Voters in Pennsylvania have turned out in droves as polls opened in one of the most hotly contested states of the election.
Videos posted to social media show voters lining the streets of Pennsylvania even before polls opened at 7 a.m. on Tuesday.
In one video, between 80 and 100 people can be seen queuing outside a polling station in Jenkins Township in Luzerne County. In another video, voters can be seen lining the halls of the University of Pennsylvania before polls opened.
Whoa. This is the line to vote at the University of Pennsylvania before polls even open. Young people are fired up & turning out. Gen Z is going to save us. pic.twitter.com/OJyIAeOnZK
— Victor Shi (@Victorshi2020) November 5, 2024
Meanwhile, voters gathered in York County at 5.55 a.m., an hour and five minutes before polls opened, according to one social media user. In York County, 143,260 people voted Republican in 2020, compared to 126,933 in 2016.
Another post showed around 100 voters in line at 7 a.m. in Erie County.
With 19 Electoral College votes, Pennsylvania is a crucial swing state to win, voting for the winning candidate in 48 of the past 59 elections.
Polls in Pennsylvania are currently very close, with polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight showing Kamala Harris 0.2 points ahead, while forecaster Nate Silver’s tracker showed Donald Trump 0.1 points ahead.
Individual polls are equally divided over who is winning the state, with every survey showing the two candidates within three points of each other, all within the margins of error.
Matt Rourke/AP
AtlasIntel’s latest poll, conducted between November 3 and 4, showed Trump one point ahead, on 50 percent to Harris’ 49 percent. Meanwhile, Survation’s November 1-4 poll put Harris two points ahead, while Research Co.’s November 2-3 poll had Harris leading by just one point.
However, the latest Echelon Insights poll, conducted between October 27 and 30 among 600 registered voters, showed Trump leading by five points in a multicandidate race.
Such numbers for Trump would represent the biggest winning margin by a Republican in the state since Ronald Reagan, who won Pennsylvania by seven points in 1984.
Jon Parker, senior lecturer in American studies at Keele University in the U.K., told Newsweek last week that with such tight margins, the election “will come down to turnout and whose voters are the most committed on election day.”
Early voting data showed that more Democrats than Republicans turned out to vote in the state so far, with 56 percent of voters being registered Democrats and 33 percent being Republicans. The Democrats are also ahead nationally, according to early voting data. However, it is unclear what this means for the election since the data reveals only whether voters are registered with a party, not who they are voting for.
Nonetheless, the data suggests the lead for the Democrats is party driven by women coming out in force to vote for Harris, with 54 percent of all early voters identifying as female, while 44 percent are men. Harris has focused her efforts on galvanizing women during this campaign, positioning herself as her party’s leading voice on reproductive rights in contrast to Trump, who has not said whether he would veto a national abortion ban.
According to the latest John Zogby Strategies poll, 27 percent of voters said abortion is the main issue that will decide their vote in this election.
In Survation’s latest poll, conducted among 915 likely voters in Pennsylvania, 27 percent of female voters said abortion was the most important issue in this election.
