Swing state guide: Pennsylvania

It all comes down to here

This is the last of my swing state guides. They’re designed to help you better understand the results as they come in tonight. You can also check out the guide to Arizona, guide to North Carolina (free to read), guide to Nebraska’s 2nd district (free to read), guide to Georgia, guide to Michigan, guide to Nevada, and guide to Wisconsin.

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Pennsylvania is known as the Keystone State, and in this election it’s an apt description. The most plausible paths to the White House for both candidates run through it, and the campaigns have devoted more resources to it than any other state. Nate Silver’s model predicts that whichever candidate wins Pennsylvania has a 90% chance of winning the entire election. But you don’t have to take Nate Silver’s word for it - just by playing around with the math and comparing the polls to other states, you can see that it gets really hard to win without Pennsylvania.

It’s also a complicated, confounding state to understand. It has the most Electoral College votes of any swing state, reflecting the fact that it’s the most populous, and it also has some of the most complicated political geography. What makes Pennsylvania a swing state is that it’s basically a microcosm of America. You’ve got big cities, sprawling suburbs, medium-sized cities, and a lot of rural voters. If you stitch together the coalition to win here, you’ve probably won enough elsewhere to be the winner of the whole election. But it’s actually slightly harder for Democrats to win Pennsylvania than it is to win the nation because lesser-educated white voters - the core of the Republican coalition - are disproportionately present here. This, in turn, is the underlying reason for the Republican bias in the Electoral College.

Pennsylvania was a solidly blue state until 2016, when Trump stole it away. Barack Obama won it by over 5% in 2012, only for Trump to eke out a <1% victory in 2016. But the broader political realignment brought about by Trump - something I discussed in the guide to Wisconsin - means that we shouldn’t expect a return to Obama-era margins. Trump has proven uniquely galvanizing to a white, non-college voters in a way that John McCain and Mitt Romney were not. He’s also galvanized an anti-Trump, anti-MAGA coalition, and it’s what allowed Biden to win PA by just over 1% in 2020. The question in 2024 is: whose coalition is going to be bigger this time?