Is Pennsylvania more similar to New York or Ohio?

[pikachu]

Question’s in the title.

[Tekken_Guy]

Ohio. PA doesn’t have a city that dominates its state the way NY does. Also its rurals are bratty staunchly Republican.

[Torie]

Outside of SEPA, Ohio is the easy call.

[If my soul was made of stone]

Western Pennsylvania is very clearly aligned with the neigboring parts of Ohio, both along Lake Erie and in the Mahoning/Shenango Valley. The parts of NEPA considered part of the NYC metro are much more distant and their cultural connections to the urban core much more tenuous. Philadelphia does not dominate Pennsylvania in the same way that NYC does, although much of interior PA has some aspects in common with upstate. Both Pennsylvania and Ohio also have a substantial Amish influence in certain regions that New York lacks.

[Sol]

New York IMO is the correct answer. Most regions of Pennsylvania has an obvious counterpart in New York--the differences are simply in percentages (i.e. much less city/Catskill-Poconos in PA, much more small town and rural areas). The American city which most closely resembles New York is Philadelphia, and vice-versa.

Meanwhile, the vast plains of Western Ohio are unlike anything in PA. Even Pittsburgh is a bit like the cities of Upstate.

[CookieDamage]

New York, but PA has similarities to both. Philly is a solidly mid-atlantic city much like New York and it's suburbs are very similar. Even though Philly doesn't dominate Pennsylvania like New York City does New York, the Pennsylvania-only part of the Philly metro is something like 30% of the state's population. Versus the ~15-19% of the Ohio population whom reside in the Columbus, Cleveland, and Cinncinatti metro areas.

Plus we also have to consider cities like Allentown, Bethlehem, Reading, Scranton which can be rough analogues to NY cities like White Plains.

As for voting patterns, Philly and it's suburbs vote very similar to New York and its suburbs like Westchester and Nassau. Of course, suburbs of Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, York, Lancaster, and Erie are fairly red, but so are suburbs of NY cities like Buffalo and Rochester (although Ontario County is a very light pink). If anything, the western and great lakes oriented metro areas of both Pennsylvania and New York have been quite red as of recent cycles compared to the nuclei of the primate cities of Philly and NYC.

[Boss_Rahm]

Central PA and Upstate NY are quite different politically. You have to get pretty creative to draw even a single Dem-leaning Congressional district in Central PA, but there are several in Upstate NY.

[Tekken_Guy]

Central PA and Upstate NY are quite different politically. You have to get pretty creative to draw even a single Dem-leaning Congressional district in Central PA, but there are several in Upstate NY.

Would a Harrisburg-Reading district work? Maybe with State College added in?

[If my soul was made of stone]

Central PA and Upstate NY are quite different politically. You have to get pretty creative to draw even a single Dem-leaning Congressional district in Central PA, but there are several in Upstate NY.

Would a Harrisburg-Reading district work? Maybe with State College added in?

It's possible to draw a fairly blue Harrisburg-York-Lancaster district, but it would be quite ugly. State College-Harrisburg-Reading sounds like a bit of a stretch.

[sting in the rafters]

NY east of Blue Mountain+Scranton, Ohio on the other side. The Appalachia-Acela divide is real.

[Sir Mohamed]

As whole OH and not even close. Might be more like Upstate NY though.

[Brittain33]

As whole OH and not even close. Might be more like Upstate NY though.

Yes, going by PVI, the answer is Ohio.

[pikachu]

Anyway, imo, NY. PA's population currently and historically has a distinct eastwards lean (the center of population is somewhat northwest of the Harrisburg area), so I think it's fair to weigh the culture of the eastern part of the state more when making the comparison than the west. With that, the Delaware Valley is pretty clearly a Mid-Atlantic metro area a la Baltimore and NYC, while the Wyoming Valley, Harrisburg, and the Lehigh Valley wouldn't be too out of place in upstate NY are definitely more connected to it than Ohio.

Even looking at the west, idk much about NWPA, but going off this article on NFL fandom in the region, the area seems to orient itself equally to Cleveland, Buffalo, and ofc Pittsburgh. SWPA strikes me as the only area which really seems like it's decisively more Ohio than New York.

[If my soul was made of stone]

As whole OH and not even close. Might be more like Upstate NY though.

Yes, going by PVI, the answer is Ohio.

Pennsylvania has voted to the left of New York three times since the Civil War: 1952, 1956, and 1984. The base of the Democratic Party in western Pennsylvania at the time resembled Ohio's coalitions much more than New York's, although they've since converged somewhat.

[Brittain33]

Size of metro areas shows the dilemma:

New York City: 19.1m
Philadelphia: 6.1m
Pittsburgh: 2.3m
Cincinnati: 2.2m
Columbus: 2.1m
Cleveland: 2.0m

NYC is 3x as big as Philly, which is 3x as big as Ohio's metro areas.
But in absolute numbers, 6m is a lot closer to 2m than it is to 19m.

Pennsylvania with a smaller Philadelphia would look a lot like Ohio. Is Philadelphia as it is today enough to make it look more like New York? I don't think so, and recent election results bear that out.

[TDAS04]

Politically Ohio, geographically New York.

[Sol]

Politics shouldn't matter for this at all imo.

[MillennialModerate]

I mean the obvious answer is SEPA is more like NY (metro)

The rest of the state especially anywhere west of PSU is Ohio

[Cokeland Saxton]

Ohio, especially outside of metro Philly which, unlike NYC does with NY, does not dominate PA

[GregTheGreat657]

Everything west of the Philly metro is more similar to Ohio