Democrats in Pennsylvania once outnumbered Republicans by more than 1 million registered voters. According to the latest voter registration data, that advantage today is less than 175,000. And when only active voters are counted, the Democrats’ edge is just 53,557.

A chunk of that shift is due to the popularity of President Donald Trump, but another big chunk is likely due to the increasing number of voters fed up with partisan politics and leaving both major political parties, say experts.

“The exodus away from Democrats really started after 2008 and it kind of stabilized a little bit during Trump’s first term,” said Berwood Yost, a political science professor at Franklin and Marshall College. “It really tanked during Biden’s term — Democratic registration. There is a tie between party registration and presidential job performance.”

With Democrats and Republicans essentially in a dead heat in terms of voter registration, the state’s unaffiliated voters are emerging as the tie-breaking segment who will decide elections.

“The real beneficiary, if you want to call it that, the largest kind of percentage change in registration, is among unaffiliated and third party voters. There are a lot of people who aren’t happy with the way politics is practiced. And they’ve abandoned the major parties, which is a huge statement in a place where we don’t have open primaries,” Yost said.

Registration shift

In November 2008, there were 4.48 million registered Democrats in Pennsylvania, amounting to 51% of the total registered voters in the state.

At that time, there were 3.24 million Republicans and just over 1 million unaffiliated voters.

According to the latest voter registration numbers, there are 672,000 fewer Democrats than there were 17 years ago. There are 379,000 more Republicans than there were in 2008.

That 2008 peak for Democrats followed eight years of rapid expansion for the party as its members increased 18% from 2000-2008.

Since then, the only four-year period in which Democrats added voters was from 2016-2020 during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, when the Democrats boosted their registration numbers 1.3%.

During former President Joe Biden’s term in office, the Democratic Party saw its registration total drop 7%.

In 2008, there were just over 1 million independent voters in Pennsylvania. Today, there are 1.43 million unaffiliated voters. More than 560,000 people have switched from the major political parties to become unaffiliated — 336,000 of them Democrats and 225,000 Republicans.

Since the state launched automatic voter registration at the Department of Motor Vehicles in 2023, independent voters have been the largest segment of voters to register. Of the 279,000 new voter registrations, 36% were for independents, 33% were Republicans and 31% were Democrats.

The Trump effect

The narrowing in voter registration between Democrats and Republicans has also been fueled by shifting allegiances among blue-

collar Pennsylvanians who have largely backed Trump and the Republican Party.

Some of that shift can be attributed to views about the comparative benefits and harms of natural gas over the last two decades.

“It’s also hard to separate this out from what seems to be the major divide in politics is this reorganization by educational attainment,” Yost said.

“There’s been this separation in college-educated voters and non college-educated people and that divergence is probably a big part of both the fracking movement and the change of registrations that we’ve seen.”

Trump has successfully attracted blue-collar voters into a coalition with more traditional conservatives, social conservatives and conservative Christian groups, Yost said.

“There was a tension there in marrying those groups,” he said. “I think Trump’s populism has drawn those groups together.”

Yost’s polling showed that in 2024, more voters felt like the economic benefits of fracking outweighed the environmental risks. Previously, voters had been more inclined to be more concerned about fracking’s impact on the environment.

In addition, the polling suggests that Republicans who live in fracking regions are more likely to view the economic benefits of natural gas as significant.

While the viewpoints of Republican and Democratic voters may diverge on environmental issues, the policies embraced by the state’s last few Democratic governors have frustrated voters worried about the impact of fracking and the broader need to confront climate change, said Karen Feridun, co-founder of the Better Path Coalition.

Feridun said she had previously been actively involved in Democratic organizing, but she has moved away from the party and now considers herself a progressive.

“This mentality is kind of making its rounds these days that Democrats are to blame for being overly concerned with environmental reviews, environmental regulations and it is just wrong,” Feridun said, noting that former Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell welcomed the fracking industry into the state.

Former Gov. Tom Wolf, another Democrat, campaigned on taxing fracking rather than trying to limit or bar it and current Gov. Josh Shapiro has embraced policies to attract data centers and artificial intelligence infrastructure, which will lean heavily on natural gas.

“I’d love to see anybody point to what these great, you know, regulations that Democrats have succeeded in putting in place would be, because really, Democrats haven’t,” she said. “I just would think that voters would have a hard time differentiating between Republicans and Democrats on fracking other than maybe a couple of regulations.”

Feridun said any voter registration gains made because of Trump may not translate into lasting support for the Republican Party.

“My gut reaction is that it’s not that they’re switching because one party did something that they didn’t like. I think it’s that people are generally frustrated with both parties,” she said. “Trump is shaking things up, as much as I hate it. His rallies look like parties. It looked like a fan club, you know, and he would jump around with them, you know, and say 30 jokes and things like that. You know, it’s so inappropriate, so not what’s done. And yet it felt like he was relating to people, even though he’s lying to them, but he was relating to them in a way that Democrats never do.”