If the polls are even close to being accurate, the outcome of the 2024 presidential election is going to be determined by the results in just six states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. These are often referred to as the "swing" states. North Carolina isn't on that list, but probably should be; folks on the right like to pretend it's a 1000% mortal lock for the GOP, but it's not. It just leans slightly in the direction of Republicans at the presidential level in recent years.
2024 presidential election map; swing states in purple
If the Democrat candidate, whoever it turns out to be, wins every state that Democrats normally win, he/she/it will receive 226 electoral votes (EV) from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine*, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.
If Donald Trump wins every state that Republicans normally win, he will receive 235 electoral votes from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska*, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
[* Maine and Nebraska are the only states where electoral votes are not winner-take-all; they award them by congressional district, and the statewide winner gets the other two votes. Because of this, Trump is expected to easily gain one of Maine's four electoral votes, and the Democrat is narrowly expected to take one of Nebraska's five EV.]
The magic number is 270 EV; that's the number a candidate needs to obtain in order to be elected president.
The six swing states combine for 77 EV:
- Arizona (11)
- Georgia (16)
- Michigan (15)
- Nevada (6)
- Pennsylvania (19)
- Wisconsin (10)
Assuming everything else goes as expected, Trump needs 35 EV from those six states in order to win; the Democrat nominee needs at least 44.
2020 presidential election results in PA
Pennsylvania has been reliably Democrat presidentially from 1992 to the present with the exception of 2016 when overconfident Democrats just barely failed to manufacture enough votes in the Philadelphia ghetto to deprive Donald Trump from eking out a statewide win by 0.7%. Trump would have won the presidency even without PA's 20 electoral votes that year, but Democrats still rued their mistake and vowed it would not happen again in 2020. It didn't.
Pennsylvania election results |
2020 |
Joe Biden (D) |
3,461,221 |
49.9% |
Donald Trump* (R) |
3,379,055 |
48.7% |
2016 |
Donald Trump (R) |
2,970,733 |
48.2% |
Hillary Clinton (D) |
2,926,441 |
47.5% |
2012 |
Barack Obama* (D) |
2,990,274 |
52.0% |
Mitt Romney (R) |
2,680,434 |
46.6% |
2008 |
Barack Obama (D) |
3,276,363 |
54.5% |
John McCain (R) |
2,655,885 |
44.2% |
2004 |
John Kerry (D) |
2,938,095 |
50.9% |
George W. Bush* (R) |
2,793,847 |
48.4% |
2000 |
Albert Gore, Jr. (D) |
2,485,967 |
50.6% |
George W. Bush (R) |
2,281,127 |
46.4% |
1996 |
Bill Clinton* (D) |
2,215,819 |
49.2% |
Robert Dole (R) |
1,801,169 |
40.0% |
1992 |
Bill Clinton (D) |
2,239,164 |
45.1% |
George Bush* (R) |
1,791,841 |
36.1% |
2024 scenarios: If Trump wins all of the states which Republicans usually win these days, he needs only Georgia and Pennsylvania among the six swing states and the result is a 270-268 win.
Trump 270, Democrat 268
If Trump loses PA, then he still loses even if he takes both Arizona and Nevada along with Georgia (268-270).
Democrat 270, Trump 268 (and now that one Nebraska electoral vote looks huge)
Wisconsin likely isn't going to Trump (current illusions aside), what with the Wisconsin Democrat Supreme Court recently issuing a ruling which trashes the election integrity measures passed by the state legislature, and practically mandates Democrat vote fraud. Correspondingly, any delusionals who are dreaming about a GOP Senate pickup in WI can wake up now and face reality unless some 1994-ish tidal wave hits in November.
Politically speaking, Michigan is PA's poorer, more liberal Rust Belt little sister. If Trump can't take PA, he surely isn't winning Michigan. Maybe lightning strikes again as it did in 2016 and he takes both. Like Wisconsin, Michigan has also recently taken measures to thwart election integrity.
To summarize: if the Democrat candidate wins both Michigan and Wisconsin -- as is still probable, though we all wish it wasn't -- and all non-swing states go as expected, there is no scenario under which Trump can win without Pennsylvania.
