Pennsylvania’s presidential vote won’t be decided in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh
But in 10 smaller counties that once weren’t important
Joe Burkhart is busy working at his job as a maintenance manager at a processor here in Cambria County. Like many people who have spent their career working with their hands, he knows that unexpected layoffs and companies who have been around for decades suddenly shuttering their doors is part of today’s technological revolution.
Like many people around here born in the 1960s, Burkhart says he was born and raised a Democrat. “Everyone in my family was a Democrat, its just what you did,” he said, adding when he first started looking for work as an adult being a Democrat was basically a requirement to get a job. “Especially a union job.”
Then Barack Obama ran for re-election in 2012 and the party went from a coalition that included New Deal Democrats like Burkhart to a “coalition of the ascendant” centered on minorities, the millennial generation and progressive college educated upscale whites, especially women — a coalition that had its beginnings with Al Gore’s candidacy.
And like many others like him, Burkhart was out.
Where Trump won Pennsylvania
To win, presidential candidates need a complex and sometimes nontraditional coalition that coalesces people with often very different backgrounds, education and priorities. Displaced legacy Democrat voters like Burkhart were a big part of the coalition that placed Donald J. Trump in the winners circle in Pennsylvania in 2016.
The election that year marked the first time a Republican had won our Commonwealth since George H.W. Bush did in 1988. Because of his unique appeal to legacy Democrats, suburban Republicans and rural voters, his chances should not have been a surprise. Our state had changed since Bill Clinton first won it in 1992.
Some saw it coming. In 2016, numbers whiz kid Dave Wasserman, the senior editor and elections analyst for the Cook Political Report, calculated that Trump needed just 2,000 more voters in 10 or so counties that Mitt Romney won, or came close to winning, and even if Hillary Clinton did very well in both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — even if she won more votes than Obama, which she did significantly in Allegheny County — Trump would still win.
The key to Trump winning then, he said, was tweaking the margins in existing red counties rather than flipping traditionally blue counties. In 2016, he did that and won the state by a little over 44,000 votes. Four years later he came up short. Wasserman says Trump could do it again this year.
This change had been coming for almost 30 years. Wasserman crunched Pennsylvania’s electoral trends since 1996 and the numbers showed Pennsylvania has become 0.4% more Republican every cycle. In 1996, 28 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties went for Bill Clinton over Bob Dole; by 2012. Just 13 counties went for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney.
Wasserman told me in 2016 that few
people had noted the Democrats’ erosion of support from these voters from 1996 to 2012, because Pennsylvania was always at the end of the day a win for the Democrats. “It was so subtle and narrow many people missed it,” he said in an interview last week.
As a reporter, I have always spent my time on the back roads observing and talking to voters outside the big cities. I noticed eight years ago the people who live 15 minutes outside of any major city had no hesitation placing Trump signs in their yards.
No big deal, right? Well, many of these signs were in places where a Republican rarely won a race, places like here in Cambria and Erie, Northampton and Luzerne counties. All counties Barack Obama had won, many by significant margins.
I saw a lot of those signs and often they were not the standard issue campaign signs you pick up at the local Republican county headquarters. They were homemade, sometimes placed or painted on the sides of homes or barns. I once saw a horse with “Trump” painted on the side of its saddle.
I also started to see Trump signs in lush suburban neighborhoods where traditional Republicans lived, despite the conventional wisdom they would not vote for the brash outsider.
That is not the kind of enthusiasm you traditionally get in a presidential election in our state — so I started to talk to a mix of voters in those counties: rural Republicans, upper middle class traditional types, skeptical Independent voters, and displaced Democrats like Burkhart.
What drew them together will surprise you. It wasn’t him.
A lack of respect and power
It was the lack of respect they felt in our culture and a perceived loss of power. They often saw a diminishing respect for them and their ways of life. They saw it in the news, in commercials, in the music they listened to and on the playing field of their favorite sports team.
Their values, their loyalties, their work ethic, their way of life, even where they live and their commitment to family and community were often cast in a negative light.
Not all that long ago, their taste in music, entertainment, clothing and so on determined the country’s standards. Now they were and are often the butt of a Hollywood joke, or even a sharp criticism in a candidate’s throw away line. This coalition was formed because of the pressures they felt from our cultural curators.
Think Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” and Biden’s “dangerous extreme MAGA.” And Barrack Obama’s famous line: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. ... And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
These voters take that to mean, “You don’t matter anymore” or even “You’re bad for the country.” Can we blame them for thinking that?
It wasn’t just Wasserman’s analysis nor my observations that made me think something was different that year. A Gallup analysis that year based on 87,000 rolling interviews that went on for a year showed that while economic anxiety and Trump’s appeal were intertwined, his supporters for the most part did not make less than average Americans (their Main Street peers) and were less likely to be unemployed.
The study showed that these voters were more concerned about their children and grandchildren having the life they had in their hometown, and they felt powerless to make that happen.
In short, Trump did not create this coalition. He is the result of it.
Eight years after Trump first won and four years after Biden defeated him we take a look at if those 10 counties remain the ones to watch — Wasserman says yes.
This story will take a look at voters in some of those counties who have been anywhere from enthusiastic to lukewarm over Trump and what that means as we head into this November’s rematch in the state that may decide who will be in the White House in January of 2025.
