000 additional votes for Joe Biden. That’s a fifth of the margin of victory and, when combined with our persuasion work, paints a more complete picture of how Joe Biden was able to win Pennsylvania this year.
Takeaways for Future Races
From our perspective, these are essential elements to running successful future campaigns in Pennsylvania:
- Democrats cannot take voters of color for granted. Persuasion matters, but not just with Obama-Trump voters. Democrats cannot continue to presume that communities of color are just mobilization targets worth engaging only at the end of a campaign. We need to make the case, early and often, for voters of color to support our candidates.
- Voting by mail is here to stay. Whether a COVID-19 vaccine comes out in 2021 or not, voters are likely to enjoy the convenience of voting without having to go to the polls. Campaigns have a responsibility to protect and educate voters on the rules of vote by mail.
We are both incredibly proud of the work our teams did to make this victory possible. And most importantly, we both hope to see voters of color getting proper credit for making Joe Biden the 46th President of the United States.