Even with Joe Biden's obvious mental and physical degradation, swing state polls remain exceedingly close although most of them slightly favor Trump as of this time, but within the margin of error. On July 6, Bloomberg released polls for the seven obvious swing states (NC included) and Trump was ahead in five of those, though the pollster cheerily noted that Biden was closing the gap. This is likely to be as close to reality as we have seen so far, with Trump losing Michigan and Wisconsin. They say he remains slightly ahead in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. One day later the Emerson pollsters had Trump sweeping all six of the swingers (NC wasn't polled).
If 2024 somehow mimics 1984 or 1972 then we will see fluke outcomes in states that shouldn't even be on the radar right now (e.g. Virginia). But even with as much disarray as President Alzheimer and his party seem to be in at the moment, expecting anything along the lines of a rout is foolish.
If you're trying to forecast the 2024 outcome, don't forget to factor in the following:
- Biden is looking less and less likely to be the nominee.
- Mitt Romney's inflammatory (yet quite accurate) comment from 2012 is still operative, undoubtedly at an even higher level than his now-outdated 47% figure. In case you've forgotten what that comment was:
"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the [Democrat] no matter what. . . who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."
- The mass invasion of new welfare recipients streaming across the Mexican border -- who are infiltrating numerous states and not merely Texas or other border states. And all they have to do to earn their "paychecks" is vote Democrat.
We're all enjoying the clown show right now, but the liberals have four long months to fully recover from the current predicament -- and they will do so, much sooner than that.
The stakes are too high to simply fold up and wait for some other year, as they did in the days of Walter Mondale, George McGovern and Mike Dukakis. Not this time. Not when the GOP nominee is Donald Trump, a man who deranged leftists believe is "literally Hitler". And not with control of the House and Senate so much up-for-grabs. In 1972, 1984 and 1988 Democrats knew with 100% certainty that they would maintain House control irrespective of the presidential outcome; they also had the Senate in their pockets for two of those three election years.
Memo to GOP cheerleaders: become overconfident at your own idiotic risk.
The last Democrat to win the White House without PA was Harry Truman in 1948. George W. Bush was twice elected president without PA, in 2000 and 2004. Richard Nixon accomplished the same thing in 1968 though he and George Wallace combined for 52.4% of the vote in Pennsylvania.
Bellwether status: only three times since 1948 has PA's voting percentage for the GOP presidential candidate varied by more than about 2% from the national average. Two of those years were 1988 and 1984, when longtime Democrat steel-mill towns in southwestern PA, which had begun dying well before Reagan ever took office, swung hard to the left against Reagan anyway. The Pittsburgh metropolitan area was the only one of any significant size in the entire country where Reagan's percentage of the vote declined from 1980 to 1984.
Bush was able to amass enough electoral votes elsewhere that he did not need the Keystone State in '00 and '04. As it turned out, Trump didn't need it in 2016 either -- but he almost certainly does now.
2000 presidential election results
In 2000, Dubya won several states which are no longer normally winnable for the GOP in a presidential election -- Colorado and Virginia being the biggest of those. In 2000 CO and VA, plus Nevada and New Hampshire, added 29 electoral votes to the GOP total, more than offsetting the absence of PA's 23 EV. Bush of course also won as expected in Arizona and Georgia, which were solid Republican properties at that time but are now rightfully considered swing states. Bush did lose Iowa which is now considered true-blue (proper color usage). Bush won by a total of 5 EV that year, 271 to 266.
2004 presidential election results
In 2004 Bush repeated his victories in VA + CO and picked up Iowa and New Mexico but dropped New Hampshire. The outcome in the electoral college wasn't nearly as close as it had been four years earlier. The final score was: Bush 286, Lurch 251. The major Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin once again were not needed.
In 2024, barring a landslide of wishful thinking, Trump is not likely to win states like Virginia (unless Glenn Youngkin is on the ticket as VP, and maybe not even then) and is highly unlikely to win places such as Colorado or New Mexico. He must hold North Carolina and take a couple of the biggest swing states. Pennsylvania is the top prize among the swingers.
Without neglecting the other tossup states, Trump's campaign would do well to stay laser-focused on PA from now through November -- with hard-hitting advertising, as many rallies as possible and -- most importantly -- doing whatever can be done to ensure election integrity in order to avoid a repeat of the highly questionable 2020 results here.
We have divided the commonwealth of Pennsylvania into seven sectors which are analyzed below, in order of their size and political impact, from smallest to largest.
