BEAVER, Pennsylvania — Seven months ago, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State, Democrats still held a lead over Republicans regarding voter registration in this southwestern Pennsylvania county that, for generations, was the heart of the working-class voter.
The men and women who live here were undeniably the all-important cog in the New Deal Democratic coalition. They worked in the steel mills, fabrication plants, railroads, barber shops, and mom-and-pop grocery stores. Their belief that the Democratic Party stood up for the working class and their willingness to support Democrats in each election helped bring home major wins for Democratic candidates locally and in statewide elections for more than 100 years.
Seven months later, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State, the Democrats have fallen behind. They now trail Republican registration by over 1,000 voters.
But that is only half the story, said Sean Parnell, a former Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan, ran for Congress, and now lives in Beaver County.
“Tapping into those voters and getting them to vote by mail is as equally important,” he said. Which is exactly what he is spearheading as a senior adviser to Keystone Renewal, a super PAC that supports Republican Dave McCormick’s run for the U.S. Senate this year.
Parnell is running a project whose goal is to steer a major turnaround in Republicans’ vote-by-mail operation in this year’s election cycle, in which the Keystone State will live up to its name as a keystone in the races for president and partisan control of the Senate.
Parnell said the project has put together an unprecedented, combined effort that includes not just the resources of Keystone Renewal but also the Republican State Leadership Committee PAC and the Sentinel Action Fund to register new Republicans and build a statewide mail-in-ballot initiative.
“We don’t just need to register voters. We also need to make sure they show up. And it is not secret Republicans have fallen way behind in developing and implementing a comprehensive mail-in ballot program,” Parnell said. “We basically formed an alliance and set the task of not just building a targeted mail-in program but also working with an organization that had the experience of doing just that.”
He turned to the Republican State Leadership Committee, which was successful at doing it at a very local level in Virginia last year in that state’s off-year legislative races.
“What slipped through the cracks is when Republicans lost the majority in Virginia in 2021, the narrative became the loss, and the ones in several competitive [races], where the mail program was won in very, very contentious swing districts, Republicans won,” he said.
The RSLC, in reaction to the Democrats’ nationwide high success rate at turning out low-propensity voters in the 2022 midterm elections, winning many races on the margins, decided to target a universe that included low-propensity voters, independent-leaning Republicans, and swing voters who favored now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) and his agenda in small legislative races.
In those targeted races, the RSLC generated a 26% increase in absentee ballot requests from 2021 and a 32% increase in absentee ballot returns. And they won. In state House District 22, they won by 1,631 votes in a district that produced nearly 1,900 absentee and early votes.
The same went for House Districts 57, 89, 24, and 27.
In 2022, here in Beaver County, of the 15,194 people who used mail-in balloting, 10,925 were Democrats, and 3,134 were Republicans. It is a disadvantage that Parnell said costs them close races.
“There are a lot of advantages for using mail-in balloting, beginning with it pushes low-propensity voters to cast ballots that might not show up for whatever reason on Election Day,” Parnell said.
Parnell dismissed the argument that Republicans would simply be cannibalizing their own voting base by turning them into mail-in voters.
“What it does is get that middle- to low-propensity voter to show up,” he said. “It then turns them into voters who show up every cycle, so in local races that often are decided in low turnouts, in future races, [it] gives a floor to work with.”
Since 2020, the Democrats have built a powerhouse of mail-in ballot operations. Their efforts for the past few years have been ruthlessly efficient. But Parnell said his coalition’s groundbreaking, eight-figure investment positions Republicans to counterbalance the Democrats’ dominance in mail-in voting: “Not only in the upcoming elections this fall but in future election cycles, thanks to the significant in-state infrastructure it will help us build.”
Parnell said that in Pennsylvania’s April Republican primary election this year, their coordinated effort invested over $1.5 million. “And we will invest over $10 million total by the end of the cycle. Hopefully more if we raise more money. But this is where we sit now,” he said.
In the primary, they sent four rounds of vote-by-mail application mail pieces to over 1.5 million Republican voters and launched digital advertisements across various platforms, delivering over 20 million impressions.
They also sent over 475,000 peer-to-peer text messages.
One month before the primary, they launched the SkipTheLinePA website, which received over 40,000 visits before the primary. I tried out the website, and once you enter the portal, it takes you directly to the vote-by-mail application.
“Seventy-five percent of all new permanent list signups originating from our targeted universe despite comprising less than one-third of the total GOP electorate,” Parnell said.
The program produced over 24,000 new permanent list signups at the same time Democrats produced only 13,000 new permanent vote-by-mail list signups. Fifty-two percent of the Republicans’ targeted voters who requested vote-by-mail ballots for the primary election also joined the permanent vote-by-mail list. Parnell said that underscores the effectiveness of their strategy and signals that Republicans are warming up to mail-in voting in the commonwealth.
During April’s primary election, Republicans produced more than 236,000 vote-by-mail ballot requests, which is roughly an 18% increase from the 2022 primary.
Republicans also returned more than 160,000 mail-in ballots in the 2024 primary, a 7% increase from 2022.
Republicans certainly needed to do something to increase participation by voters who lean their way. In 2020, more than 35,000 “4-of-4” Republican voters (loyal voters who have voted in four out of the last four elections) skipped the general election. In 2022, that number of vote skippers rose to over 61,000. Even worse, of the 3-of-4 participants (who voted in three of the last four elections), the number rose from more than 70,000 in 2020 to just shy of 174,000 in 2022.
In short, in 2020, more than 100,000 high-propensity voters skipped the presidential election, and in 2022, more than 230,000 high-propensity voters skipped the midterm elections.
Parnell said to put that in context, then-President Donald Trump lost Pennsylvania in 2020 by about 80,000 votes, and the midterm races in the state were lost by about 260,000 votes.
“In 2020, it would literally have made the difference, and in ’22, it would’ve nearly made the difference,” he said. “Our goal obviously is to bring new voters to the table from the low-prop buckets, but we need to stop allowing Democrats to convince us that cannibalization of Election Day votes is the worst thing ever because when we ‘cannibalize’ votes, we are lifting the burden of Election Day and freeing up resources that can be used on crucial persuasion universes in the final stretch of the campaign.”
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One other benefit is that Trump and his family have stopped discouraging mail-in balloting, which they did four years ago, and have begun encouraging it. Parnell said Donald Trump Jr. has cut two pro-mail-in ads specifically for them, and in May, the elder Trump posted this on Truth Social: “ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS,” followed by “REPUBLICANS MUST MAKE A PLAN, REGISTER, AND VOTE!”
In a state in which everything will be on the margins, Parnell said mail-in balloting is the key to winning, and their operation is very lean and granular in its efforts. “We are just scaling up the program to where we have the capability of hammering all 67 counties and targeting low-propensity Trump voters, as well as the newly registered Republican voters in the state,” he said of places like Beaver County. “We plan on leaving no stone unturned, no voter untapped. If we are successful, and I am sure we will be, Republicans are going to have a very good night thanks to Pennsylvania.”