Geographically, the state that most fascinates me at the Presidential level is Pennsylvania. With four sundry regions both culturally and politically, the Keystone State is as different as Northern and Southern California. But it still contains 20 electoral votes that matter.
At the national level, Pennsylvania has been faithfully Democrat – it has not voted Republican for the Presidency since 1988 and that year, George H.W. Bush’s margin over Michael Dukakis was a mere 51-49%. In fact, even in the 1984 Reagan landslide, it gave the President just 53%, less than monolithically Democratic New York.
This year, Republicans are hoping to flip the state and while, they have certainly succeeded in putting it in play, most analysts think the odds of Donald Trump actually winning it are a stretch. Clinton strategist David Plouffe called it an outright “fantasy.” While I wouldn’t call it the fantasy that one would think could never happen – such as a sex-tape involving a Miss Universe making into a tweet by a Presidential candidate’s at 3 a.m., the numbers do reveal that a Trump victory there still has long odds.
To determine the lay of the land, most will focus on Southeastern Pennsylvania, particularly the margins of Philadelphia and the city’s “collar counties”. Philly is the anchor for any winning margin Democratic margin in Pennsylvania. Obviously, Clinton will carry Phil’del by a punishing margin. Obama won the city by 492,000 votes in 2012 and there is little reason to think Clinton would do much worse, if she slumps at all. But turnout is super-important. In the 2010 mid-term, Republican Senate candidate Pat Toomey thought he had lost on the basis of a drubbing in the city, and he did lose it by 300,000 votes. But turnout was far lower and the numbers from the rest of the state was enough to give him a 51-49% win. Obviously, a Presidential year will mean far more voters turn out. Democrats just need to make sure it hits the max.
Now for the collar counties and her strength there is all the more crucial. Trump doesn’t need to carry any of the four that border Phil’del (though Bucks and Chester would put him on a path) but would need to keep Clinton’s margin to a minimum to have any remote chance at notching the state. It won’t be easy. George W. Bush was able to hold John Kerry’s margin to 87,000 (again winning Chester) and Kerry still won the state by 145,000. But Kerry also carried many of the Western Pennsylvania counties that have turned sharply against the national Democrats and whose voters are receptive to Trump. In 2012, Obama carried Bucks by 4,000, Delaware by 59,000 and Montgomery by 65,000, losing only Chester by the barest of margins – 529 votes.
Most analysts think Trump has alienated enough swing voters so that Clinton’s margin may well hit 150,000. She should also carry nearby Berks, which is about 60% of the population of each collar county as well (Obama took 54% in ’08 but Romney nipped him by fewer than 1,000 votes in ’12). She’ll need that to cancel out gains Trump is destined to make in the Anthracite margin of the state.
That’s where the margins get unpredictable though, provided she meets these thresholds, she should have the upper hand mathematically with a little room to spare. How much is dependent on places such as Lackawanna County (Scranton). Thanks in part to the popularity of its native son, Joe Biden, it gave Obama 63%. Clinton will certainly drop from that figure and some optimists on the Republican side think she may even lose the county. That’s a stretch but, assuming everything else comes through,
Luzerne and Northampton Counties in the Northeastern part of the state are at the epicenter of the kind of voters Trump is hoping to reach. Long Democratic, they have a blue-collar, almost rust-belt feel, a kind of “left-out” folk if you will. Before being elected to Congress, Lou Barletta served as Mayor of Hazelton where he drew fame for advocating a staunch crackdown against illegal immigration.
In 2012, Obama won both counties by 6,000 votes each but late-summer polls showed Trump up as much as 17 points. Were that to hold, it wouldn’t be devastating because, while those counties Are mid-size, they are nowhere near the population of the collars. In the Southern portion of the State, Obama carried Dauphin (Harrisburg) and while there is no guarantee Clinton will, the demographics guarantee that she’ll be competitive. The largest GOP vote share is poised to be Lancaster and York. Romney won 59% of the 219,000 voters who took out ballots that year I the former and 60% of the 185,000 in the latter but, while Trump may succeed in wrestling a few Obama voters from the Democratic fold, it’s not hard to imagine Trump’s temperament causing some on the GOP side to cast a ballot for someone not named Trump. Still, the GOP recognizes its importance. It’s not coincidental that Trump is soon headed to a rally in Lancaster while his running-mate will be going, where else? To York.
That brings us to Western Pennsylvania and this is the part of the state that even requires Democrats to get out their figures when it comes to plotting a win. The region has been changing for years. Outside of Pittsburgh, this has been deep coal-mining country. But many citizens have been left behind and have felt betrayed by the Obama administration’s perceived “war on coal” and, at the national level at least, have furiously realigned toward the GOP. Some also see this area as the epicenter of Obama’s “bitter-American” line. That remark may have been supported by some and dismissed by others but, the sentiment has caused Democrats here wide problems. And that has been borne out by recent results.
One reporter well-versed in the politics of Western Pennsylvania thinks Clinton’s floor in Allegheny (Pittsburgh) is 55% with some expecting one substantially higher. Because Obama got 57%, that would almost certainly guarantee a victory regardless of how she gets slaughtered in the region. Erie is the only other county in Western PA that Obama carried, and with a handsome 57%. Few on the ground are willing to realistically project how the county will vote this year but, I’m not sure it matters even as we’re looking at a complete domination in the counties around it. Let’s look at that.
Mitt Romney won mid-sized Fayette County with 56%, Washington with 56%, and Westmoreland with 61%. He took 58% in Green and Cambria, 67% in Clarion, and an astounding 71% in Somerset. Few would be surprised to see Trump doing better in all six but those counties have far fewer voters and have steadily been losing population. Indeed, his dream is to register the forgotten white voter all across America (among his many boasts at a campaign rally was how he “loves the under-educated”). There’s no dispute that many love him back but, they need to be registered. And his campaign has done little to do so.
Dave Wasserman, in a column for the blog, fivethirtyeight.com, notes that “registrations have increased 4.9 percent in the 63 counties where a majority of potential voters are non-college-educated white people. But in the other four counties (Philadelphia, Delaware, Montgomery and Chester), registrations have risen 6.3 percent. Those four more-cosmopolitan counties combined for an Obama margin of 611,724 votes in 2012, nearly twice his statewide margin of victory.”
For Pennsylvania at least, that’s illustrative of Trump’s conundrum. Even with success, given their size and applying it to Obama’s 310,000 vote cushion statewide, this makes the math an uphill if not impossible climb.
Map: By Peter Fitzgerald, revisions by LtPowers (Own work based on the US Geological Survey map) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons