Pennsylvania’s Blue Shift

A local activist said, “You should have known, Don, not to mess with Philadelphia.”
Biden supporters holding a large sign reading Count The Votes
Biden supporters gathered outside of the Philadelphia convention center as mail-in ballots were tallied.Photographs by Morgan Levy for The New Yorker


On Wednesday afternoon, outside the convention center in Philadelphia’s Center City, Samantha Rise, a thirty-two-year-old community organizer, led a crowd of protesters in a chant: “No Trump! No K.K.K.! No fascist U.S.A.!” Inside, election officials were counting hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots from voters in Philadelphia. Donald Trump was still ahead in the state’s tally, but the remaining votes, which came mostly from Philadelphia and the surrounding areas, looked likely to be overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. The Trump campaign had just announced that it was filing an emergency injunction in an attempt to stop Pennsylvania from counting the remaining ballots. Protesters feared that the President would succeed in muddying the results and halting the counting process. “Donald Trump is stealing the election!” one called into a microphone plugged into a portable amplifier. Another yelled, “A fascist President is declaring victory! We voted with our ballots and now it’s time to come out into the street and vote with our feet!”

The mood was tense. Off to the side, a young counter-protester wearing a MAGA hat spoke to a European reporter. Rise, who was wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the word “DECOLONIZE,” pressed their way into the conversation and shouted, “Interrupt bigotry!” (Rise self-identifies as gender nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.) The young man told Rise that they weren’t being civil. “Politeness doesn’t equate justice!” Rise snapped back. A group of police officers with bicycles moved in and broke up the argument. “We knew for weeks that Trump would manipulate whatever happens,” Rise told me. “The reality is, this is so close. There are searing wounds in this country. But four more years of Trump would put people in harm’s way.”



Samantha Rise is a community organizer in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania has long been a battleground state, and in the lead-up to this year’s contest it appeared as if it might decide the election. On Election Night, however, Trump took a significant lead, and it looked as if the election might be decided elsewhere—in Nevada, say, or Arizona. But, in the coming days, Pennsylvania underwent what has come to be known as a “blue shift.” Democrats had requested more mail-in ballots than Republicans had by a margin of two to one. The state’s Republican legislature had prevented county commissioners from sorting or counting these ballots ahead of time, a process called pre-canvassing. This meant that in-person results, which tended to favor Republicans, were announced first. But, as mail-in votes were painstakingly counted, Biden gained steadily. (A similar story played out in Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where mail-in ballots added to Biden’s tally in the days after the election.) Experts had predicted this phenomenon, but, as you watched Pennsylvania turn red, it was difficult to trust that it would turn back. “Our last poll said that seventy-eight per cent of mail-in ballots were Biden ballots, and if you did the math it was on his side,” Chris Borick, a political analyst at Muhlenberg College, told me. “I could give people all the empirical evidence I had, but the experiences of 2016 were so traumatic, it was really hard for them to believe.” But by Wednesday evening it appeared that Biden could win Pennsylvania, and that, if he did, he would win the Presidency.

To prevent this from happening, the Trump campaign urged officials around the country to stop tallying mail-in ballots, claiming, baselessly, that they were fraudulent. In a speech on Thursday evening, Trump said that he was being cheated out of an election victory. “If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” he said. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.” Right-wing protesters gathered outside county offices in Detroit and chanted, “Stop the count!” (In Phoenix, where Trump was gaining ground, they chanted, “Count the vote!”) On Wednesday, Eric Trump and Rudy Giuliani held a rally near the Philadelphia airport, where they announced the Trump campaign’s lawsuit against the state, apparently for its lack of “transparency.” Giuliani cited the “Democrat crooked machine of Philadelphia,” and claimed that there was no way to know if ballots had been cast legally. “They could be from Mars,” he said. “Joe Biden could have voted fifty times, as far as we know, or five thousand times.” Eric Trump said that polling places in Pennsylvania had been covered in Biden campaign posters, and that ballots had been discovered in drainage ditches, claims for which he provided no proof. Still, based on these claims, the Trump campaign was seeking an emergency injunction to stop the count.

Trump supporters stood outside of the Philadelphia convention center as the vote count continued inside.

This was only one of several legal challenges that Trump and his fellow-Republicans were making in Pennsylvania this week. This year, ahead of the election, the Republican legislature passed a law requiring that mail-in ballots be sent in with two envelopes, ostensibly to insure a voter’s privacy, and that policy seemed likely to cause confusion. (Last year, in local elections in Philadelphia, mistakes were made on six per cent of ballots.) On the eve of the election, Pennsylvania’s Department of State issued an order that, if a ballot had an error—an absent “secrecy” envelope or a missing signature—officials could notify the voter, who could come in and make a correction. County by county, officials made different decisions on how to handle this late-breaking direction. Some counties, like Bucks and Philadelphia, contacted voters; others, including Allegheny and Lancaster, did not. On Tuesday, the Trump campaign, the Republican congressman Mike Kelly, the Republican National Committee, and others filed a lawsuit against the secretary of state, Kathy Boockvar, alleging that the differing treatment rendered any “cured” ballots suspect. A state appellate court ruled that the ballots be set aside for further legal review.

