Over the past decade and continuing into the first five months of 2019, nearly 4,000 more previously registered Democrats have switched their party affiliation to Republican in Erie County than Republican to Democrat.

Judy Phelps never paid close attention to politics until Donald Trump came along.

But when she did vote in years past, she did so as a registered Democrat. Phelps can't remember why exactly she ever registered as a Democrat, but assumes it likely had to do with liking a certain Democratic presidential candidate.

"I wasn't awake," she said, referring to her political involvement, "until recently."

Phelps voted twice for President Barack Obama, she said, but wanted someone "more independent" in 2016.

For Phelps, a self-described "addict" of Fox News who now volunteers weekly at the Erie County Republican Party headquarters, that someone was Trump.

"I have grandkids and I was looking at who would be the president and what the future of our country would be," the 71-year-old Millcreek Township resident said. "And when it came down to Hillary (Clinton) versus Donald Trump, I had no question. So I thought, well, I'm changing my party also."

Phelps is not alone.

Since late 2008, Republicans have built a 2-to-1 advantage when it comes to previously registered voters switching political parties, an analysis of state voter registration records shows.

Over the past decade and continuing into the first five months of 2019, nearly 4,000 more previously registered Democrats have switched their party affiliation to Republican in Erie County than Republican to Democrat. It's a fact not lost on Erie County Republican Party Chairman Verel Salmon, who believes that disenchanted Democrats played a large role in Trump's 2016 victory in the county and state — the first Republican since Ronald Reagan to win here.

"I'm pleased with Erie voters to see those kinds of trends," Salmon said. "During that period our economy was impacted. We lost major industries. You look at the negative things that happened to Erie during that time frame when Erie was under Democratic leadership. It's the simple, basic philosophy between the two parties. What we saw in the Trump election was working people and union members switching because of the Republican focus on jobs. Since Trump's been in office, the unemployment figures nationally, it's a low of how many years? It's massive. Hispanic unemployment at its lowest. Black unemployment at its lowest. Women's unemployment at its lowest. I'm not sure what else we need to do."

2013 was the last time local Democrats gained more voters via party switching than the GOP. Since then, the Republican net gains have been 164 in 2014; 374 in 2015; 1,795 in 2016; 268 in 2017; 393 in 2018; and, through the first five months of the year, 146 in 2019.

Overall, the party has seen an uptick in voter registration — not just from party hopping.

As the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported in early May, each of the eight counties in northwestern Pennsylvania have seen a net gain of registered Republican voters in the past seven months: Crawford (342); Clarion (354); Erie (576); Forest (41); Jefferson (219); Mercer (793); Venango (168) and Warren (253). Statewide, Democrats made gains in only 10 of Pennsylvania's 67 counties, according to the Capital-Star report.

Even so, Democrats still maintain a large voter registration advantage in Erie County

Of Erie County's 192,428 registered voters, 96,742 are Democrats; 68,792 are Republicans; and 26,890 are either affiliated with a third party or no party at all.

Salmon expects the recent trend to continue in the GOP's favor.

But he acknowledges that the president could be doing better were it not for "political noise," some of which Salmon says he attributes to negative national media coverage of Trump and the Republican Party and some of which he says is the fault of Trump himself. Even though Republicans have the advantage locally when it comes to party switching, that doesn't mean the party itself has been immune to it.

"The noise factor bothers them," Salmon said about Republicans who are disaffected. "His (Trump's) talking out or whatever it is you want to call it. But I'm interested in results and I think that the good people of Erie are thinking and they want those results. I don't hear any complaints about the state of the economy."

Despite his narrow 2016 victory in Erie County, a poll conducted by Mercyhurst Center for Applied Politics of 412 registered voters in Erie County earlier this year found that 55 percent of people disapprove of Trump’s job as president, 57 percent had an unfavorable view of him and 61 percent said the nation is headed in the wrong direction. His victory also failed to carry over into 2017 or 2018, when Democrats won key races for local and state races, including governor and U.S. senator.

Whether the trend in a traditionally reliable Democratic stronghold can continue in favor of the GOP, as Salmon hopes, is anyone's guess. If recent history is any guide, though, it won't.

