We don’t yet know what it will mean for the vote count, but Pennsylvania has definitely taken on a different shade of purple when it comes to the cold categorization of one’s voter registration.

1. The Donald J. Trump era, for whatever else it has been, has proven to be a great party-building period for the Republican Party as there are now more registered Republican voters in Pennsylvania than ever before. The party now numbers 3,710,290.

“You can’t think about what’s taken place over the last years (in voter registration) without sort of thinking about Donald Trump’s influence,” said Marc Meredith, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has analyzed the numbers.

2. While Democrats still are the largest party in number in Pennsylvania, the Democratic Party’s 281,091 lead in voter registrations - down from 1.2 million at the height of Barack Obama fever in 2008 - is now smaller than it’s been at any time since 1970, when it held a scant 19,000 edge in the voter count.

The margin for Democrats heading into the last presidential election in 2020, for further context, was 685,818.

Experts note that some of the closure is due to the fact that the cohort of older voters leaving the system through death, disability or other factors skews Democratic because more of those voters came of age in a time of higher union membership and a rich legacy of “New Deal” politics.

But more current Democrats are also simply making a change.

Pennsylvania Department of State numbers show that from 2021 through 2024 - the entire cycle since the last presidential election - 203,706 Pennsylvania Democrats switched their registration to Republican, compared to 96,577 Republicans who flipped to Democrat.

3. The number of voters choosing to be registered as independent or with a third party has also reached a new record, pushing to 1,460,307 for this cycle.

So for those keeping score, the pool casting ballots this fall is Democrat, 43.5 percent; Republican, 40.5 percent; and everyone else, 16 percent.

This is not meant to be predictive about how the election will go in Pennsylvania.

People vote for candidates, not parties, and voters often split their ticket here. Moreover, people make shifts in their voting behavior over time and for different reasons, and the administrative act of changing one’s registration is not always in synch with that.

But the party realignment is real, and it may not be over yet.

“It would not surprise me at all if in 2028 there were more registered Republicans than Democrats” in Pennsylvania, said Meredith, the Penn professor.

Democrats reached for this story tried to downplay the changes, noting that they see the registration shift as a lagging indicator of voter attitudes that have been baked in for years.

They can point to places like Westmoreland County, on the eastern end of the Pittsburgh metro region, where Republicans have carried presidential elections since George W. Bush in 2000, but it wasn’t until 2019 that voter registration finally flipped to Republican red.

And consultants from both parties noted that for years now the art of selecting what districts to prioritize in campaign has been more keyed to voter performance - a metric that looks at the actual election results of a region or district in recent statewide votes - than simple registration.

“What matters is how people vote, not how they are registered,” said Marty Marks, a longtime Democratic Party strategist based in western Pennsylvania. Democrats have been on a 5-1 run in gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races here from 2014 through 2022, even as their registration gap has waned.

But they also acknowledged Democrats statewide will have to calibrate their messages to winning the hearts and minds of independents and centrist Republicans more than ever before, and cannot rely solely on turning out their own base.

Similarly, while Republicans stopped short of calling the registration gains a guarantee of big wins this week, they could not help but see glimmers of hope since it’s generally accepted that it’s easier to win a vote from someone already in your party.

So when the party-to-party gap has closed by more than 400,000, “it’s clearly a more hospitable environment for Republicans than four years ago, and that’s a good thing if you’re on the ballot as a Republican candidate this year,” said Mike DeVanney, of Pittsburgh-based Cold Spark.

One last thing.

With the registration gap closing and more independent and third party voters in the mix, all sides agree Pennsylvania is not likely to lose its swing-state political identity anytime soon.

“I think that long into the future, Pennsylvania is going to be a hotly-contested state in presidential politics,” DeVanney said.