September 19, 2024

FLASHBACK: Lifetime Pennsylvania Democrats are becoming Republicans.

Shirley Hall has always lived in this charming Blair County borough, located a few miles from the big city of Altoona and once the home of booming coal and paper mill industries. She has also been a Catholic all of her life and for most of it a registered Democrat, two attributes she says are, or at least were, a profound part of her identity.

She is still a Catholic, faithfully so, but last week when watching former President Donald Trump walk into the convention hall in Milwaukee just two days after being shot, she changed her voter registration on the spot.

In short, she is not just a Democrat voting for Trump come November, but she is now a Republican and will be voting so up and down the ballot. How solidly Democrat was Hall? The retired administrator for a local Catholic church voted for Barack Obama twice and Hillary Clinton in 2016 and did not vote for Donald Trump in 2020.

“I didn’t vote for Biden either. I just didn’t vote for either man that year,” Hall said.

Hall said a number of things led to her pivotal decision last week. “The last three years had really disheartened me in how my party had handled inflation, never recognizing that it is really impacting people’s lives, but also the border and how that has made accessing drugs even easier for people,” she said.

That’s a Salena Zito story from July.

Today:

I don’t like how needlessly close this race is — and I let it get me crabby yesterday — but there are unprecedented undercurrents in this race that I’m not sure pollsters have figured out how to account for.

Posted at 3:35 pm by Stephen Green