Demographics Turned Pennsylvania Blue, and Democrats Keep Gaining

AUG 1, 2016 10:56 AM EDT
By Conor Sen

Pennsylvania matters. The Trump and Clinton campaigns will spend millions in this state to nudge the needle a few percentage points one way or the other. But whatever they do, geography and demographics are pushing hard toward the left.

No Republican presidential candidate has carried the state since 1988, but there are three ways Donald Trump could hope to turn Pennsylvania red this year. He could make inroads in the core counties of metro Philadelphia and well-educated Allegheny County. He could make gains with a group other than working-class white men. Or he could elicit a historic surge in turnout for working-class whites.

He’ll certainly try. Without Pennsylvania, an emerging consensus says, Trump has no realistic path to the White House.

In 2012, a late surge in some polls for Mitt Romney gave hope to Republicans that they could win the state. Those votes failed to materialize in that election, and are unlikely to in 2016.

As in most other states, there's a large partisan difference between Pennsylvania’s major metropolitan area, Philadelphia, and the rest of the state. As urban areas have leaned more Democratic and rural areas have become more Republican, metro Philadelphia has become the Democrats' firewall in the state. The Democratic margin of victory in Philadelphia's five core counties -- Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia -- has expanded since 1992. That year, Democrats carried the five counties by 304,000 votes. So far, the Democratic high-water mark for the metro area was in 2008, when Barack Obama carried it by 682,000 votes. That margin fell a bit in 2012, when he carried it by 615,000 votes.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-01/demographics-turned-pennsylvania-blue-and-democrats-keep-gaining