On Wednesday, the Trump campaign also intervened in a lawsuit pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had previously ruled that ballots that had been sent in by Election Day but arrived afterward owing to mail delays should still be counted in the state’s results. Republicans appealed, and the Trump campaign joined the lawsuit, arguing that the ballots should be thrown out; the Supreme Court had yet to rule. As a result, another segregation order instructed counties that, like “cured” ballots, late-arriving mail-in ballots should be counted but set aside in case they were subject to further scrutiny.

On Thursday, the Trump Administration brought yet another legal claim. Pennsylvania had instructed election observers to stand twenty-five feet away from workers, and the Trump campaign complained that its official watchers couldn’t see well enough to monitor the counting. A court in the state upheld the complaint and allowed observers to stand as close as six feet. Vote counting halted for two hours in Philadelphia that afternoon while the new measures were put in place.

The tactics succeeded in further delaying Pennsylvania’s counting process, and they served to create an unfounded sense, in some corners of the American right, that large numbers of fraudulent votes were being tallied. “Any time a candidate is behind, they need to do something or they’re at risk of losing,” Edward Foley, the director of election law at Ohio State University, told me. “It’s not uncommon to see such suits, even if they lack merit.” But the suits seemed unlikely to change the result. Even if a court were to decide that Pennsylvania’s Department of State made errors regarding election law, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the ballots will be invalidated. “These voters acted in good faith, and it’s not supposed to be a game of gotcha,” Foley said. And, even if these ballots were all invalidated, they seem unlikely to add up to enough votes to make a difference in the final result. “Assuming Biden ends up winning with a significant margin of votes, none of these lawsuits seem like they would do anything that could fundamentally change the election outcome,” Rick Hasen, a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, told me. They seemed designed, instead, to create confusion. “The legal challenges being filed by the Trump campaign are designed to undermine the results of the election,” Rachael Cobb, the chair of the political-science and legal-studies department at Suffolk University, in Boston, told me. “In the places he’s losing he says keep counting, and in the places that he’s winning he says stop the count. The strategy is to serve his own purposes, not the purposes of the truth.”

On Thursday night, a text went out to Trump supporters: “ALERT: Radical Liberals & Dems are trying to steal this election from Trump! We need YOU! Show your support at the corner of 12th and Arch St. in Philadelphia.” A tense standoff between Trump supporters and protesters ensued outside the convention center. The mood changed, however, when Nicolas O’Rourke, a thirty-two-year-old pastor and the organizing director for Pennsylvania’s Working Families Party, set up a d.j. booth and speakers and started spinning Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” A massive dance party broke out on the streets, with activists dressed up as mailboxes and a papier-mâché version of City Hall. O’Rourke works with a group called the Election Defenders, whose five thousand members had been trained in how to deëscalate threats of violence at the polls; the party was his effort to defuse the tension. “We knew that Trump would attempt to sow discord, and his riled-up supporters would come out, and that we had to protect the vote count and continue to resist the infringing of votes,” he told me. “The best way to do that was joy.”

Rise missed the dance party in order to lead a meditation circle for local activists, who were decompressing after long days in the streets. “It’s one of many tools we need for collective liberation,” Rise said, of meditation. “It’s especially needed right now.” The aggressive Trump supporters were a worrying sign. On Thursday night, the police arrested two men who had come to Philadelphia in a gray Hummer featuring a QAnon sticker, carrying firearms, on the suspicion that they were planning to attack the convention center. The two were detained for not having valid weapons permits. “People came to attack us last night,” Rise said. “We’ll be out in the street celebrating, but also protecting our neighbors.”

The next morning, Rise arrived outside the convention center at 9:23 A.M. to check in on the scene. “It’s over!” an onlooker shouted. Boockvar, the secretary of state, had given a press conference in which she remained vague about the deadline for giving final results, saying only that officials “were in the home stretch” of tallying ballots. But the most recent batch of votes that she had announced, on Friday morning, put Biden ahead.

Philadelphians cheered and danced at the gathering.

At the convention center, Rise made their way around the crowd, clapping and calling to others on Arch Street, in front of a large “Count Every Vote” banner. “It’s time, Philadelphia!” Rise said. A dozen pro-Trump counter-protesters in blue blazers and red pumps shouted from across the street, but their words were drowned out by the music and cheering. The mood was joyous. Between dance breaks, a group of Election Defenders set up a snack table with Munchkins, Skittles, and Pirate’s Booty. Pastors arrived to lead a prayer, saying, “Every vote is sacred,” which the crowd picked up and began to chant. “Every vote counts, because no one is disposable,” Rise said. The activists were proud of their work. Trump had tried to get the courts to throw out the votes of Philadelphians, many of them people of color, but people had flooded the streets to defend them. And, when the votes were counted, they had given Biden the edge. “The only talking point you hear about Philadelphia is that it’s the poorest major city, but we held it down last night,” Rise said. “You should have known, Don, not to mess with Philadelphia.”


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