Photo credit: visiterie.com
Erie sector (Erie County):
At one time the Erie area had just about the highest percentage of unionized workers in the entire U.S., however it was still often politically marginal as those workers did not always vote the way their labor union bosses instructed them to. Even working-class Erie was not particularly enamored with FDR and how he prolonged his Great Depression. In 1936 it gave FDR his lowest percentage (barely 50%) of any sector in PA against Republican joke candidate Alf Landon.
Erie was the only urban sector in Pennsylvania to vote against America's beloved King-for-Life in both 1940 and 1944. The sizable Catholic vote in the area helped Erie give a narrow two-point majority to JFK in 1960. Ever since that time, Erie has voted for Democrats in all but the most GOP-landslide years (1972, 1980 and 1984, but not 1988) and had a lengthy streak of voting against the GOP candidate in every presidential election from 1988 through 2012.
After an aberrant vote for Trump in 2016, Erie narrowly returned to the D column -- maybe (see below) -- by 1% in 2020. Erie casts only about 2% of the state vote, but is included here as a distinct though not terribly significant sector of PA, because it doesn't really fit in anywhere else.
[Erie made the news on Election Day of 2020 when an alleged poll worker there by the name of Sebastian Machado boasted on Twitter that he had personally "thrown out over a hundred ballots for Trump already!" and "Pennsylvania gonna turn blue 2020!!". The liberal media quickly raced to defend the Democrat vote-counters. They contacted a Democrat operative in Erie who conducted no investigation but labeled Machado's tweet a "false claim" (referring of course only to the first part of it). Democrats insisted that Machado was not actually a poll worker at all. Then the media -- which is the final arbiter of things like this, not law enforcement -- declared Machado's claim of shit-canning 100+ Trump ballots to be "debunked". Meaning that the number of trashed Trump ballots in Erie was likely far higher.]
Photo credit: govtech.com
Wilkes-Barre/Scranton sector (Lackawanna and Luzerne counties):
Presidentially, the electoral history of the anthracite coal country of northeastern PA has been quite similar -- albeit with a much smaller number of votes -- to that of the bituminous coal region of southwestern PA. To some extent the demographics of these two areas at opposite ends of Pennsylvania are also quite similar, in that they contain a significant percentage of residents of eastern European/Slavic descent -- blue-collar workers with little or no formal education who toiled in the mines and the mills back when such things were operational. Their pride and their work ethic (traits which are absent in certain other demographic subgroups) caused them to volunteer to endure difficult and dangerous jobs rather than being lazy and living off of welfare.
The demographics of southwest PA and northeast PA may be similar but they are hardly identical. As a fairly major city, Pittsburgh has far more blacks than WB/S; prior to the invasion of Hispanics which has greatly accelerated in the 2000s, northeastern PA was one of the Whitest areas in the entire country.
Northeast PA and southwest PA tended to favor the same party (normally Democrats) in almost every presidential election from 1932 through the 1970s. However the two regions diverged in the 1980s when the Pittsburgh area continued to blame President Reagan for the fact that Democrat Jimmy Carter presided over the near-destruction of the steel industry in the 1970s. WB/S voted for Reagan twice in the '80s while metro Pittsburgh remained ignorantly Democrat.
From 1988 through 2008 the two opposite corners of the state were back in sync, voting Democrat for president every time. By 2012 however, the "bitter clingers" in the smaller towns and cities of western PA had taken offense to Bathhouse Barry Obama's slur and his total destruction of the coal industry, and western PA marched solidly to the right. By 2016, northeast PA and southwest PA were marching together again, this time on the GOP side. Despite a noticeably higher minority percentage, Luzerne County (Wilkes-Barre) is much more Republican than Lackawanna County (Scranton).
In recent elections this sector of Pennsylvania casts approximately double the number of votes as Erie County, which works out to about 4% of the state vote.
Photo credit: visithersheyharrisburg.org
Harrisburg-Lebanon-York sector (Cumberland, Dauphin, Lebanon and York counties):
Harrisburg-Lebanon-York, along with the non-metro sector, has been consistently the most patriotic sector in the state even though the city of Harrisburg began deteriorating in the 1950s and continued doing so at an accelerated pace through the 1970s and beyond. Enough good people eventually fled, that the city began electing Democrat mayors and Democrat-controlled city councils, something which had not happened there since before World War I. The suburbs closest to Harrisburg are now nearly as reprehensible as the city itself, and in terms of registered voters Dauphin County flipped from R to D over 15 years ago. York County is steady, however even fast-growing (by PA standards) Cumberland County is beginning to decline and is now only moderately GOP instead of solid GOP.
