The States That Flipped From Trump in 2020 — And How They Could Shape Up in 2024 #4: Pennsylvania
Follow me on Facebook and LinkedIn!
Check out my website!
Want me as a podcast guest? Contact me on my Matchmaker FM profile!
Check out my book!
Part 6: Finale
Six states that Donald Trump won the electoral votes for in the 2016 presidential election flipped (or in the case of Nebraska, partially shifted) to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. One of Nebraska’s five Electoral College votes went to Biden. The five states that went from red to blue for president are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In this series of posts, I will look at recent political history of these states and current partisan trends. With a rematch between Biden and Trump in 2024 looking increasingly likely, this series of posts will largely assume that that will be the case and make some sense of whether these states will stick with Biden or flip back to Trump. (Now that Nikki Haley is out of the race, a rematch between Biden and Trump in 2024 is all but assured pending lawsuits over Trump’s candidacy.)
Today’s post is the fourth post of the series and focuses on Pennsylvania, The Keystone State.
Pennsylvania and Recent Presidential Elections
Arizona and Georgia, when they flipped away from Trump in 2020, broke from their longstanding streak of voting for Republican candidates for president. Michigan’s flipping, meanwhile, was a return to its usual pattern of voting for Democrats.
Pennsylvania falls into Michigan’s camp. In six straight elections (1992 to 2012), the state went blue for president. The 1988 election of George H.W. Bush was the last time a Republican presidential candidate won the state prior to Trump winning it in 2016.
And for the most part in these past nine elections, the state has been at least somewhat competitive, as seen in the table below. Red and negative vote margins mean a Republican candidate won the state; blue and positive vote margins mean a Democrat won the state. (As before, positive and negative percentages are not value judgments on the candidates. They are just to demonstrate the direction that an election went.)
Pennsylvania was one of the seven states that lost a congressional seat following the 2020 census, and thus one of its Electoral College (EC) votes. But The Keystone State is still just as critical as ever with its 19 EC votes, tied for 5th-most with Illinois. It was a bellwether for the last four elections (i.e., the candidate the state chose for president from 2008 to 2020 won the overall election). That could very well happen again.
But if Pennsylvania does once again predict the eventual winner in the November general election, election handicappers and political observers in general have very little certainty of who that is going to be. Inside Elections and The Cook Political Report both see the race as a toss-up as of March 19, 2024. Sabato’s Crystal Ball is a little more confident in predicting the race as “Leans D,” one tier away from being a toss-up on his scale.
To see where Joe Biden in 2020 made up ground from Hillary Clinton’s performance in 2016 in Pennsylvania, we once again turn to the county level. There are 67 counties, too many to include in this post, but you can view the full table of my data here.
To compile the data, I used Dave Leip’s Election Atlas to see the percentage of participating voters in each county that picked between Clinton/Trump in 2016 and Biden/Trump in 2020.¹ Fortunately, the number of voters by party for each county at the time of the 2020 election was easy to find, and those are listed for the 2nd, 4th, and 6th columns from the left. (The percentage of Democrats/Republicans by county was a simple calculation from there.) The Voter Pop. Rank (7th column from the left) is simply a ranking of counties by total voter population from highest to lowest (“1” being highest).
Blue and positive margins of victory indicate the Democratic candidate won the county in that election year. Red and negative margins of victory indicate that Trump won that county. Finally, the rightmost column indicates how much the margin of victory changed from 2016 to 2020. If it’s blue and positive, it indicates how much Joe Biden in 2020 outperformed Clinton’s margin in 2016. If it’s red and negative, it means Donald Trump in 2020 outperformed his margin from 2016. (Improved performance, however, does not mean that candidate won the county in 2020.)
Below are five snapshots of the top 10 counties by various measurements:
- Most registered voters in 2020
- Most improved performance from Biden in 2020
- Most improved performance from Trump in 2020
- Highest percentage of Democrats in 2020
- Highest percentage of Republicans in 2020
Here are the most important top-level data points from the full table.
- Trump won 54 of the 67 counties in Pennsylvania in 2020. However, he lost Erie (14th-highest number of voters in 2020) and Northampton Counties (12th-highest) after winning them in 2016.
- Biden outperformed Clinton in 44 counties, ranging from 0.2 percentage points in Forest County (66th-highest voter population in 2020) to 7.7 points in Chester County (6th-highest voter population).
- Trump outperformed his 2016 showing in 20 counties, ranging from 0.1 percentage points in Warren County (47th-highest voter population in 2020) to 3.7 points in Clarion County (55th-highest voter population) and Philadelphia County (highest voter population).
- Biden improved upon Clinton’s performance in 24 of the top 25 counties by 2020 voter population.
