the Commonwealth

"In fact she wrote two autobiographies herself so the story is out there but although she was known completely throughout the Commonwealth she is hardly known today which is sad."

That is reflected in the 2024 numbers: As of Tuesday morning, nearly 1.9 million Pennsylvanians had voted by mail out of more than 2.1 million people who had requested a ballot, about a third of them Republicans, according to the Pennsylvania secretary of state — a drop from the 2.6 million who voted by mail four years ago, when less than a quarter of such votes came from Republicans and President Joe Biden carried the commonwealth by just more than 80,000 votes.

That these electors would lack legal standing — Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, is the only person who can legally certify the commonwealth's electors — may not be an obstacle in an increasingly politicized judiciary.

As Shapiro noted at a press conference Tuesday night, "high turnout" in the commonwealth was greeted, in the final hour of in-person voting, with "multiple bomb threats."

"The Commonwealth will likely continue to be a key platform," says Nicole Breadsworth, an academic at South Africa's Wits University.