'Pennsylvania is Critical': The Movement To Turn PA Blue

PENNSYLVANIA — For many Democrats, Donald Trump's upset victory in the 2016 presidential election was just that: upsetting.

On election night in Pennsylvania, supporters of Hillary Clinton watched as Trump narrowly won the state by 44,000 votes, delivering him 20 of the 270 electoral votes needed to declare victory.

At the time, Jamie Perrapato was working as an attorney in southeastern PA. Since then, she's turned her full attention to politics, doing everything in her power to turn Pennsylvania "blue" in local, state and national races.

Trump's victory has led to the birth of Democratic-led movements like Indivisible and Stand Up America, but at the local level, Perrapato saw fragmentation.

"All these Indivisible groups started popping up," Perrapato said. "I saw that if you coordinated, you'd get double the people."

She reached out to Philadelphia State Sen. Art Haywood, a Democrat who has served at the state level since 2014. He suggested that Perrapato help get more people involved in state legislative races, which don't get the same attention as congressional races. At the time, Republicans held a 20-seat majority in the house and a 10-seat majority in the senate.

"They had a supermajority. It was pretty dire," she recalls.

Her vision was formalized in January 2017 when she co-founded Turn PA Blue, a political organization mobilizing volunteers to elect Democrats in the Keystone State to flip the state legislature as well as deliver victory for Joe Biden.

Republicans control the Pennsylvania House of Representatives by a nine-seat majority and the State Senate by four seats. Perrapato believes Democrats can win a majority share of both legislative bodies despite the confusion surrounding mail-in ballots.

"I don't worry about having the voters," Perrapato said. "It's a matter of getting their votes cast."

Gov. Tom Wolf called on the state legislature to allow for pre-canvassing, which would have allowed county elections offices to begin preparing and processing ballots to be counted prior to election day, but Republicans declined to take up the measure.

Bucks Commissioners: Let Poll Workers Open Ballots Early

Among other actions, Turn PA Blue sends volunteers to the PA Democrats Voter Protection Team, which runs a hotline for voter questions. Recently, Perrapato has visited early voting locations throughout southeastern Pennsylvania, looking out for voter suppression.

"The goal is to make sure everybody has equal access to voting," she said. "That's not a partisan issue, nor should it be."

See full coverage of the election in Pennsylvania here.