How Keystone State will choose next president
After a long and brutal campaign, ballots are finally on their way to Pennsylvania voters, who will play a pivotal role in selecting the next president of the United States.
The state has been in the national spotlight since President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, one he earned by a mere 44,000 votes out of 6 million cast across Pennsylvania.
There wasn’t just one factor responsible for the surprising outcome in a state that had backed Democrats for president since 1988. Trump was able to whip up rural turnout to unexpected levels, as well as flip several counties that typically could be counted on to bolster big Democratic numbers out of Philadelphia. While Hillary
Clinton nearly matched Barack Obama’s numbers in Philly, Trump also did better there than past Republicans.
But Trump’s path to repeating his 2016 win in the state is complicated by demographic and political shifts in the fastest-growing counties. Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden, a native son, has maintained a slim but significant edge in state polls for most of the year, but small changes in any number of factors across the state could swiftly alter that margin.
As the race hits the final stretch, and county officials brace for the avalanche of mail ballots they expect to receive, here’s what to watch for from key regions across Pennsylvania — and what each candidate will need there to earn the state’s 20 electoral votes.
The Lehigh Valley
Long viewed as a bellwether region of Pennsylvania, the Lehigh Valley’s two core counties reflect the political tension of the state overall: Democrats have made gains in Lehigh, where the party swept four open county commissioner seats last year, while Northampton was one of three Pennsylvania counties won by Barack Obama in 2012 then by Trump in 2016.
The 7th Congressional District, which includes Lehigh, Northampton and part of Monroe counties, went for Democrat Hillary Clinton — by 1%.
The Trump campaign has been deploying surrogates here in recent weeks, including Donald Trump Jr., and in a separate visit, Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Biden’s campaign wants to see this part of the state voting more like its neighbor to the south, while Trump’s team wants to see Northampton staying red and Lehigh reversing recent trends, to align closer to counties to the northeast.
The northeast
Perhaps no region was more critical to Trump’s 2016 win than northeastern Pennsylvania, where a 30,000-vote swing in Luzerne County showcased how far the area has trended away from its Democratic roots.
But this time Trump is facing a Democratic nominee native to this region. Biden was born and spent his earliest childhood years in Scranton, a city that looms large in his personal narrative and in a catchphrase as Biden seeks to brand the presidential election as between “Scranton” and “Park Avenue.”
“Can Biden just move the bar back just enough to take away the 2016 advantage?” asked Chris Borick, a political scientist and pollster at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. “The northeast will be fascinating because of Biden’s roots, and Trump’s strength there.”
Biden’s path to success isn’t flipping this area as much as it is narrowing Trump’s margins here. Trump needs to replicate his strong vote tallies to counteract the Democratic numbers that will be racked up in the southeast.
The big cities and the ’burbs
The conventional path to Democratic victory in Pennsylvania has been through Philadelphia due to its size and ideology. The party tallied huge margins here and in Pittsburgh, as Republicans tried to match those numbers in red swaths of the state in between those cities. In presidential elections with a larger voter turnout, Democrats have often won out.
But while Democrats can’t count on much of a boost from places like Scranton or the Republican-trending southwest, they have another tool to add to margins out of Democrat-heavy Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The southeastern counties of Bucks, Montgomery, Chester and Delaware used to be solidly Republican but now look much more in line politically with the urban center that they surround. Those suburban counties have slowly and now swiftly trended toward Democrats in a pattern that mirrors the exodus the GOP has experienced in similar suburban communities across the country.
That “suburban erosion,” as former Lehigh Valley Congressman Charlie Dent put it, could spell disaster for Republicans. Not wanting to lose in the suburbs, Trump has targeted
a law-and-order message to those voters in the wake of riots focused on racial injustice.
Can Trump win back a portion of those disaffected Republicans? Or has the trend that began before his candidacy solidified in a way that will boost Biden?
Rural Pennsylvania
This is where Trump has his biggest potential to stockpile votes, but that requires a historic repeat of the high turnout he was able to capitalize on four years ago.
Trump’s campaign has expressed confidence that it can not only repeat the rural surge of 2016, but even squeeze more votes out of the deepest red and most sparsely populated areas.
In a CNN interview last month, Dent, a Republican who represented the Lehigh Valley for 14 years, was skeptical that there are enough rural voters to offset GOPlosses in the suburbs.
“The president pulled a perfect straight in 2016 and would have to do it again,” he said.
Even amid a pandemic, Trump has been using rallies to motivate his base in critical parts of Pennsylvania: he was in Scranton in August, and in Latrobe and Harrisburg this month.
When the president takes the debate stage with Biden Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence (who was in Luzerne County last month) will be back in deep-red Pennsylvania, watching from a farm in Lancaster County.