Pennsylvania continues tradition as ‘key state’ in presidential elections

Pennsylvania’s role as a swing state in presidential elections is a modern continuation of a characteristic noted as early as 1802. At a rally celebrating President Thomas Jefferson’s election victory, Pennsylvania was reportedly referred to as “the keystone of the federal union” — a keystone is the center stone in an arch that holds all the other archstones in place.

Since the nation’s earliest days, Pennsylvania has been at the center of the action in many ways. The state hosted the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in the 1770s and was the last state to unanimously approve the Declaration of Independence in July 1776. At the time of independence, Pennsylvania also lay at the geographic center of the 13 original colonies, with six states to the south and six states to the north and east.

The state hasn’t always been a swing state, but it has been central to presidential campaigns—and remains so. Pennsylvania has voters with a wide range of political views, which tends to produce close results in state elections.

Philadelphia voters are almost uniformly liberal on all issues, while most rural Pennsylvania voters tend to be conservative and skeptical of urban politics. The state’s major suburbs, however, are divided, with Philadelphia leaning Democratic and Pittsburgh Republican.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania’s smaller, often overlooked metropolitan areas such as Harrisburg, Allentown-Bethlehem, Erie and Scranton are the swing state’s true swing areas.

Pennsylvania changes from swing state to solid Republican

As the regional political divide between North and South grew in the 19th century, so did Pennsylvania’s pivotal role in presidential elections. Between 1828 and 1880, Pennsylvania was the only state to vote for the winning candidate in every presidential election. Pennsylvania voters vacillated between supporting Democrats and Whigs from the 1830s through the 1850s, then voted for all winning Republican presidential candidates in the 1860s and 1870s.

Pennsylvania was not a swing state for decades after the Civil War. Voters there supported Republican candidates in every presidential election between 1860 and 1932 — including Progressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

Pennsylvania is moving toward Democrats

Throughout the 1940s, Pennsylvania continued to support Republican presidential candidates more than the rest of the country as a whole. But then the state abruptly switched gears and began supporting Democratic presidential candidates by margins larger than the nation’s electorate as a whole for 60 years, from 1952 to 2012.

Part of that is because the Republican political machine in Philadelphia has been disintegrating, with no Republican mayor since 1952.

As the South became Republican in the 1950s and 1960s, and Philadelphia became more Democratic, the state of Pennsylvania also became more Democratic than the country as a whole in presidential elections. Pennsylvania continued to lack swing state status in Electoral College politics, as Democrats won every close presidential election there in 60 years, even as Republicans won nationwide. That included 1968, when Democrat Hubert Humphrey won the state; 2000, when Democrat Al Gore won Pennsylvania but lost a narrow and contested National Electoral College; and 2004, when Democrat John Kerry won the Keystone State.

The years when Pennsylvanians voted for a Republican presidential candidate were only years when the Republican won the country as a whole by particularly large margins: twice for Eisenhower, for Nixon’s re-election, and twice for Reagan.

Pennsylvania Returns to Swing State Status in the 21st Century

Early in the century, however, in a series of close presidential elections, Republicans began to suspect that Pennsylvania might play a role in the calculations of the national Electoral College.

The proliferation of political polls in the states meant that campaigns could determine state-specific voting trends. Most states turned out to reliably vote for one party in every presidential election – leading to the labeling of “blue states” and “red states” that began after the 2000 election. That left only a small number of swing states with close polls that were seen as crucial to victory.

During the 2000 election campaign, the media repeatedly emphasized that Pennsylvania, Florida, and Michigan were the key battleground states, based on polls and their large electoral vote shares. When Gore was announced as the winner of all three states early on election night, everyone assumed that he would therefore become president. Later that night, however, the prediction that Gore had won Florida was retracted, leading to a long legal battle that ended with George W. Bush as president.

Pennsylvania continued to be seen as a potential Republican victory in the next three presidential elections, even though Democrats won each time. The Republican effort was sometimes criticized as futile in the media and among political consultants.

Pennsylvania switches to Trump, then to Biden

But with Trump in 2016, the Republican Party made a breakthrough in Pennsylvania, not only winning its first presidential election since George HW Bush in 1988, but also outperforming the national average.

The deciding factors were Trump’s overwhelming popularity in rural parts of the state and in the Pittsburgh suburbs, and Hillary Clinton’s absence from campaign appearances in many cities outside the state’s two largest metro areas. Trump’s surprising—if very narrow—wins in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that year secured the margin of his Electoral College victory and have led to a national media and political focus on those three key swing states ever since.

Biden, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, won the state back for the Democrats in 2020. But Trump still won a higher percentage of the vote in Pennsylvania than he did nationwide.

In the 2024 rematch of the 2020 election, both campaigns are likely to continue to devote significant time and resources to the Keystone State as one of the top opportunities for an Electoral College majority in November.