What is up with Montour County?

[It’s so Joever]

So if you look at the 2022 PA Senate swing from 2016, Montour stands out like a sore thumb in that it swung left pretty strongly while nearby counties swing right (as they are rural) Same story if you look at 2020 presidential, where Montour swung further left than other adjacent counties. Same trend also holds or PA-Gov 2022 (as expected) and even in 2016, while Montour did swing R, it did so significantly less than any nearby county.

Yet when I look at Montour…I don’t see anything unique. What is going on up there?

[Sol]

Home to a large hospital (Geisinger Medical Center) which employs an unusually high percentage of the county's population. People in medicine moved leftwards during COVID.

[Schiff for Senate]

Montour seems quite inelastic compared to other counties in the area. It doesn’t give the GOP more than 60% of the vote, but it’s still stubbornly conservative enough that Bob Casey lost it all three times (and with the GOP winning a majority all three times as well), and it’s red enough that Corbett 2014, Wagner 2018 and now Mastriano 2022 all won majorities as well in gubernatorial elections - in fact, even Lynn Swann, who took less than 40% of the statewide vote against Rendell in 2006 (and didn’t even manage 30% in Bucks County!), won Montour with a majority.