Contemporary deterioration notwithstanding, in terms of its presidential preference this sector has been highly Republican from the late FDR years through the present time, though the area is weakening. From 1944-2020 the only time it voted for a Democrat was in the anti-Goldwater landslide of 1964 and even then this area only gave LBJ 55% -- a lower percentage than even the staunchly Republican non-metro sector of PA known generally as "The T".
Comparing 2020 to 2016, the aforementioned deterioration of this sector would appear to be slow-paced. Trump's percentage dropped only from 56.9% to 56.1%, but that is misleading. Even though Trump won PA in 2016 and allegedly lost it in 2020, his percentage actually increased in nearly every sector. Only this one and WB/S gave Trump a lower percentage in 2020 than it had in 2016. However the Democrat percentage increased by greater amounts in all sectors, with the number of those who voted third-party dropping substantially from its 2016 level.
In terms of political influence, Harrisburg-Lebanon-York currently accounts for about 8-9% of the votes in the state, which is about 50% more than Erie and WBS combined.
Photo credit: amishfarmandhouse.com
Reading-Lancaster-Allentown sector (Berks, Carbon, Lancaster, Lehigh and Northampton counties):
Northampton County (Bethlehem, Easton) is a true bellwether for the rest of PA. From 1984-2020 the most it has varied from the statewide GOP presidential percentage is a fraction over 1%. In Berks County (Reading), Republicans began to outnumber Democrats (by a very small amount) as of 2023, and this is the first time that has happened in forever. Across most of PA, the GOP is making inroads against the voter registration advantage which Democrats have enjoyed for decades. For a counterexample however, see below for the description of the Philadelphia sector.
As of early July in 2024, the Republican registration deficit in the state is down to 371,000. It was 915,000 in November of 2016, and 687,000 as of the 2020 general election. It's been half a century or more since Republicans were "only" outnumbered by 371,000 in PA.
Like the Harrisburg sector, the Reading-Lancaster-Allentown amalgamation has voted consistently Republican for president since 1944. The two exceptions were 1964, when everyone voted Democrat, and 2008. The mistake of 2008 was quickly corrected; Lehigh and Northampton counties still voted for Obama in 2012, but Carbon, Berks and Lancaster swung to the right sufficiently to push the whole area back into the blue.
Lehigh County (Allentown) remains a Democrat bastion, with the Rats having a 10% registration advantage. Allentown and the portion of Bethlehem which lies in the county cast nearly 30% of the vote, and the rest of the I-78 corridor (Whitehall, South Whitehall, Upper Macungie, Lower Macungie) is no bargain either. The other four counties which comprise this sector of Pennsylvania lean sufficiently to the right to offset Lehigh, though as noted Northampton is perennially close to the state average which means it is close, period.
Photo credit: wellsboropa.com
Non-metro sector, i.e. "The T":
The counties which run across the northern tier of PA combine with a wide swath of counties in the central part of the state, running all the way to the Maryland border to form a capital letter T. These counties are for the most part rural or small-town oriented. Modestly-sized cities such as Johnstown, Altoona, State College, Williamsport, Pottsville and Chambersburg are typical for this area.
We define the non-metro counties of Pennsylvania as the following: Adams, Bedford, Blair, Cambria, Cameron, Centre, Clarion, Clearfield, Clinton, Columbia, Crawford, Elk, Franklin, Forest, Fulton, Huntingdon, Indiana, Jefferson, Juniata, Lawrence, Lycoming, McKean, Mercer, Mifflin, Monroe, Montour, Northumberland, Perry, Pike, Schuylkill, Snyder, Somerset, Sullivan, Susquehanna, Tioga, Union, Venango, Warren, Wayne, Wyoming. The Census Bureau defines some of these as metropolitan, but for our purposes they are small enough to qualify for this grouping.