The counties that matter
The big swing counties and likely the most important two are Erie and Northampton. They have larger populations than tiny Greene county. But if Trump gets an energetic turnout in Greene and counties like Indiana and Somerset that have the same voting patterns but larger populations, Trump could have a good night.
Also important are Burkhart’s Cambria County, as well as Washington, Westmoreland, Beaver and Luzerne counties. Trump won the last three by 108,154 votes, in a year his Pennsylvania margin of victory over Clinton was just 44,292.
Wasserman says larger turnout in Philadelphia’s blue-collar counties like Bucks or the coal county of Lackawanna where Trump likely won’t win could also still chip away at Biden’s margins.
Here are interviews with Trump voters in four of the 10 counties whose enthusiasm for him and disappointment in Biden showcase where the Trump voter is today: Erie, Northampton, Washington and Beaver.
Erie County: Michael Martin has been all over the map with Trump. The retired small businessman is a classic suburban Republican voter, and been one all of his life. He was showcased in my book with Brad Todd, “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping the Republican Party” as a Rotary Republican hesitant to support Trump on personality yet happy with his policies.
The day after the riot on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, he told me he was done with him. Three years and no other choices later Martin said he will vote for Trump in November.
“I honestly cannot believe I am saying that, yet Biden has given me no reason to support him. He has not brought the country together as promised, he hasn’t even tried. He is mostly angry all of the time,” Martin said.
Martin is the suburban voters most experts and pollsters missed because the tidy suburb he lives in is located in Erie and not suburban Virginia. Voters like him have spent their lives in a county surrounded by neighbors with varied educational backgrounds. Suburban Republican voters like him broke for Trump and it was enough for him to win.
Trump must win here as well as Northampton to win the state.
Northampton, Washington and Beaver
Northampton: Craig DeFranco is as solid Republican as you can get. He’s been the county party’s past GOP chair, he has run a super PAC and is a relentless volunteer.
He is the guy they bring in to get other voters across the finish line for candidates. Right now he says he struggles to get Main Line Republican type voters and Independents needed for Trump to win this county. And Trump must win this county too, in addition to Erie and Northampton.
“It’s hard to convince independents and moderate Democrats that he’s not an idiot. I mean, if you keep his mouth shut, he’d be fine,” he said bluntly.
A mix of leafy suburbs, rolling hills and old manufacturing blue-collar neighborhoods — this is after all the home of Bethlehem Steel — Trump won this county in 2016. Biden narrowly won it back in 2020. Both need it to win this year.
DeFranco is all in, but he’s not so sure he can convince enough people to join in with him, “The best thing he has going for him is that Biden has done nothing to win voters over. If Trump wins this time it is because Biden lost it.”
Washington and Beaver Counties: Conservative ideology alone did not unite this coalition, which is why both Pam Barton of Beaver County and Lucy Shoupp have both arrived at Trump despite not growing up in Republican orthodoxy.
Barton, who works as a medical professional in Dermatology, grew up in a working class Democratic household. Her father was a union steelworker, her mother a homemaker and being a Democrat came as natural in her family as going to church every Sunday.
These are the suburban women hiding in plain sight that many pollsters missed because of their geography; the assumption was they would vote for Clinton or Biden. What was missed was the simmering populist distrust of big institutions including the media, DC politicians, Hollywood and corporations, all based in people living in super ZIP codes far removed from the people they supposedly serve.
Barton says she felt connected to the Democratic Party as a young adult because then it was the party of the working people. “That’s just not who they are anymore. They’re the party of the elites. And that’s what the Republicans used to be, and that’s why we didn’t fit in with the Republicans at the time.”
Barton says Biden has done nothing to win her over, and she has no problem with Trump’s comportment. “Perhaps it is because he was never a politician. He’s not felt the need to ‘act presidential.’ Whatever the case, my life was better four years ago and so he has earned my support once again,” said Barton.
Shoupp began her career as a nurse. When she retired in 2010 from St. Clair Hospital in Mt. Lebanon she was the administrative vice president and chief quality officer for the hospital. Her husband William also retired as a medical professional. They both live in the leafy suburbs of Washington County and were part of the undetected Republican suburban voter pollsters expected to flee the party.
Like Barton, Shoupp began her political journey as a Democrat, but by Bill Clinton’s presidency that relationship had started to wane. “This will be my third time voting for Trump for president. Unlike some of my friends, my support for him never skipped a beat,” she said. She also has no problem with Trump’s comportment.
She explained why she’s not voting for Biden: “Inflation has been a real big part of my problem with Biden and how he has dismissed it, but also I find it hard to understand why he has until recently turned a blind eye to the border and the long term effects that it will have on our country from the part of surge that has criminal ties.”
Which way will Pennsylvania go?
It is far too early to know where this election is going. However, it is important to understand that it is unlikely to be the major population centers of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia that will swing this election and more likely to hinge on the voters who live in these 10 counties.
In talking with these voters, it’s clear Trump’s problem remains his comportment. Biden’s problem with them remains his failure to bring the country together and his perceived frailty.
Whichever candidate is speaking to them about concerns they have about inflation, the direction of the country, security at the border and national security will likely be the one who wins their vote.