It’s interesting that Trump outperformed his 2016 showing in Philadelphia County, the government of which is consolidated with its eponymous city. Granted, he came nowhere remotely close to winning it, as Philadelphia is one of the most Democratic areas in the country. But with a 3.7 percentage point improvement in the county, one might think that that would lead to another victory in the state for Trump. Yet he performed much worse in 2020 in the other populous counties of Pennsylvania such as Allegheny (home to the yinzers of Pittsburgh) and Lehigh (home to Allentown).
If you’ve read the previous entries of this series of posts, you might be sick of hearing me say this next part, but it bears noting: As is typical in the country, the less-populated and/or more rural counties tend to lean to the Republican Party while more-populated and/or more urban counties tend lean to the Democratic Party. Those less-populated counties tend to be more numerous, so a map showing which candidate won which counties might make it look the Republican candidate won in a rout.
If Trump can keep up the same performance in Philadelphia County, he can potentially take the state back in 2024. But if he doesn’t close the gap in those other major counties, he’ll see the same result that he had in 2020. Trump lost Pennsylvania by only 1.16 percentage points in 2020 (less than 81,000 votes), so closing the gap against Biden in even a handful or so of those counties can make the difference between winning and losing the state — and perhaps the entire election.
Could Other Elections in Pennsylvania Suggest How 2024 Will Pan Out?
As stated in previous installments of the series, other elections that have happened in Pennsylvania can provide some insight into what might happen in 2024, but such data must be taken with a grain of salt. Here is a summary of the main reasons for tempering predictions for president based on other races in the state.
- Every race has different underlying factors (e.g., the candidates themselves, strategies, spending, the issues) influencing how they play out.
- Elections from different kinds of election years have different levels of voter turnout (e.g., midterms have lower rates of voter turnout than presidential elections), meaning different sets of voters are influencing the results in different years. Many presidential election voters did not participate in the midterms.
- Elections might not cover the same geographical areas (e.g., governor’s elections are statewide, but state house seats are divided into districts).
Governor
Pennsylvania’s governor’s race is, like for 35 other states, held in midterm election years. When observing the gubernatorial contest in Pennsylvania, don’t expect a close election. Since 1994, the closest governor’s race was in 2010, when Republican Tom Corbett defeated Democrat Dan Onorato by 8.98 points.
Even though Republicans have won the office of the state’s chief executive by a wide margin before, Democrats have been much more successful as of late, winning five of the last six contests. The closest of these was a 9.04 point margin of victory in 2002 by Ed Rendell over Mike Fisher and the largest landslide was 20.73 points in 2006 when Rendell won reelection over Lynn Swann. (Yes, that Lynn Swann.) A Republican hasn’t won two elections for governor in a row since Thomas Ridge in 1994 and 1998.
Now, let’s compare the gubernatorial elections results to the subsequent presidential election results to see how predictive they may be of who becomes president two years afterward.
A quick glance at the chart shows that the governor’s race in the midterm isn’t really predictive of what happens in the following presidential contest, at least in terms of margins of victory. The closest races from 1994 onward came in the 2010 midterm/2012 presidential (4.48 point difference) and in the 1998 midterm/2000 presidential (4.87 point difference), and in both cases Democrats won both offices. Apart from those, the difference in margins of victory were between 13.61 points and 35.59 points. (The 35.59 point difference accounts for the fact that a Republican won one race and a Democrat won the other, making the difference in margins of victory wider.)
If we’re simply looking at which party wins these elections regardless of margin of victory, the governor’s race becomes more of a portent. Four out of the last five times a Democrat won the governor’s race, a Democrat also won the state for president (the exception being Democrat Tom Wolf for governor in 2014 and Republican Donald Trump in 2016). But even then, the same party won both offices (if we count midterm then presidential afterward) only four out of the last seven times.
In short, if we want to use the gubernatorial election as a gauge of the following presidential election, it might not tell us a whole lot. Use it with caution, if at all.
U.S. Senate
Looking at the same time frame as we did for governor’s races, Republicans have been somewhat more successful in U.S. Senate contests.
The GOP has won six of the last 10 times, but lately it’s been more in favor of Democrats. And apart from 1994 (2.48 point margin of victory), 2010 (2.02 points), and 2016 (1.43 points), the contests have been only sort of close or blowouts.
This year, a U.S. Senate election coincides with the presidential election again. Here’s a comparison of the last four years that this happened:
From 2004 onward, the gap between the margins of victory for the U.S. Senate winner in a midterm and the presidential candidate who won the state’s Electoral College votes has been closing. That indicates that ticket-splitting, at least for these two offices, has been decreasing in frequency. Assuming this trend holds in 2024, the margins of victory for these offices in Pennsylvania will closely reflect one another. (Ticket-splitting refers to when a voter picks a candidate from one party for one office and then a candidate from a different party for another office, such as Democrat for U.S. Senate and Republican for president.)
