Historical US state could deliver winning candidate
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA—The state that played a pivotal role in the American Revolution and the quest for independence from the British Empire now stands once again at the heart of US history, emerging as the most consequential state in the 2024 presidential election.
After all, whoever wins Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes will most likely win the presidency, said John Kincaid, a political scientist from Lafayette College in Northampton County. It’s the biggest of the seven so-called swing states this election including Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
But even to the end, both Vice President Kamala Harris and former US President Donald Trump remained neck and neck here—and “that is precisely what makes us a swing state,” Kincaid said. “The margin is so narrow, [and] a few thousand voters going one way or another will make a difference in the election.”
It’s why both candidates made sure to have some face time in the state on the final day of the campaign, Kincaid said.
Harris barnstormed across Scranton, Allentown and Pittsburgh, and then ended her campaign in Philadelphia, the same city where the Declaration of Independence that created the United States was signed.
Trump, meanwhile, stopped by Reading where he repeatedly alluded to immigrants as “vicious, savage and bloodthirsty,” and threatened to instate the death penalty for migrants who kill American citizens and police officers.
Blue Wall until Trump
Since 1992, Pennsylvania, the fifth most populous state in the United States, has been part of the so-called “Blue Wall”—or states that traditionally swung Democratic—of northern industrial states until Trump knocked it down in 2016 by a narrow 2-percent victory. President Joseph Biden reclaimed it back in 2022, but only by an even slimmer 0.5-percent victory.
Loss of steel and manufacturing jobs swung the state Red in 2016, Kincaid said. This year, the Democrats—and by extension Harris—are “more vulnerable to this election than 2020 because of inflation … and the economy could make them go back to Trump,” he said.
This makes the stakes even higher for Harris as no Democrat since 1948 has ever become president without carrying Pennsylvania.
Not only does the state itself have a good record of electing the presidential winner—75 percent of the time from 1912 to 2020—but it also has a bellwether county, Northampton, that has elected the presidential winner 89 percent of the time from 1912 to 2020, Kincaid said.
The three exceptions: in the 1968 presidential election, the county voted Democratic but Republican nominee Richard Nixon won, and in 2000 and 2004, the county again voted Democratic, but Republican George W. Bush won.
Higher turnout expected
But there are other problems. At least 12 of Pennsylvania’s 50 counties were placed on watch by a Brookings Governance Study last October amid reports that they may refuse to certify the election results.
Most of these stem from conspiracies of electoral fraud “which are being driven mostly by Republicans and Trump supporters, and they are the ones who are most pushing the idea of not certifying the election.”
But while Kincaid foresees that the process would eventually compel those counties to do their job, “it could delay reporting or else for several weeks. And if that happens in a couple of counties in Pennsylvania, and we have a close election, we may not know who won Pennsylvania for three or four weeks now. And everybody else will be upset.”
While Kincaid refused to speculate on how Pennsylvania could eventually vote, he conceded that Trump, at least, “really mobilizes voters on both sides … People love or hate him. The people who hate him, want to come out and vote, and the people who love Trump want to come out.”
“So I think we’re going to see a higher election turnout than we saw in 2020, and the kind of polarization that our system is experiencing is going to drive that turnout,” he said.
At the same time, things could go well for Harris as well, as the colleges in Lehigh Valley—which is part of Northampton—have a strong “get out the vote” drive. Many of the students—who tend to vote Democratic—currently registered in other states have decided to register here for the 2022 elections as “their vote could make more difference here.”