Voters in most of patriotic, rural, small-town America naturally tend to be Republicans, and The T of Pennsylvania is no exception. In 2020 the above-listed counties represented 20% of the PA electorate, and voted 67.0% for Donald Trump as compared to only 31.4% for Joe Biden. This, not surprisingly, was by far the best portion of the state for Trump. Since 1932, The T has only voted Democrat for president in the landslide years of 1936 and 1964, and much of the time it has been at or near the top of the state's sectors in GOP percentage.
In this part of the Keystone State, Republican presidential and other statewide candidates are expected to do well and they need to rack up sizable margins in order to win, given the precarious (or worse) situation in the larger metro areas of the state.
In 2016, Trump won PA by approximately 44,000 votes out of 6.16 million. He amassed a margin of 446,000 votes in The T while losing the rest of the state by 402,000. In 2020 Trump won The T by about 493,000 votes -- but lost the remainder of PA by 575,000. This lamentable result was not due to a relative lack of turnout, or lack of support, in The T. Turnout there was up by 13.5% from 2016 to 2020, and only up 12.3% in the other sectors which contain most of the state's urban and suburban territory.
Photo credit: Richard Nowitz / visitpittsburgh.com
Pittsburgh sector (Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland counties):
This sector in the southwestern portion of Pennsylvania casts approximately as many votes as The T does -- about 20% of all votes in the state.
As is well known, the greater Pittsburgh region was heavily-unionized coal and steel country back in the days when Pittsburgh was known as the Smoky City. From the Great Depression up through recent years, southwestern PA was the most radical portion of the state. These counties have always been fairly White as major metropolitan areas go, and the ethnic Catholic Democrats who comprise a major part of the polyglot Pittsburgh area have often been moderate or even conservative on non-economic issues. It's true that they like their FDR-style economic "safety net", but they also treasure their guns and their Bibles and they are not rabid pro-abortionists nor do they appreciate governmental pandering to welfare state racists.
Because of these traits, the White working-class citizens of small-town western PA were slandered as being "bitter clingers" by prospective president Barack Obama while on the campaign trail in 2008. In April of that year, shortly before the Pennsylvania primary (which he lost by almost 10 points), Bonzo showed how out-of-touch he is with the heartland of America. While safely ensconced behind closed doors at an expensive Democrat fundraiser in elite ultra-liberal San Francisco, he had this to say about the good folks some 2,000 miles to the east:
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and... they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Blinded by their ancestral loyalty to the Democrat party, the Bitter Clingers voted for Obama anyway that November. But as in northeastern PA, when Obama's Environmental Protection Agency declared "War on Coal", the blinders were finally removed and many of these voters were through with the Democrat party once and for all. It sure took long enough.
All through the FDR years, the Pittsburgh sector voted more Democrat than any other sector in the state. Even for several decades after FDR finally perished, the voters of southwestern PA remained attached to his Welfare State programs and their descendants. Pittsburgh didn't like Ike in '52 and voted for Egghead Adlai; naturally the heavily-Catholic ethnic voters of the region (like the ones in northeast PA) strongly preferred their co-religionist in 1960.
Pittsburgh was the most anti-Nixon (36.7%) of all PA sectors in 1968 -- and the most pro-George Wallace (10.6%). It was the only Pennsylvania sector to vote against Ronald Reagan in 1980 and as mentioned previously was the only significant metro area in the entire U.S. to move further left during Reagan's 1984 demolition of hapless Fritz Mondale. Speaking of hapless, Mike Dukakis achieved 59% of the Pittsburgh sector's vote in 1988, a far greater percentage than the intrepid Tank Commander received in any other portion of PA.
During the 1990s Pittsburgh was overtaken by the Philadelphia metro area as being the most liberal in the state, but southwestern PA still gave solid -- though decreasing -- margins to Democrats from 1992 through 2008. By the early 2000s the Steel City area was the most marginal in Pennsylvania, with the potential to tilt either way though it still leaned slightly to the left in presidential elections.
By 2012, the effects of Obama's "War on Coal" were evident and the areas of the country which still depended on coal for what little economic vitality they had, finally rebelled at the ballot box. From eastern and southern Ohio, through small-town western Pennsylvania, all of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, long-time reflexive Democrat voters began trending Republican in large numbers.
The media and other Democrats will always use urban ghetto and barrio areas as examples of woeful "poverty" because it suits their racist anti-White agenda -- but if you ever want to see real poverty in America, look to the areas of Appalachia mentioned in the last paragraph. They were poor to begin with and now have been further impoverished by Democrat political policies.
