Bucks County delivered Trump’s largest mail ballot surge in Pa. How did local GOP do it?

Without mail ballots President Donald Trump may not have become the first Republican in 36 years to carry Bucks County.

The critical purple county voted for Trump last year by a narrow 291 votes.

An Inquirer analysis of mail voting across the commonwealth showed that much of the president’s success in the county could be attributed to improved performance in mail votes, despite spending years falsely claiming the method was insecure.

Trump improved his mail voting margins across Pennsylvania but GOP efforts to convince Republican voters to cast a ballot by mail were most successful in Bucks County where Trump earned 9,663 more mail ballots in 2024 against Vice President Kamala Harris than he did in 2020 against President Joe Biden.

“With the margin we won by, I’m sure it could very well have been the mail-in ballots,” said Pat Poprik, the chair of the Bucks County Republican Committee.

Republicans invested heavily last year in campaigns to convince voters, skeptical after years of misinformation, to “bank” their vote. Electoral losses in 2020 and 2022, they believed, were driven in part by the early lead Democrats gained when they voted by mail.

The mail ballot campaign, which included intense messaging and targeted communications urging voters to request and return ballots, played a key role in driving Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania.

In 2020, Biden received over 1.4 million more mail votes than Trump in Pennsylvania. This Democratic lead in mail ballots was cut in half in 2024, narrowing to just under 600,000 votes.

While some in the GOP worry 2024 was a perfect storm that can’t be replicated, Republican officials are hopeful the work they did to build voters’ confidence in mail voting will drive similar victories in November’s municipal elections and next year’s midterms. If the rest of the state sees similar trends, they hope it can keep Republicans competitive statewide.

“It’s going to be more of the same,” Poprik said. “We have to keep getting the confidence up.”

Trump discouraged mail voting in 2020. He falsely told voters it was unsafe and then leaned on those claims when he lied that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.

By 2024, Republicans in Bucks County were left trying to convince those same voters to cast a mail ballot anyway.

Linda Mannherz, a state GOP and Bucks County GOP committeewoman, spent months nagging her colleagues at the helm of the county party to get on board with mail voting — making executive committee members stand at meetings if they had yet to complete their ballot, and hoping the peer pressure would force the issue.

“You look a little silly when you’re standing two meetings in a row and you still haven’t filled out a silly little form,” she said.

It became the role of county committee people, Poprik said, to then chase down individual ballots in their area. The county party, she said, improved its data tracking and collection in Bucks ahead of the election and was able to more effectively target voters who had requested but not returned their ballots.

Motivation and enthusiasm, Poprik said, were driven up when the county’s voter registration flipped from majority Democrat to majority Republican over the summer.

Jim Worthington, the owner of the Newtown Athletic Club and longtime Trump supporter, had successfully worked with U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, the lone Republican representing the Philadelphia region, to fund and run a program chasing mail ballots for the candidate ahead of the 2020 election. And he remained a cheerleader for mail voting as a political strategy in the years that followed.

In an interview, Worthington said his phone calls to the president helped convince him to support mail voting in 2024. Worthington, who founded the grassroots advocacy group People for Trump worked closely with the Trump campaign last year to promote mail voting in the county.

“The benefit that Bucks County had in 24, I believe the other counties will have going forward,” Lawrence Tabas, the former chair of the state party, said. “They were familiar with the process, they had used it, it was successful.”

In 2020, Montgomery County led the greater Philadelphia region in mail ballots cast for Trump even as the county went strongly for Biden. But Bucks pulled ahead in 2024, gaining about 3,700 more Trump mail ballots than Montgomery.

Trump’s mail ballot gains in Bucks were not only large enough to overtake Montgomery but represented a 25% increase from the 2020 election, much higher than the growth seen in Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties.

By the end of the 2024 election cycle, dramatic scenes played out when voters, many Republicans, stood in lines for hours at Bucks County voter services offices to request and cast a mail ballot in person.

When the county cut lines off at voting centers before the posted closing time, the RNC sued, forcing the county to offer three additional days of in-person mail voting and allowing Bucks Republicans to continue driving up their vote-by-mail numbers.

“Every second of those three days was filled with Republicans voting early, on demand, in-person ballots,” said Scott Presler, a GOP influencer who runs the Early Vote Action organization.

Worthington is convinced the party is already behind. His organization, Bucks County Votes, has begun work to connect with voters across Bucks County ahead of key elections in 2026 and 2028.

But he worries candidates and party leaders aren’t doing enough to prepare for municipal races or the midterms.

“We’re going to be in a world of trouble, not only in Bucks but throughout the state,” Worthington said, arguing local and state party leaders had not done enough to chip away at Democrats’ mail ballot advantage.

The key test, he said, will be in November when Bucks County voters decide on local law enforcement races.

“I don’t want a wake-up call, but if there is going to be one, it would be if we lose this DA race in Bucks County,” he said.

State Sen. Steve Santarsiero, the chair of the Bucks County Democratic Party, noted that Democrats still vote by mail at a nearly 2-to-1 margin to Republicans in Bucks County and that primary election returns indicate Democrats will have an easier time getting their base out in November when the county votes for sheriff and district attorney and next year when the governor’s office is up for grabs.

“While they may have had success last year, the Democratic base is now much more enthusiastic about voting than the Republican base.”

But 2024 may still have set patterns. Republican campaigners and voters are more used to mail voting. The playbook that delivered hundreds more mail votes for Trump in 2024, Tabas said, could be replicated again in 2026.

And Mannherz, the Bucks County committeewoman, already has voters in mind who used a mail ballot last year and could be persuaded to do so again.

“Now they’ve tasted it, they realize how easy it is, it’s going to be a much easier sell,” she said.