Pennsylvania was the state that decided 2024. Of the seven battlegrounds, it carried the most electoral votes, nineteen, and it landed nearest the national result — Donald Trump by 1.7 points, on more than seven million ballots. Four years earlier Joe Biden had carried it by 1.2; the margin moved 2.9 points in a single cycle, enough to put it back in the Republican column for the first time since 2016. The Democratic vote is concentrated and the Republican vote is spread. Philadelphia and four suburban counties ringing it, Pittsburgh’s Allegheny, and the capital and college seats of Dauphin and Centre hold most of the party’s margin against everything between.
Philadelphia was the bluest county in the state at 58.8 points Democratic, on more than 720,000 votes. The four collar counties around it split: Delaware ran 23.7 points Democratic and Montgomery 22.8, Chester 14.5, while Bucks went Republican by 291 votes out of 401,000 cast. Allegheny County, holding Pittsburgh, gave the Democrats 20.3 points. Against that sits the rural “T” that runs up the center and across the northern tier: Fulton County, the reddest in the state, voted Republican by 72.6 points, and a long row of small counties — Bedford, Potter, Juniata — ran sixty points or more the same way. The map is two Pennsylvanias.
Between them lie the old industrial and Appalachian counties, and over a decade they have moved hard toward the Republicans. Luzerne County, around Wilkes-Barre, voted Democratic by 4.8 points in 2012 and Republican by 19.2 in 2024 — a 24-point shift, and 27.6 from the 8.4 points it gave Barack Obama in 2008. Erie County ran 16.0 points Democratic in 2012 and a single point Republican in 2024, flipping from Obama to Trump to Biden and back. Underneath is a state of 13 million, German and Irish in ancestry and 21.9 percent Catholic, eleventh of fifty. In 2026 Gov. Josh Shapiro seeks a second term against State Treasurer Stacy Garrity.