Consider this:

In November 2004, America was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the country was still reeling from 9/11. President George W. Bush was facing reelection four years after the mess that was the Florida recount, butterfly ballots and hanging chads. In Erie County, the local Republican party witnessed a surge in voters, gaining 6,154 new registrants, a 10 percent increase, following the 2002 midterms. Bush, of course, went on to win reelection handily over Democratic nominee and then-Sen. John Kerry.

But in the years that followed, Erie County Republicans, like the approval numbers of the president and their party as a whole, saw their ranks decline significantly.

Party registration dropped by 10,450, from a high of 73,308 in 2004 to 62,858 in November 2008. The Erie County Democratic party felt the opposite effect, gaining 9,131 voters to boost their registration to 102,053 ahead of the historic election of the nation's first black president, Barack Obama, and at a time when the country was in the early throes of the so-called Great Recession.

Fast forward 10 years: Democrats locally have watched registration plummet, regain some ground and then drop slightly again. Republicans, like the Democrats during the second term of George W. Bush's presidency, have rebounded significantly, from a low of 60,196 registered Republicans in November 2012 (Obama's reelection) to 67,494 before Trump's 2016 victory, to 68,792 today.

Erie County Democratic Party Chairman Jim Wertz recently analyzed voter registration demographics in Erie County as part of the Jefferson Educational Society's Raimy Fellowship program.

"To some extent, the change from party to party I think is cyclical and I think you can see that in those 20-year county voter registration numbers," Wertz said. "Robert Reich describes economic cycles as vicious and virtuous and I think that political cycles are also vicious and virtuous. Certainly that time around 2008 was a virtuous cycle for the Democratic Party and we worked hard to hold onto some of that, but there were folks, they came in and ended up not being happy with things that Obama did.

"I'm not completely surprised given the political moment that we're in and the demographics of Erie County that Democrats are ceding more voters to the Republican Party than Republicans are to the Democrats," he said.

Joe Morris, chairman of Mercyhurst University's Political Science Department, said these types of swings in registration are not uncommon. Whether they are meaningful and lasting is a different story.

On one hand, Morris said Erie's demographics are changing.

"For example, we can look at the health and the vitality of unions in our county," he said. "These institutions, which were incredibly important for helping people to understand their interests and the issues that were important to them, are no longer as strong as they once were. The unions have been closely linked to the Democratic Party. As unions decline, it's not surprising to see a decline in Democratic support. But on the flip side, there's good reason to believe that the trend will not continue."

In Erie County, Democrats, since at least 2000, have enjoyed a 13-point to 20-point point advantage in terms of registration, he noted. That suggests that "any change in voter registration may be just part of the natural ebb and flow that we see in the American electorate," he said.

Morris is skeptical about the weight that registration numbers carry when it comes to predicting elections. Political scientists once relied on a theory that suggested that every 30 to 60 years Americans would change the way they vote and that change would be lasting.

"These changes were fairly predictable, or we thought they were, up until we get to the middle of the 20th century, when that abrupt change in party affiliation and then lasting period of stability tends to vanish," he said. "Then we ended up in a period of what many have called de-alignment, where voters' connections to political parties are becoming less and less important to them. And instead they're inclined to vote based on short-term influences."

Wertz, the local Democratic party chairman, has said multiple times that many of the Democrats who went for Trump in 2016 wanted the kind of outsider that they would have had with Sen. Bernie Sanders had Sanders defeated Clinton in the Democratic primary. Wertz said he believes that many of those same Democrats will return to support the party's nominee in 2020.

As for those who took the extra step of switching registration, he said, "I'm not truly all that concerned about the folks that we've lost to the Republican Party because my sense is that those were probably blue dog Democrats that we might've lost a long time ago, folks that quite frankly are more ideologically aligned with the Republican Party than with the Democratic Party."

Wertz said Democrats have done a better job converting independents than Republicans have and that's critical because the number of registered voters who don't affiliate with either major party has increased from more than 15,000 20 years ago to nearly 27,000 today.

Salmon said the momentum is on the side of the GOP in Erie County and that will bode well for Trump again in 2020.

"If you cut out the noise that we hear nationally on both sides, and you look just at the statistics, voters should be turning out in this coming election based upon those mega-statistics, I would suggest," he said. "It's a sign of the times. People — and I give the voters credit — they're thinking."

Matthew Rink can be reached at 870-1884 or by email. Follow him on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/ETNrink.