NBC’s Steve Kornacki Outlines How Trump Flipped Swing States
NBC data reporter Steve Kornacki said Wednesday former President Donald Trump flipped swing states that went for President Joe Biden in 2020 by lowering the margins by which Vice President Kamala Harris won key voting groups and counties.
Trump gained support among both black and Hispanic voters in pre-election polling, largely due to the economy and immigration, securing the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the presidency early Wednesday morning. Kornacki said that Trump assembled a "diverse blue-collar coalition" to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris, using Pennsylvania as an example.
"First of all, you talk about the suburbs, we've spent so much time talking about the suburbs in the Trump era, how they've become more Democratic, especially suburbs with high concentrations of college degrees, with higher incomes, the collar counties around Philadelphia," Kornacki said. "Actually, I want to show you Montgomery County... this is the biggest of the Philadelphia collar counties, it fits the demographic description I was just giving you. This is a place where Democrats have been driving up bigger and bigger margins and they came into tonight thinking and banking that that would continue."
"Biden won Montgomery by 26 points. Harris wins it tonight, the margin comes down by four points," Kornacki continued. "Again, Democrats were looking at this saying it's going to go north, maybe it'll get close to 30%, something like that. We saw this in Montgomery, we saw this in Chester, we saw this in Delaware County, other collar counties. We saw this in other states. These big suburban areas, that got bluer and bluer, generally stayed blue. They didn't get bluer this time around. Trump stopped the slide in places like that."
While Vice President Kamala Harris regained some support from Hispanic voters in pre-election polling since replacing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, she still lagged behind Biden's numbers in the 2020 election. In Texas, Trump won a county that was 97% Hispanic that voted for Democrats for over 120 years with 57% of the vote, according to the New York Post.
"Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, something else, too, I've been saying, I think the coalition Trump assembled here, the winning coalition, it's a blue-collar coalition, we talk about that, we've been talking about that ... last night, it became a much more diverse blue-collar coalition," Kornacki said. "So, what am I talking about there? We're talking about a place like Luzerne County, this is where Wilkes-Barre is, this is where Hazelton, Pennsylvania is, Hazelton has one of the fastest growing Hispanic populations in the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. At the turn of the century Hazelton was 5% Hispanic, now it's 70% Hispanic, largely Dominican-American, Trump carried the city of Hazelton."
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