In Appalachia, these indigent victims do not tend to use their EBT cards for crack cocaine, nor are they overstuffed to the point of being morbidly obese; "poverty" is not supposed to weigh 300 pounds and have Type 2 diabetes.
The poor people of Appalachia do not drive their Cadillac Escalades down to the luxury grocery store (parking in a handicapped spot, natch) to get their mac & cheese dinners and then plop down in front of the 75" TV in their rent-free air-conditioned apartments so they can tune into Oprah and be told how downtrodden they are and what a hateful, racist country the U.S. is while they consume their 3,000-calorie meal which was purchased at taxpayer expense.
All of these regions of Appalachia, including southwestern PA, flipped from Democrat to Republican as of 2012. Even many inhabitants whose livelihoods were not tied to coal mining and processing began marching resolutely to the right, and the voter registration patterns and election outcomes prove it.
Being more urban and suburban rather than isolated and rural, much of greater Pittsburgh has little in common with the rest of Appalachia, and the region's grip on Republicanism is tenuous in its infancy. As in the rest of the United States, the more-upscale suburbs (of which Pittsburgh has several) have run screaming to the left since 2016 while the less privileged White working-class precincts in urban and suburban areas have moved to the right. Whether these trends will continue in the post-Trump years, we'll have to wait a while to see. If Biden couldn't win southwestern PA even in 2020, it's not likely that he (or whatever stooge replaces him) will be able to do so in 2024 either.
But that doesn't matter a whole lot as far as Pennsylvania's 19 electoral votes are concerned, because the ace up the Democrats' sleeve is. . .
Photo credit: Thom Carroll / phillyvoice.com
Philadelphia sector (Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties):
Southeastern PA was actually the most Republican region of Pennsylvania heading into FDR's elongated depression; it voted nearly 60% to re-elect Herbert Hoover in 1932, and no other segment of PA was even close to that figure. As recently as 1948 the City of Brotherly Love was still electing GOP mayors, but never again since that time. The city reached its peak population of 2.07 million as of the 1950 census, and the mass exodus to the suburbs then began in earnest. The end of Mayor Frank Rizzo's term in 1979 marked the last time that someone who wasn't an ultra-liberal coddler of criminals occupied that office; Philadelphia started racing downhill without brakes in the 1980s and has continued to do so ever since.
For several decades, the large suburban counties around Philadelphia were able (and willing) to counterbalance the city's effect on presidential elections. Those suburbs also normally sent Republicans to Congress and voted for the GOP in other statewide races, but their preference was for Republican candidates who were well to the left of center.
Metro Philly grudgingly voted twice for Ronald Reagan, with 46.4% in 1980 and a bare majority (50.4%) in 1984. Philadelphia-area voters have not, as a whole, voted Republican for president at any time since then. This has been far and away the most liberal sector of PA since the 1990s.
The mid-1990s, specifically 1994, was very much a watershed date in metro-Philly politics.
As Sir Isaac Newton might have said, for every political action there is an opposite reaction (but not necessarily an equal one).
The trend, at least at the presidential level, began much earlier than 1994. The glorious outcome of the 1994 midterm election which placed the Republicans in control of the House and Senate for the first time in four decades represented the culmination of a long journey away from the Democrat party in parts of the country where such a thing seemed unlikely to ever happen.
The Democrat hold on the "Solid South" helped to keep them in charge of the Senate at all times and was a major factor in the House too, along with customary hyper-partisan Democrat gerrymanders in the most important states like California and Texas. The overconfidence and venality (and criminality) of Democrat politicians finally caused a critical level of voter discontent to be reached in that wonderful year of 1994, and a major congressional coup was the result.
That was the "action", or at least the most visible part of it. The "reaction" was not necessarily just a backlash against GOP control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, although the liberal media wasted no time trying to make that backlash happen. Congress has always been unpopular with the American people; only beginning in 1995 did the media feel the need to constantly remind people exactly which party controlled Congress, so the voters would know which party they were supposed to hate.
