How Trump won big in Pennsylvania
From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? Let us know!
The final votes in Philadelphia and other places are continuing to trickle in but Pennsylvania voters have made their message loud and clear: The commonwealth's voters chose Republican Donald Trump to be the 47th president of the United States.
With close to 3.5 million votes already counted for Trump, he now holds the record for Pennsylvania, even beating Joe Biden's record 2020 count. Meanwhile, Harris will exceed Clinton's 2016 performance and may even reach Trump's 2020 level, but it wasn't enough.
The total vote count in Philly showed a turnout too low to effectively serve as a Democratic bulwark against a red wall of rural Republican votes. Vote tallies dropped from 750,000 in 2020 to around 710,000 this year.
Donald Trump won several thousand more votes in Philadelphia Tuesday than he did in 2020, totaling more than 141,000 votes, about 20% of the city's overall vote.
As for the state as a whole, Trump boosted his numbers across the vast majority of counties, most significantly in Democratic strongholds.
"The big story nationally and particularly within Pennsylvania, is that nearly every part of this country shifted at least a couple points in Trump's favor," said Dr. Stephen Pettigrew, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies. "Philly in particular, it seems like turnout wasn't at the benchmark that I'm sure the Harris campaign was hoping that it would be."
As a result, Harris fell short and ended with nearly a 2% gap between her and Trump in Pennsylvania .
Trump performed better in Pennsylvania this election than in 2020 among younger voters, white men, Black men and Latin Americans. Black women voted a few points higher for Harris and, interestingly enough, a larger share of older voters also voted for Harris than in 2020.
Results from individual voting precincts help to map some of this out. For example, Harris received fewer votes in many precincts in neighborhoods like Kingessing and North Philly while Trump won more. That's also the case in Berks County, which has a large Puerto Rican population, particularly in Hispanic-majority Reading.
The blame and infighting has already begun among Democrats but the reality is that there weren't enough additional doors to knock in Philly to cover Harris' deficit. The Harris campaign regularly touted their state campaign structure and ground game, regularly boasting about their 50 satellite offices . The campaign hired hundreds of staffers and recruited thousands of local volunteers. For months, they held daily events — often several in the same day — with prominent surrogates, including Republicans for Harris , and were in regular contact with local reporters to spread their message.
Harris herself appeared in Philadelphia some 15 times to motivate her base and made several visits to other parts of the state.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign's apparatus was much slower to launch and appeared to lack a consistent ground game. Part of that was likely a simple lack of resources. The Harris campaign was flush with cash, having inherited the Biden campaign's account and managed to raise more than $200 million after she was elevated to the top of the ticket.
In the end, Harris raised and spent more $1 billion, 2.5 times that of the Trump campaign. Outside PAC spending helped reduce that gap but, ultimately, that imbalance meant few staff on the ground.
"They just didn't have the resources," Dr. Tim Blessing, a professor at Alvernia University in Reading, said of the Trump campaign. "And frankly — and I'm trying to be tactful about this — I don't know that the Trump campaign was overly gifted with skilled volunteers."
Pettigrew says that there is evidence that the Harris campaign's efforts did make an impact. The shift toward Trump was much higher in non-swing states — even as high as 6% in deep blue California — than in swing states where they spent all their resources.
"That is suggestive that the ground game was kind of effective and that had it not been as effective then we may have seen an even more pronounced shift in the favor of Trump," he said. "So maybe they did all that they possibly could, and they just were fighting such an uphill battle."
Ultimately, it just may have been the economy. Voters of all ages and ethnic backgrounds pointed to the economy — or, at least, a high cost of living — particularly among disaffected voters of color who spoke to WHYY.
"I'm not impressed with these last four years with the Democrats," said Cliff Copper, of North Philly. " Inflation affected everybody. Milk is $6. I'm affected financially."
Misael Nieves, a Puerto Rican voter , also cited the economy, particularly the national debt, as the most important factor in his vote for Trump, saying he was worried about the next generation.
"I think we need someone in the White House that knows how to manage money and who has a track record of finance that can prove that," he said.
Blessing argued that Harris inherited a bad situation.
"The reality is that if you look at the polls on the administration which showed 60 or 70% of people saying we were going in the wrong direction, that administration is in trouble," he said. "The issues which Trump touched on — the immigration, the economy — got them voting the way they did."
Many voters I talked to over the course of these months said they saw a stronger leader in Donald Trump, and polling over the last few months has supported that. Younger voters, such as the college students that stood in long lines for hours near area universities, may have been drawn to a bold leader who called on his supporters to "fight" immediately after facing down a bullet.