We can examine this in another way: Since Pennsylvania had a U.S. Senate election in 2022 as well, how closely do presidential elections reflect U.S. Senate races from the previous midterm? Here are the last five times that happened.
The midterm election for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania is a lot less predictive than when the race coincides with the presidential election. That’s not surprising: Midterm elections have a different overall set of voters turning out than in presidential years. Also, in the time frame we are looking at, a Democratic presidential candidate won the state regardless of which party won the U.S. Senate seat from the previous midterm. In 2022, a Democrat won it as well.
State Legislature
Recent state legislative history suggests that Republicans’ greatest success in campaigns comes from state legislative candidacies. From 2010 up to the 2022 election, the GOP held the majority in both legislative chambers, especially in 2016 when Trump won the state on his way to the presidency.
But the gap in the state house closed in 2022, as an equal number from both major parties won seats (the “other” seat was a vacancy). Now, Democrats actually have a 102–100 advantage as of March 30, 2024, due to state legislative special elections in 2023. CNalysis, an elections forecasting and analysis website, predicts that the chamber will retain its Democratic majority.
State senators in Pennsylvania have four-year terms, staggered so that half of the 50 seats are up every two years. In 2024, 13 incumbent Republicans, nine incumbent Democrats, and three open seats are up for election. Two of those open seats are currently held by Republicans and one is held by a Democrat. They aren’t all necessarily competitive seats, and flipping six out of 25 seats with that many incumbents running, even when most of them are Republican seats, is a tall order. Therefore, Republicans may still hold onto their majority in the upper chamber, but the gap between them and Democrats could very well close further.
(Incumbents generally have an advantage, as seen in their high reelection rates, simply by already being in office. This is due to factors such as the connections from being in office already, name recognition, a usually more robust fundraising apparatus, and a general unwillingness by voters to choose someone different unless they feel strongly enough.)
The trend of Democratic gains in the state legislature does not bode well for Republicans, obviously. But whether that was the case or not, you must be particularly careful with comparing presidential and state legislative elections.
- Presidential elections are statewide. State legislative elections are split into specific geographical areas, and voters are not split evenly across the districts. The percentage of Democratic/Republican state legislators may not reflect the percentage of Democratic/Republican voters.
- State legislative elections can happen in both presidential and midterm elections, which see two different sets of voters. Midterm voters almost always vote in presidential elections, but a lot of presidential voters do not participate in midterms.
- Pennsylvania’s State Senate is one where only half the chamber is up for regular elections every two years, so that chamber’s results specifically can’t be reflective of the state’s presidential vote anyway.
The Partisan Affiliations of Pennsylvania Voters
Like Arizona, but unlike Georgia and Michigan, Pennsylvania does track its voters by party affiliation. That makes this part a bit easier to analyze.
Pennsylvania has a noticeable Democratic advantage over Republicans in the number of registered voters. However, since Trump took the state in 2016, the gap between the two party’s registrants has been diminishing, even though Trump lost the state in 2020. But that trend is partly thanks to an increase in the number of voters that identify with a third party or no party at all, and there are both fewer Democrats and Republicans since the 2020 election. As of March 18, 2024, Democrats had about a 404,000 voter advantage over the GOP.²
Even if Trump does lose the state again in 2024, it looks like future Republican presidential candidates — and other statewide candidates — might have an easier road to winning if this voter registration trend continues. Of course, that depends on other factors like how well the two parties’ campaigning professionals can turn out their bases and how third-party and non-party voters behave. But at the very least, decreasing the partisan gap in voter registration is good news for Republicans.
2024 in Pennsylvania: Who has the Advantage?
Early in this post, it was noted that the three major election handicappers have little if any certainty which way Pennsylvania will go for president. Besides the fact that these are highly reputable analysts — and that we are still far away from the general election in November — those ratings make sense. Recent statewide elections have been mostly on Democrats’ side, save for exceptions like Trump’s win of the state in 2016. On the other hand, Republicans have been gaining ground on the number of registered voters against Democrats. It’s still too early to look at other factors like polls (if there are any specifically for Pennsylvania yet) and campaign fundraising.
At this moment, I’d give the advantage — slight as it may be — to Biden and the Democratic Party. But that hardly means anything when we have over seven months left until the election. There is plenty of time for things to change.
- Note that Dave Leip’s Election Atlas has Republican as blue and Democrats as red, instead of the usual conception of Republicans as red and Democrats as blue. The reasons for this are described here.
- When accessing the URL I linked, I chose the first option under “Current Registration Statistics” — labeled “Voter registration statistics by county” — on March 18, 2024. It’s a regularly-updated spreadsheet, so if you look at the link yourself, the data will probably be updated from when I viewed it.