Photo credit: AP / Denis Paquin
The real "reaction" was against the fact that the GOP was now being led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich and like-minded conservatives -- and therefore was viewed by the left-wingnuts of BOTH parties as being racists, rednecks, sexists, Bible-thumpers, illiterate trailer-trash, etc. This was no longer the party of moderate milquetoasts like former House Minority Leader Bob Michel. Republicans finally had some power in Washington after four dark decades and -- gasp! -- they might actually try to use that power!
These developments especially did not sit well with the upscale, suburban, country-club elitist wing (the "George Bush wing") of the Republican party, and in few places was the revulsion more obvious than in the suburbs of northeastern cities like Philadelphia. While these areas had been ancestrally Republican, they were never conservative, and now these Republicans were terrified by what they thought "their" party was becoming.
The Philly suburbs had seemingly always been represented by GOP politicians who were self-described "fiscal conservatives" (a true oxymoron, since these so-called conservatives voted for every budget-busting social welfare program that came along). They took great pains to make clear that they were not conservative in any other way. This formula of being on the far left of the GOP on all issues aside from some minor spending bills was sufficient to get elected in moderate-liberal suburbs for many years. It boiled down to "I won't raise your taxes as much as a Democrat would, but otherwise you'll never know from my voting record that I am actually a Republican!"
Democrats occasionally won U.S. House elections in the Philly burbs, but the GOP normally swept those districts every two years or came close to doing so. Naturally there was a clean sweep of the four districts which covered the suburban Philly area in 1994. Things barely held together in 1996 (liberal Republican Jon Fox almost lost the Montgomery County-based 13th district) and began disintegrating in 1998 when Fox did lose to future statewide failure Joe Hoeffel. That district and its successors have never again elected a Republican to Congress.
The old 7th district (mainly Delaware County) fell to the Democrats in the anti-Republican landslide in the "Abramoff scandal" election of 2006. Democrats ran the table in 2008 in their giddiness over the prospect of electing America's first half-black president. The scales tipped back towards equilibrium when buyers' remorse set in and GOP voters kicked numerous liberal Democrats out of the House in 2010; two of those evictions came in the Philly area.
The status quo held until the hyper-partisan Democrat gerrymander which was mandated by the Pennsylvania Democrat Supreme Court became law in 2018 and remains in effect today. Liberal Republican stooge Brian Fitzpatrick has been able to consistently squeak his way to re-election in the marginal Bucks County district, but the remaining districts which ring the city of Philadelphia have been crafted to elect nothing but liberal Democrats -- which they do.
Philadelphia suburbs |
2004 |
John Kerry (D) |
657,795 |
53.3% |
George W. Bush* (R) |
570,671 |
46.2% |
2000 |
Albert Gore, Jr. (D) |
527,812 |
51.2% |
George W. Bush (R) |
473,466 |
45.9% |
1996 |
Bill Clinton (D) |
427,706 |
46.8% |
Robert Dole (R) |
385,603 |
42.2% |
1992 |
Bill Clinton (D) |
405,327 |
39.9% |
George Bush* (R) |
402,877 |
39.7% |
As of the early ("pre-Gingrich") 1990s the country club suburbs were still comfortably Republican in terms of registrations but not always in terms of their presidential voting. In 1992, Bill and Hillary defeated George Bush by the slender margin of 39.9% to 39.7% in the suburban ring around Philly. Aside from the Goldwater year, this was the first time ever for those counties as a whole to vote Democrat for president.
While some deterioration was clearly already taking place as of 1992, the area's leftward lurch gained serious traction after 1994. Dole's losing margin in 1996 was 4.6 points, Dubya was defeated by 5.3% in 2000 and then by 7.1% in 2004.
Things got much worse in 2008, and they haven't improved since that time:
2008: Obama +15.5%
2012: Obama +9.7%
2016: Hillary +13.9%
2020: Biden +18.9%
Philadelphia suburbs |
2020 |
Joe Biden (D) |
913,304 |
58.8% |
Donald Trump* (R) |
620,031 |
39.9% |
2016 |
Hillary Clinton (D) |
742,226 |
54.7% |
Donald Trump (R) |
553,873 |
40.8% |
2012 |
Barack Obama* (D) |
689,980 |
54.2% |
Mitt Romney (R) |
566,653 |
44.5% |
2008 |
Barack Obama (D) |
749,127 |
57.2% |
John McCain (R) |
545,494 |
41.7% |
Remember, all of the above data is for the Philadelphia suburbs only and contains no part of the city.
