How did Trump do so well in Pennsylvania?

[Cyrusman]

Seeing how bad Oz and Mastriano (two Trump Picks) are doing in PA in an environments favorable to Republican's, makes it so much more impressive just how well Trump did both times in PA. Why was he such a great fit for that state? He became the first Republican to carry it since 1988 and even in a losing effort in 2020 he did better than any of the other Republican nominees since 1988 did. Also keep in mind 2016 was a neutral year and 2020 was a good environment for Democrats.

I mean recent candidates such as Lou Bareltta, and Scott Wagner got crushed there. Other than Trump, the only other GOP nominee to have success statewide recently was Pat Toomey, and 2010 was a VERY favorable year for him, and one could argue Trump helped him in 2016.

Why was Trump such a good fit in PA?

[EJ24]

Trump's messaging on trade and renegotiating NAFTA helped him a lot in 2016.

His attacks on Biden for being anti-fracking helped keep things as close as they were in 2020.

Rural turnout helped him both times, Trump's greatest strength is rural whites.

Otherwise, I don't think it was anything special. Pennsylvania is a tossup state almost every cycle, maybe leaning slightly Democratic.

[Cyrusman]

Trump's messaging on trade and renegotiating NAFTA helped him a lot in 2016.

His attacks on Biden for being anti-fracking helped keep things as close as they were in 2020.

Rural turnout helped him both times, Trump's greatest strength is rural whites.

Otherwise, I don't think it was anything special. Pennsylvania is a tossup state almost every cycle, maybe leaning slightly Democratic.

Then why did Romney do so poorly while winning a county like Chester County? It never seemed like a tosss up with Romney.

[EJ24]

Trump's messaging on trade and renegotiating NAFTA helped him a lot in 2016.

His attacks on Biden for being anti-fracking helped keep things as close as they were in 2020.

Rural turnout helped him both times, Trump's greatest strength is rural whites.

Otherwise, I don't think it was anything special. Pennsylvania is a tossup state almost every cycle, maybe leaning slightly Democratic.

Then why did Romney do so poorly while winning a county like Chester County? It never seemed like a tosss up with Romney.

It didn't seem like a tossup because Obama's 2012 campaign was incredible. They had endorsements from all the major labor unions (which Hillary and to a lesser extent, Biden did not), and more importantly, his campaign successfully defined Romney early on as an out of touch elite who cared more about his bottom line at Bain Capital than the welfare of the country. Obama also ran on the bailout of GM under his watch. Stuff like that matters in the rust belt and it's a big reason he carried Michigan, PA and Wisconsin with relative ease.

[If my soul was made of stone]

gee i do wonder why no one liked scott wagner
https://twitter.com/mattmfm/status/1050779638463639552

"So well" is a strange way to put this, given that he wasn't even the best-performing Republican on the ticket in 2016: Toomey won by about twice the margin and carried four HRC counties (Bucks, Chester, Centre, and Dauphin). Comparing their maps, it becomes clear that Toomey's old-school Tea Partier style was far less appealing to the small-town post-industrial world where Trump tore up residual Democratic strength enough to win–Schuylkill County in anthracite country, lifelong home of arch-Demosaur former Rep. Tim Holden and Mrs. T's Pierogies, swung an astounding 30 points Republican from '12 to '16, while Toomey only managed about half that vis à vis 2010–but much more appealing to the well-off and educated who see the former constituency as beneath them. While Trump's victory points to Pennsylvania being much more dense in this sort of country–some of which, like Altoona, Sunbury, etc, is even ancestrally Republican and remained so through the halcyon New Deal Coalition salad days–this is hell world postwar America, and suburbs and exurbs are beating hearts.

Nor was he the top Republican in 2020, as the GOP flipped two state row offices on the same ticket. Incumbent Democratic Treasurer Joe Torsella's vote share collapsed in the sort of "outer industrial" counties that Trump had triumphed in; he went from winning Beaver County, the heart of PUMALand that the McCain campaign rightly saw as its potential key to winning the state (they didn't, of course, but it still swung hard against the tide), to losing it by 14, and from losing Cambria County by less than two points to being blown out 63-34. Both performances were marginally better than Biden's, mind you, but while Biden improved greatly on HRC in places like ChesCo, or even more affluent suburbs in smaller metros like Harrisburg and Reading (in the latter compounded with Muh Hispanic Trends), Torsella still underperformed the Presidential topline, this time roughly on par with HRC beneath Biden. The lack of that girth of raw votes was enough for Muh Realigner Suburbanites, who still keep the Dems at arms' length and feel proud of themselves for splitting their tickets, to help topple him even as they resoundingly rejected Trump, in tactical alliance with the collapse in the backwoods they so despise (cue James Carville talking about The Deer Hunter).

[Schiff for Senate]

Obligatory reminder that in the concurrent senate election in 2016, Pat Toomey (R) outperformed Trump and won by a bigger margin than Trump did.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Trump's messaging on trade and renegotiating NAFTA helped him a lot in 2016.

His attacks on Biden for being anti-fracking helped keep things as close as they were in 2020.

Rural turnout helped him both times, Trump's greatest strength is rural whites.

Otherwise, I don't think it was anything special. Pennsylvania is a tossup state almost every cycle, maybe leaning slightly Democratic.

Then why did Romney do so poorly while winning a county like Chester County? It never seemed like a tosss up with Romney.

PA Trended Republican even in 2012. McCain did 3% worse in PA than nationally in 2008, Bush did about 4% worse in PA than he did nationally, while Romney only did 1% worse than he did nationally in PA.

