Move the coalition until she wins.

What the buttons are doing

The model replays past coalitions on the Oct 19, 2026 voter file, 9,041,391 registrants. A 2022 turnout rate on those rolls is about 5.45 million ballots. Garrity’s share of the two-party vote is the lever. The third-party share in each county stays at 2022.

Repeat 2022 is Shapiro by 14.7 points: about 3.08 million votes to 2.28 million. Closing that takes 400,668 people switching from him to her, which is a uniform gain of 7.5 points of two-party share in every county. Polls today are worse than that replay.

One change never wins. Matching Trump only in the four Philadelphia suburbs and Allegheny still loses by 9.0 points. A rural surge in counties Trump won with 60% or more loses by 5.4. Philadelphia falling to its 2014 turnout loses by 12.4. An extreme turnout gap loses by 8.2.

The maps that win require Trump’s 2024 coalition, not a better version of Mastriano’s. Trump’s share in every county, at 2022 turnout, is Garrity by 2.2 points. Getting 87% of the way from Mastriano to Trump in every county is a tie. Lay any of those on top of a 20-point poll lead and you are counting the same voters twice. Likely-voter polls are already a turnout model.

The skill-game shutdown

On October 14 the unlicensed skill games went dark, after the Supreme Court called them illegal slot machines and the Legislature did not pass a tax or a license. The attorney general’s count is about 70,000 machines in roughly 17,000 bars, stores and clubs. The 150,000-machine case is about 37,000 locations.

A statewide player pot near $1.25 billion fits the industry anchors. Spread over 70,000 machines that is about 325,000 regulars; over 150,000 it is about 700,000. About three in four regulars are registered, about three in five of those vote in a governor race, and about 62 percent of that slice was already hers. The votes that move are the rest, plus owners, plus a few of her own voters who would have skipped a race they think is over. At the realistic setting that is about one point on the state’s machine count and about two points at 150,000.

How the map counts

Projected ballots in a county are its 2022 turnout rate times its Oct 19, 2026 registration, unless a preset changes the rate. Garrity’s votes are ballots times the non-third-party share times her two-party share. Shapiro gets the rest of the two-party vote. A uniform swing adds the same amount to every county’s 2022 two-party share and clamps it between 0 and 100. Region and county sliders do the same on a smaller map. The presets match scripts/wargame.py; see Paths to win for every scenario side by side.