Pennsylvania Memo: Inside Trump's Win and the McCormick Upset

How the state's east-west divide set up GOP flips for the White House, the Senate, and two Congressional seats

The second in my series of 2024 after-actions focuses on the biggest swing state of them all, Pennsylvania, where Trump won, Republicans engineered their only Senate upset of the cycle, and also picked up two Congressional seats. You can read my first installment on Michigan here.

As a thank you, paid subscribers will get the full analysis and charts about the Presidential, Senate, and House races in the Keystone State, following an overview of the Trump-Harris race for all subscribers.

The Presidential Race in Pennsylvania

• Trump’s 1.75 point margin in the Keystone State — the tipping point state of the 2024 election — made it his best performing state of the big three Blue Wall states. His margin was just big enough to also deliver a Senate victory to Dave McCormick.

• Pennsylvania ranks between Michigan and Wisconsin in its rightward shift in 2024, with a swing right of 2.9 points, to 4.2 points in Michigan and 1.5 points in Wisconsin.

• The eastern part of the state led the way in the shift right. Here, a segmentation by Congressional districts is useful: the districts around Philadelphia, the Lehigh Valley, and northeastern Pennsylvania swung 4.6 points right presidentially from 2020. The rest of the state swung just 1.2 points right, a swing that if replicated in the east would have left the state on a knife’s edge.

• The Philadelphia metro was a surprising bright spot for Trump. The educated Philadelphia suburbs (including an smaller enclave of very wealthy precincts) swung almost 3 points in Trump’s direction — together they cast 18 percent of the vote. Improvements of 5.5 points in both Black-majority Philadelphia and white working class Philadelphia precincts made these working class communities representing 11% of the state’s an even bigger raw vote contributor to Trump’s gains. Hugging the Delaware River, the white working class communities spanning from South and Northeast Philadelphia to lower Bucks County are a long-term opportunity for the GOP, including a growing Latino population that is shifting this once staunchly-Democratic, union-heavy area to the political center.

• The largest shifts right came in Latino neighborhoods, both in Philadelphia and in smaller eastern and central industrial cities, with swings of 13.3 and 11.0 points respectively. The Latino shift cannot be clearly seen at the county level; we need the precinct segmentation that forms the basis of this analysis to see it. These communities make up a small share of the electorate (2.5 percent between them) but punched well above their weight in the shift right. The shift is even more notable given that the Latino community in Pennsylvania is heavily Puerto Rican, showing no effect from the “island of garbage” joke at Trump’s MSG rally.

• More urban areas north of Philadelphia were also a bright spot. Allentown and Bethlehem, with their heavy Latino populations, swung right. Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, another urban white working class hub that was the birthplace of Joe Biden, swung 5.4 points. The “Greater New Jersey” region in the Poconos moved 6.7 points right. This area is home to many New York metro transplants who swung the region left during Covid and back right in 2024 — in an outgrowth of Trump’s New York / New Jersey gains. The loss of a hometown candidate at the top of the Democratic ticket along with an extension of Democrats’ New York metro woes were Trump advantages unique to Pennsylvania.

• If there’s anywhere where Kamala Harris held up in the battlegrounds, it was in newly suburbanized areas. In Pennsylvania, that is mostly in the central part of the state, around Harrisburg, York, and Lancaster. I wrote before about how central Pennsylvania is becoming the state’s third electoral powerhouse, competing with Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. In the rapidly suburbanizing areas, Harris gained 0.5 points and in the countryside, Trump only gained 0.5 points, less than his rural gains everywhere else. But Trump ultimately did what he needed to do in central Pennsylvania, with gains in already built-out cities (+3.5 points) and in Latino neighborhoods.

• Moving on to the bulk of Pennsylvania’s rural white working class, the most staunchly Republican of these voting blocs anywhere in the Rust Belt battlegrounds, Trump saw muted gains in the neighborhood of 2 points. In a clear sign of maxing out, he only gained 0.4 points in the Johnstown-based “Ancestral Mountain GOP” region he won by 54 points.

• The Pittsburgh metro proper was an underperformance for Trump. The metro has long overperformed for Republicans, even before Trump, when it moved sharply right as part the Obama-era Appalachian swing right. And perhaps Steeler Nation wasn’t as Biden-pilled in 2020, leaving little room for growth here.

• The middle class Pittsburgh suburbs swung 0.8 points left, while their wealthy enclaves swung 1.6 points left. The white working class exurbs only swung 1.2 points right. A small group of Black-majority precincts swung 2.8 points right. These are all figures that are around 3.5 points off their counterparts in Philadelphia. Applying the Pittsburgh swings to Philadelphia would have made the state much closer.

  • Pro readers of my piece on PA voter registration could have seen this coming based on relatively weak GOP voter registration growth in Allegheny County. Allegheny County was predicted to be a 1-point swing to Harris and in the end it was a miniscule 0.1 point Trump gain.