Romney also never targeted PA to the extent that Trump did (Romney's preferred path was FL, VA, OH, CO/NV) and failed to hammer the currency manipulation issue the same way Trump constantly harped on NAFTA.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

1. PA has been trending Republican since 2008. Democrats quick to point to the GOP losses in 2014 and 2015 ignored the bigger trendlines, sure that SEPA would always save them, regardless of losses elsewhere.

2. Trade: Going back to 1846, which is when PA became more open to the Whigs, after being a Jacksonian stronghold, largely because of the Tariff issue. PA has historically reacted positively to a strong protectionist message. Trump highlighted in every rally "number of jobs lost since NAFTA and since China joined the WTO" in every state he campaigned in. In 2020, Trump backed off the trade message because he wanted to be able to crow about the gains on the DOW instead.

3. Immigration. There has been massive demographic shifts in the Lehigh Valley, Harrisburg area, and NE PA around Scranton/Wilkes-Barre/Hazelton. There are important and in the case of two of them, the historically decisive swing regions in the state going back decades. Lou Barletta got his national profile from cracking down on illegal immigration as Mayor and he had massive cross-over support from working class Democrats in his bid for Congress in 2008, when he nearly unseated Paul Kanjorski in a Democratic vote sink, in spite of the bad year for Republicans.  

A lot of traditionally Democratic voters in these regions, grew tired of  the Democratic Party over the immigration issue and Trump leaned into this group hard in 2016 never backed off. That is how you saw Luzerne go from being a swing county that often tracked with the state or just a touch more Dem than the state, to being a Trump by 20% county.

4. Trump's 2016 campaign was more secular than many recent Republicans and that certainly helped with a lot of working class voters. Trump's behavior also appealed to people in contrast to the straight laced Romney.


Very few "Trumpist Republicans" have ever replicated what Trump did because they don't understand what he did in the first place and think it is also just about being more hardcore conservative, or more abrasive.

[sting in the rafters]

Obligatory reminder that in the concurrent senate election in 2016, Pat Toomey (R) outperformed Trump and won by a bigger margin than Trump did.

Only because Toomey equivocated on whether or not he supported Big T until an hour before the polls closed.

I really don't feel like penning the legal brief-length post I could on PA's quirky regional dynamics due to the aforemtioned ancestral Rs and numerous New Deal era WWC Conservadems, so just keep in mind its the only state with both a Trump-Democratic (Cartwright) and Biden-Republican seat (Fitzpatrick). Those smart enough can fill in their chosen narrative. Simply consider the following regarding Big T's appeal in SWPA/NEPA:

Trump's operational responsibilities as a project manager inherently meant he interacted with the Staten Island residents who comprise a significant portion of the construction workforce. The predominant ethnic white unions' historical racial segregation up there probably proved fertile ground for Trump to test his grievance politics on the national level. Known wise guy and convicted felon Michael Franzese spoke of these professional interactions in an interview on Hotboxin' w/Mike Tyson.

I got a lil bit involved in this whole investigation because I knew some of the people around Trump and they asked if Trump ever dealt w/the Mob and I just ... are you guys like in Never Never Land? I said he was a real estate developer in NYC, he had to deal with us like every other developer because we controlled the unions. If you wanted to get anything done you had to come to us. Now we didn't party with him, he didn't come to our social club .... but of course he had to deal w/us you didn't get anything done unless you dealt w/us

Now some of this might be bluster from a disgraced, clout-chasing capo but it more or less tracks with my own experience working with general contractors. Therefore, one must ponder how much of Trump's prowess in those types of demographics comes from his professional experience and probably just shootin' the s___ with them on a daily basis.

Biden did overperformed in NEPA among people who normally vote. It's just Trump spent his entire presidency running for re-election and thus got overwhelming turnout from people who both flipped their registration from D---->R and went from nothing---->R once engaged.

It's hard to understate how Trump got the voter outreach in exurban/rural Lackawanna (and the rest of PA, hell rural areas in general) that the GOP's craved for decades. And now with the way things are looking in the country, those former low-propensity voters are Rs for life. We often talk ab how political identity is formed at coming of age, however it's also true for older people who were previously disconnected.

"We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business."

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Look, does anyone here have an actual reason why Fetterman is supposedly so much more electable than Kenyatta other than the fact he happens to fit our stereotype of what a white working class voter happens to look like? I can understand this argument with someone like Cartwright, who has actually had electoral overperformance in federal races before, but Fetterman's only won races in a heavily Democratic city and a crowded primary for lieutenant governor where he was the only Western Pennsylvania candidate running.

If you view swing voters in Pennsylvania as all racists and homophobes who won't vote for Kenyatta because he's a scary gay black man, then just be up front and say that.Both Kenyatta and Fetterman seem absolutely fine on policy and I'd be happy to run with either, but y'all need to actually base your arguments against Kenyatta on something more tangible than an imaginary aura of electability that Fetterman has.

unfortunately that is my belief

Very common misconception regarding PA. Anyone who's a homophobic racist in central PA hasn't voted for a Democrat since Casey in 2012 at the federal level (maybe Casey in '18 though it's more likely this hypothetical voter stayed home then). The swing voters of the Philadelphia suburbs are culturally liberal and will only become more progressive due to population growth. My childhood county of Chester has gone from Bush+10 in 2000 to Biden+17 because of the housing boom and good school districts. Just recently Democrats gained the party registration edge in Chester County for the first time ever. Voters here are repulsed by the poor handling of COVID+there's a number of young professionals who are struggling with student loan debt. Ditto for Pittsburgh metro, Pittsburgh's had a major tech boom in the past 5-10 years which is fueling population growth similar to the influx of young college grads in Colorado+Arizona.