It’s October. We now know enough about the current state of affairs to take a guess at what this year’s elections will look like. There are reasons to believe this year’s municipal elections could look considerably different than those in 2023 and 2021. There are also somewhat related reasons to believe the Democratic wave of backlash to Trump may not be formulating the way a lot of Democrats expect, or the way it did in 2017.

First, it’s important to understand just a bit of recent history to interpret these numbers. It’s really not worth looking at election numbers from elections before 2020 when figuring out turnout in Pennsylvania, because more voters have been voting since vote-by-mail kicked in. Prior to 2021 for instance, at times you had to hold your breath for an election in Northampton County to top 40,000 voters, and an election with 50,000 voters was considered remarkable turnout. Now there’s no way you fall under 60,000 voters in either county, just based on super voters alone, and both counties have been routinely topping 70,000 voters in the odd year elections. While some Republican candidates right now are screaming about fraud, the truth is that the increased turnout hasn’t made local elections uncompetitive. Republican candidates in Lehigh County nearly won for County Executive and took two of three Judicial seats in 2021. While the Northampton County Republican Party is a third world institution in it’s ineptitude, their statewide judicial candidates were highly competitive in 2021 and they actually gained a council seat that year. Elections in the Lehigh Valley have remained highly competitive. I expect that to continue in 2025.

Northampton County saw 71,335 ballots cast in 2021 and 72,436 ballots cast in 2023. Right now, the highly likely voter pool (2023 voters, voters who cast a ballot in the 2025 primary, and voters who have requested a vote-by-mail ballot) is 78,512. If you expand that by a bit, adding voters who cast a 2021 ballot, you get 90,885. Among the highly likely voters, the growth from 2023 is pretty close and shows us very little. If you expand in that 2021 vote, the GOP begins really making gains. While Democrats are used to believing that higher turnout is good for them, that’s not necessarily the case right now. The more less engaged voters engage, the more it seems to help the Republicans, currently. Now, that trend line doesn’t absolutely spell doom for the Democrats. Again, we remain highly competitive in Northampton County. In this specific case, it’s worth noting Republicans dropped in 2023 from 2021 and Democrats gained. Basically these numbers show us that if both parties have very good turnout, it will be a very, very close election. For Democrats, it just means that turning out voters indiscriminately to feel good is a losing strategy in Northampton County.

In Lehigh County in 2021, 74,108 people cast ballots. In 2023, 75,127 people cast ballots. Much like Northampton, it’s very consistent. The highly likely voter pool right now is 81,490. The expansion pool of voters is 93,984. Lehigh County follows a similar trend to Northampton in that the expanded universe benefits the Republican Party. Republicans dropped off a bit in 2023 from 2021. If they come back, Democrats are in for a brutal fight in which they will very likely need to win over independent voters.

Vote-by-mail suggests the Republicans are getting done what they need to get done, Valley wide. Democrats have requested just shy of 2,000 more ballots than they returned in Lehigh County in 2023. Democrats in Northampton County have requested about 1,500 more ballots than they returned in 2023. Remember that no one gets 100% of their requests actually turned in. Republicans in Lehigh County have requested roughly 3,000 more ballots than they returned in 2023. In Northampton County, Republican requests are up about 2,500 over the number of vote-by-mail ballots returned in 2023. This suggests that Republicans have gained about 1,000 voters over 2023 in both counties. What’s more alarming is that these numbers might not tell the whole story of Republican growth. Lehigh County Republicans who did not vote at all in 2023 have requested 2,474 ballots. In Northampton County, that number is 2,284. In both counties, GOP candidates needed to win nearly all of the independent ballots to make up the gap between the parties turnouts in 2023. These numbers suggest that is no longer true in 2025.

Before anyone gets too excited, this is not a eulogy for the 2025 Democratic candidates in Northampton and Lehigh County. The 2023 Democratic candidates in both counties, of which Tara Zrinski (Democratic nominee for County Executive) was prominently one, very likely won the independent voters in both counties. Candidate quality matters, and Roger Maclean and Tom Giovanni are basically moss growing on a dead tree level of excitement. Giovanni wouldn’t debate Zrinski and then could barely put together a coherent sentence together in his conversation on WFMZ’s Business Matters and Maclean believes he will find “magic money” to plug budget holes. These are deeply unserious, non-thinking individuals. That definitely could matter. Democrats lack competitive elections in Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton though to help turn out their base, and the Northampton County Council Democratic slate charitably has two (maybe three on a good day) candidates I can even stomach the thought of on the council. There are lots of variables in this election besides who turns out, but they break both ways.

I have two basic rules when I run local elections- I do not give a shit what the “prevailing wisdom” inside the courthouse/government center/city hall is, and I really don’t give a shit if a few county/city employees are pissed at the Executive/Mayor because they didn’t get a raise. None of that nonsense is indicative of what the general public thinks about the candidates, they are tiny samples of the electorate that tell us much about nothing. Sure, most of the lawyers in both county can tell you who clearly should win, but they don’t even equal 1% of the electorate. So, if you’re one of the people hanging out at all the party events, debates, picnics, or whatever else and think you have a handle on what is going to happen- you don’t.