Voter registrations are, much more often than not, lagging indicators of an area's voting preference; the trend is evident at the ballot box before it shows up in head counts of party membership. That is because voting is an immediate reaction to a political situation, whereas party membership is part of a voter's identity.
Registration statistics in the Philly sector belatedly confirmed the movement which was already being seen in the election data. These liberal Republicans perhaps hoped that the GOP's unpalatable (though mostly infinitesimal) move toward the right would cease, and the party would "come back to them".
Maybe that was why there was no great rush by suburban Philadelphia voters to abandon the GOP and re-register as Democrats immediately after 1994. In 1994 there were about 341,000 more Republicans than Democrats here, and that margin actually increased to nearly 368,000 as of 1996. Even by 2000, as Albert Einstein Gore was winning the Philly suburbs, GOP registrations in Bucks, ChesCo, DelCo and MontCo still outnumbered Democrats by almost 350,000.
Then the mass exodus from the GOP began, with more and more liberal Republicans completing their journey to the Far Left and officially becoming registered Democrats. As of 2004 the Republican advantage had been reduced to 245,000 and just four years later it was down to practically zero. This movement was not solely caused by new Democrats invading the suburbs, fresh from the Philly ghetto and other places. As Democrat registrations blossomed, the GOP head count was dropping precipitously, whether from party switches or because Republican voters were fleeing these suburbs altogether.
By 2009, Democrats had the bigger numbers and the trend is only lately slowing -- but not reversing. In November of 2020, Democrats were +158,000 in voter registrations here; as of July, 2024 the number stands at +163,000.
Registration totals are not just trivial factoids, because these days ballots are the important thing; every registered voter represents a "ballot", whether the voter casts that ballot or not. If he doesn't, the ballot can still be "harvested" after election day by (Democrat) party operatives. And that ballot, even if fraudulently completed, counts every bit as much as legitimate votes do.
If GOP vote-counters in some tiny Podunk Republican county wished to commit fraud, their ability to do so is very limited because that tiny county has so few registered voters, i.e. so few possible BALLOTS. However, when Democrat vote counters in large metropolitan counties choose to commit fraud on behalf of their party, the number of BALLOTS they can harvest -- whether by pretending to contact persons who did not vote, or by simply scanning the same Democrat ballots again and again -- is virtually unlimited by comparison to what a tiny Republican county could do.
Trump lost the Philadelphia suburbs by almost 300,000 votes in 2020; he lost the inner-city of Philadelphia by another 470,000. He is likely to do about the same in those places, if not worse, in 2024. That's a lot of votes -- over three-quarters of a million -- to make up in the rest of this politically marginal state. Polls currently suggest that Trump may be able to pull it off.
But polls aren't ballots.
Photo credit: Charles Fox / Philadelphia Inquirer
Before we close, there is one other factor to consider regarding elections in Pennsylvania:
PA Secretary of the Commonwealth (chief election officer) Al Schmidt is the token appointed RINO in the administration of far-left Governor Joshie Shapiwo. Schmidt, a Philadelphia liberal with significant experience being around Democrat vote fraud, never met a liberal he didn't love or a conservative he didn't despise. Schmidt became a hero to the left after the 2020 election, at which time he "courageously" resisted Donald Trump's efforts to obtain a fair and accurate vote count in Pennsylvania.
Schmidt will do everything in his (considerable) power to thwart Republican gains of any kind in PA in 2024 -- including protecting the White House and Senate from evil GOP challengers, and trying to ensure that the Democrat-gerrymandered congressional delegation doesn't lose any of its vulnerable leftists and does lose its one and only conservative (Scott Perry).
And don't forget the Rats' one-seat margin (102-101) in the Democrat-gerrymandered state House, which must be protected to the fullest extent possible; and the fact that the Republicans are on the verge of losing just barely enough seats (3) in the Democrat-gerrymandered state Senate in November to give liberals 100% control of PA government at every level -- executive, legislative and judicial.
The transfer of power in the state legislature from Republicans to Democrats may not be all that noticeable, what with many GOP legislators in PA basically being Democrats in Republican clothing already.
The voters will have some say in how these elections turn out, but just be aware that anything good which might happen for Republicans in PA this year will happen over Al Schmidt's dead body. (That's just an expression, ha ha.)
Tags:
2024
Pennsylvania
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