What is happening in Pennsylvania? A trend, or back to normal?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

What are we up to on the GCB? D+9?


PA was  basically tied at D+2 in 2016. In a uniform swing environment thus the state would be expected to vote about D+7 or D+8 based on that.  The Governor's race would have a bigger differential than the Senate race obviously and the same thing occurred in 2006.

Casey outperformed by about 5% to 6%, which based on his name id, popularity in the NE and Lehigh Valley and yes record performances in the cities and the suburbs, makes a lot of sense.

I think PA is a close to even state with the national average, it is the front lines between the two demographic blocks of each party and it is a tendency to favor incumbents as someone said. There certainly was a turnout problem for the GOP as the electorate that showed up in the exit poll was Clinton by 6. While we cannot be certain as to the accuracy, there is reason to believe it might be higher than that based on the turnout data posted above but it is certainly in the ballpark.

Still for a state that turned out in a manner hostile to the President, it still was split close to even on trade and immigration policy. A plurality said Trump's trade policies help more than they hurt IIRC and the split on immigration between "too tough" and "Just Right/Not Tough Enough"  was 52%-48%. this number appeared elsewhere in the exit polls as well.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

We need to be careful about reading too much into this. Democrats did very, very well in the 2018 midterms in this state, but they also had popular Democratic incumbents and very weak Republican challengers. A few years down the road, I see this year being an exception to Pennsylvania's purple status.

At the very least, it should dampen that hot take which was going around about PA being more likely to vote for Trump than WI.

A) People say that?

B) I'm curious as to what their rationale was.

Yeah, it got quite a lot of votes in this poll.

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=278854.0

I say it all the time and I will keep it saying it for this reason.

Trump only won Wisconsin because of lower turnout. He got less votes than Romney did. If Milwaukee turns out in 2020, Trump would need to rebound in WoW to RoJo levels to compensate.

The same is not true for PA.

Two things have to happen for PA to go red: Republicans have to be enthusiastic and Democrats have to not be. That's what happened in 2016,

That is not what happened in 2016. In MI and WI you can say that because Trump won them while getting less votes than Romney.

In PA, Trump got almost 300,000 more votes than Romney while Clinton only lost 70,000 from Obama. In Philadelphia, Clinton was only under Obama by 4,000 votes, but Trump ran 12,000 ahead of Romney.

Trump won Pennsylvania because he got higher rural turnout than Romney and because NE, NW and SW PA reacted positively to his message on trade and immigration, which meant that a lot of people flipped from Obama to Trump in those areas. Even in 2018, the exit polls showed a plurality with a positive view on Trump's trade policies and underwater by just 4% on immigration. This with an electorate that claimed to have voted for Clinton by 6% and voted to reelect Wolf and Casey by double digits.

I think there is a lot of faulty analysis based off the 2018 results in PA, that yes ignore incumbency, the quality of the GOP candidates, the unwinding of an overextend House delegation based on a gerrymander and other factors as well as drawing on a lingering faulty narrative about the nature of Trump's win in 2016 in PA.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

We need to be careful about reading too much into this. Democrats did very, very well in the 2018 midterms in this state, but they also had popular Democratic incumbents and very weak Republican challengers. A few years down the road, I see this year being an exception to Pennsylvania's purple status.

At the very least, it should dampen that hot take which was going around about PA being more likely to vote for Trump than WI.

A) People say that?

B) I'm curious as to what their rationale was.

Yeah, it got quite a lot of votes in this poll.

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=278854.0

I say it all the time and I will keep it saying it for this reason.

Trump only won Wisconsin because of lower turnout. He got less votes than Romney did. If Milwaukee turns out in 2020, Trump would need to rebound in WoW to RoJo levels to compensate.

The same is not true for PA.

I dont know where this idea that WI is going to become the most R state of the three when, as you point out, Trump didnt do better than Romney in raw voter totals. At least in PA and MI, Trump made gains.

Even in MI Trump's gains were smaller than Clinton's losses. Clinton lost about 250,000 votes while Trump only gained about 100,000.  I think you can safely say that WI and MI were decided by low AA and Democratic turnout in key Democratic strongholds in both states. Now while I didn't examine Scranton or Pittsburgh, the Philly numbers seem indicative that Democrats actually did turnout in PA, because if they didn't Clinton would have lost far more votes relative to Obama and Trump would have won the state by 5% or 6%.

In large measure this is probably due to the local strength of the Philly Democratic operation, which is well known for getting the job done. In 2010 for instance, it is said that when Toomey saw the Philly numbers, he expected to lose.