Recently my friends at The American Spectator asked me to begin reporting on the state of the 2024 presidential election in Pennsylvania. I tried to explain to them that I have no practical or professional experience with politics and would be unable to offer any meaningful commentary.

Long story short, I lost the argument. So below – with a proper disclaimer – is the first installment of my take on what lies ahead in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania from now until Election Day.

Author’s note: What follows is my multi-part assessment of the 2024 election contest in Pennsylvania. Although I have lived in and near Philadelphia for over 50 years, I have no particular acumen regarding Pennsylvania politics. I am a retired trial lawyer who spent 20 years as a federal and state prosecutor and subsequently litigated civil and criminal cases for 30 years. As such, I have both prosecuted and defended corrupt elected Pennsylvania office holders and have learned quite a bit about their ethically challenged attitude regarding election fraud. So, by way of warning about what you are about to read, here’s how one of my former clients explained the facts of political life in Pennsylvania: “We haven’t had an honest election in Philadelphia since 1682, and we’re not about to start now.” 

On the eve of the 2020 presidential election, Robert Cahaly, the founder and chief strategist of the Atlanta-based Trafalgar Group polling firm, appeared on The Sean Hannity Show and offered this assessment: “I think that the states that we had before [in 2016] for Trump — Florida, Arizona and North Carolina — are still there.”

But when it came to the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, Cahaly said that Trump needed “to win Pennsylvania by four or five [percentage points] to overcome the voter fraud that’s going to happen there.”

As Cahaly made this statement, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was in the process of rewriting the state’s election laws. Ultimately, the Democrat majority on the court did away with the statutory requirement that the signatures on mail-in ballots match the voters’ signatures on file. The court also struck down the legislative mandate that mail-in ballots must be post marked or received by Election Day.

Here’s what I wrote at the time in The American Spectator:

Given Pennsylvania’s recently decreed rules for receiving and counting mail-in ballots, there may be no percentage of honest votes large enough to overcome the voter fraud already underway in the Keystone State. These new rules have been put in place by a Democrat majority (Pennsylvania judges are elected) on the state supreme court. In addition to allowing mail-in ballots to be received and counted up to three days after the statutory Election Day deadline, the new judicially conjured rules for processing mail-in ballots can be boiled down to this aphorism: no postmark, no matching signature, no problem!

You read that right. Here in Pennsylvania, our state supreme court has mandated that a mail-in ballot received up to three days after Election Day must be counted and cannot be rejected merely because it is not postmarked by the statutory Election Day deadline or bears a signature that doesn’t match the one on record for the purported voter.

Care to guess how many such unverifiable ballots will mysteriously turn up after Election Day?

And so it was that, with those peculiar rulings, the state Supreme Court planted the seeds of distrust in the election outcome by removing the statutory safeguards to prohibit the counting of unverified, unverifiable, and fabricated mail-in ballots. Those seeds have spawned multiple theories about how the Philadelphia Democrat machine stole the 2020 election in Pennsylvania. (More about that in a later installment.)

Thankfully, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s bizarre rulings are no longer in effect. Today, mail-in ballots must bear signatures matching those on record and must be received by Election Day. But, as will be discussed in later installments, it remains to be seen whether those safeguards will be enough to prevent the rigging of the upcoming election in Pennsylvania.

On Nov. 3, 2020, RealClearPolitics’ polling averages had Biden at 50 percent support and Trump at 48.8 percent (a difference of 1.2 percentage points). Subsequently, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State, Biden received 3,458.229 votes (50.1 percent) to 3,377,674 votes for Trump (48.84 percent). Biden’s margin of victory was 80,555 (1.2 percentage points).

Assuming that these official 2020 data are true and correct, Trump at 48.84 percent did not materially outperform his final Pennsylvania poll average of 48.8 percent.

As of Oct. 23, 2024, RealClearPolitics has Trump’s poll numbers averaging 47.9 percent to Kamala Harris’ 47.1 percent (a difference of 0.8 percentage points). But included in that average are polls by Trafalgar Group, Atlas Intel, and Rasmussen Reports — the three most accurate pollsters in 2020 — which have Trump ahead by 3 percentage points.

Recall that Trafalgar’s Robert Cahaly said that Trump would have to be ahead by 4 or 5 percentage points to “overcome the voter fraud that’s going to happen there.”

Cahaly’s warning was true in 2020 and remains true today — especially as it applies to Democrat-run Philadelphia, the largest population center in Pennsylvania. I will discuss in later installments the many ingenious ways that Philadelphia Democrats have rigged elections and how those techniques may come into play on Election Day 2024 and address the question as to whether any Pennsylvania election can ever be “too big to rig.”

Mail-in and absentee ballots are being received and tallied as to the voters’ party registrations. According to the Pennsylvania Department of State, as of Oct. 23, 2024, the received ballot numbers are Democrat: 684,724, Republican: 328,074, and Other: 110711.

Mail-in and absentee ballots can still be requested and will be accepted up to and including Election Day. But, as of now, the there is a 2 to 1 mail-in and absentee ballot margin in favor of the Democrats.

Based on all of the above, it would appear that Pennsylvania is not a sure thing for Trump. Nevertheless, there has been one additional major development that bodes well for his chances of winning the state.

Pennsylvania Democrat Sen. Bob Casey is in a tight race for reelection. He is tied in the polls with Dave McCormick, his Republican challenger. This week, Casey began running a television ad featuring a married couple in which the wife is a Republican and the husband is a Democrat; they both endorse Casey. The couple praises Casey as an “independent” who “bucked Biden to preserve fracking” and “sided with Trump to end NAFTA and impose tariffs on China.” (You can view the ad by clicking on this link.)

Since Casey is trying to tie himself to Trump’s coattails, this ad and its timing strongly suggest that, as Election Day approaches, Casey’s internal polling is signaling that Harris’ campaign is faltering, and it’s time for the senator to hedge his bets.

That’s it for now, but there’s more to come.

Later installments will address the implications of the dramatic changes since 2020 in Republican versus Democrat voter registrations, the ongoing and innovative — for Republicans — turnout operation in deep red counties, the growing numbers of working-class voters who are defecting from the Democrat Party, and the friction between the Harris campaign and local Democrat leaders. There will also be a tutorial on how Philly’s Democrat ward leaders make use of “street money” to turn out the vote, the traditional physical intimidation of Republican Election Day poll watchers in Philadelphia, and how the legions of dementia patients in Philadelphia nursing homes will be voting Democrat by mail.

All that and more will be coming your way.

So stay tuned.

George Parry is a former federal and state prosecutor and retired trial lawyer. He blogs at knowledgeisgood.net.