Odd kind of place whose voting patterns I don't understand. The best-fitting simple narrative might be that it just drifted Republican earlier than similar places elsewhere... but somehow stopped drifting at some point.
I think the coal industry died out earlier there than elsewhere. Centralia is nearby, too, although it's in Columbia County. There's also a big Lithuanian population there that is unique in the country, might make for unusual voting patterns. New Philadelphia is the most Lithuanian town in the country, IIRC. The Yuengling brewery is politically important in Pottsville, too.
It voted for Carter at about the statewide average in 1976, which seems to have been the Democrats' high water mark in the county relative to the state. It had voted for Nixon over Humphrey in 1968 even though PA voted for Humphrey, and it swung hard to Reagan in 1980. It did vote for Kennedy in 1960, though.
