Is Pennsylvania Really Getting More Conservative?

The Philadelphia Suburbs Are Very Encouraging For The Democrats

I’ve taken the liberty to map out the election results in the state of Pennsylvania by county from the past 20 years. This set of maps alone should tell you that Pennsylvania is not trending red. Of course, there’s a lot less red in the 2020 map than there is in the 2000 map, but the counties that both Al Gore and Donald Trump won have much smaller populations than the Bush-Biden counties. One of the most incredible swings you may have already detected was the swing to the left in Chester County. Chester was a 17-point Biden county this November, yet in 2000, George Bush beat Al Gore in this suburban place by 10 percent. Chester, a suburb of Philadelphia, has been trending blue for quite some time - it was a 10-point Bush county in 2000 and then narrowed down to a 5-point Bush county in 2004. It flipped to Obama in 2008 - he carried the county by 9. The only time it trended back to the Republicans in recent memory was in 2012, where Mitt Romney, who, as we know, was an elite candidate for the suburbs, flipped it back, narrowly, to the GOP - he was the victor here by just 500 votes. Hillary Clinton won it by an Obama-esque margin in 2016, and then Joe Biden turned the county into a safe D one in 2020, where, as I mentioned earlier, he won it by over 17 percent.

Chester is just one out of the many examples of the suburban swing in the Democrats’s favor that has taken place. You can look at other suburban Philly counties for more examples - Bucks and Montgomery in particular showed big swings towards Joe Biden last November. Let’s briefly move away from Philadelphia (don’t worry, we’ll come back) and move to the middle of the Keystone state to Centre county. Between 1936 and 1992, a Democrat had won the county only once, and it was LBJ in 1964 in his landslide against Barry Goldwater. However, Bill Clinton won it twice before it reverted back to its Republican roots and went for George Bush. Barack Obama notably flipped it in 2008 due to high turnout from Penn State University, the main reason the college remains blue today. Biden won the county with over 40,000 votes - an amount that, in a state like Pennsylvania, could win you the election. Take a look at the results per township in Centre county below - Penn state, located at the bottom of the county, is shaded red (the site I got this data from uses the old-school colors where red means Democrat and blue means Republican) and the rest of the county is shaded in for Donald Trump. Centre county is also growing at a pretty good rate, so if the trends continue, it will probably be Safe D by 2028 and will eventually become a huge source of Democratic votes in the state.

Yet another example of why, contrary to popular belief, Pennsylvania is NOT trending red, is the Pittsburgh suburbs. As mentioned earlier, the suburbs have taken a hard swing to the left in recent years, and the suburbs of Pittsburgh are no exception. One of the fastest-growing cities in Pennsylvania, Franklin Park, is another D-trending suburb. Franklin Park was won by Donald Trump in 2016 by over 12 percent but flipped to Biden in 2020 - he carried it by around 4. This trend, along with other suburban trends, will continue to help Democrats.

Lastly, I’d like to talk about Donald Trump’s incredible margins in rural Pennsylvania. Cameron County, among the most rural in the state, was won by Donald Trump easily. He got 73% of the vote there in both 2020 and 2016, improving on Mitt Romney’s 2012 numbers - Romney received 65% of the vote in the county. Trump also performed better than McCain in 2008 (59%), Bush in 2004 (66%), and Bush in 2000 (62%). While one could make the argument that Cameron County and other rural parts of the state are trending red (and those people are correct about that to a certain degree), I don’t see future Republicans improving on Trump’s numbers in rural areas of the Rust Belt. First of all, Trump essentially maxed out his rural support in 2020 and still lost the state to Biden (yet Biden didn’t max out his suburban support or his support in Philadelphia) and also, Trump is a once-in-a-generation type candidate for the Rust Belt. He’s awful in a state like Georgia or Arizona, but he’s an electoral behemoth in a state like Pennsylvania due to his rural support and WWC support. To be quite frank, I don’t see any future Republicans doing better in the rural part of the state and I don’t see them doing much better with the WWC. Trump shattered the glass ceiling in that regard, and still lost the state. You should also note that although basically everywhere in Pennsylvania is losing population, the rural areas are losing it faster that the urban/suburban areas. This should make Democrats feel great about their prospects here in the future.

So next time you hear that Pennsylvania will be a solid red state by 2040, or that the state will probably flip in 2024, or that the state is just “trending red”, I’d encourage you to send them this article. As always, thanks for reading, and I will see you all in the next one.