The seven political states of Pennsylvania

[brooklynite]

Washington Post

After losing the presidency in 2016, Democrats had a few excuses for their weak performance in the upper Midwest. Hillary Clinton had barely campaigned in the Great Lakes region, outside of Ohio; she had held back campaign resources, as her data suggested such states as Michigan and Wisconsin would remain part of a “blue wall.”

None of those rationales made sense for Pennsylvania, a state Clinton tended to for months and where she buried Donald Trump in TV advertising. Democrats bet on a few trends that simply did not materialize, like a suburban vote surge overwhelming losses in rural areas, and suburban women jumping — maybe at the last minute — for the chance to elect a female president. Clinton ended up losing the votes of White women by nine points, according to exit polls, and losing the suburbs by four points. Meanwhile, voters without college degrees, who had backed Barack Obama’s 2012 bid by 15 points, went for Trump by seven points.

In 2018, Democrats swept statewide races and picked up House seats, with Republican nominees for governor and U.S. Senate holding on to rural areas while the vote in suburban Philadelphia, northeast Pennsylvania and Erie County swung back toward Joe Biden’s party.

On the county-by-county map beloved by the president, the vote shift is hard to detect. Trump won three counties (Erie, Luzerne, Northampton) that were carried by the 2012 Obama-Biden ticket; Clinton won one county, Chester, that the party had lost four years earlier. That obscures the scale of Republican gains, which turned places that Obama had lost by a few points into places where Clinton lost by landslides.

In 2018, Democrats romped back and swept Pennsylvania’s statewide elections, but some of these voters didn’t come back. Even Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D), the scion of Scranton’s most successful political family, watched his vote share decline in Northeast Pennsylvania. Statewide, his margin from 2012 to 2018 grew from 10 points to 13 points. But instead of narrowly winning Philadelphia’s outer suburbs, he won them in a rout; instead of romping in the Northeast, he fought to a draw.