I want to start this by saying this is not meant to accuse anyone of anything. I have a database of Pennsylvania presidential election results by county that goes back to 1976. I just added the 2016 as they currently stand and I noticed some interesting trends. The purpose of this is to point out some of those trends. Anyone reading this can interpret what they mean in any manner they would like.
The database does several things. First it has the raw vote for each candidate for each election since 1976. It then calculates the differential in the percentage for each candidate. As an example, if Gore got 55% of the vote in Lehigh County and Bush got 45%, then the differential would be Democrat +10%. It then also calculates the shift from one election to the next. So if Kerry got 52% of the vote in Lehigh County and Bush got 48%, then the shift would be Democrat -6%. Gore won by 10%. while Kerry only won by 4%. The other set of data on the database is the Democratic results for the 2008 primary. It was where I started the database and I’ve kept it there as an interesting data point.
Pennsylvania has 67 counties. 11 counties supported Clinton, while 56 supported Trump. While that sounds overwhelming for Democrats, it only represents a small change from 2012, when 13 counties supported Obama. The difference is truly in the margin of support in each county. 42 of the counties that supported Trump, supported him with a record percentage of support for a Republican for that county, at least dating back to 1976. Still, that’s astounding, considering the Reagan landslide of 1984 is included in that data. Oddly enough, there were actually 3 counties that had record percentage support for a Democratic candidate. All three were Philadelphia Suburb counties (Montgomery, Chester and Delaware). While that should bode well for a Democratic candidate, the margin of victory for Trump outside of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and the Philly Burbs, ranged from ridiculous to absurd. The most absurd being Luzerne County (Wilkes-Barre/Hazleton) where Trump won by 20% after Obama won the same county twice by margins of 9% and 5%. More on this later.
61 of the 67 counties shifted Republican from the 2012 election, while only 6 shifted Democrat. Of the 6 that shifted Democrat, only 2 had shifts of greater than 3%. The silver lining is that 3 of the 6 that shifted Democrat were Philly suburb counties (Montgomery +7%, Chester +9% and Delaware +1%). Any Democrat running in the future is going to need to maintain the differentials in those counties to have a chance of winning. Of the 61 counties that shifted Republican, a whopping 31 of them shifted Republican by 15% or more. Of the 31 counties that shifted by 15% or more, all of them, all 31, were Clinton counties in the 2008 primary. They were Clinton counties by wide margins. 6 of the 31 counties went for Obama at least once.
Here’s where some interesting discussion and opinion could begin. We have 31 counties that voted for Clinton, overwhelmingly, in the 2008 Democratic primary. Certainly there is a different set of voters in the primary vs. the general, but I find it intriguing that when the Democrats essentially got the candidate they wanted 8 years prior, they took it upon themselves to go vote for her Republican opponent. In a few of those counties Clinton actually ended up with less actual votes, not percentage, actual hard votes, than what she got in the 2008 primaries. I find that especially strange. As an example, in Cambria County, Clinton got over 23,000 votes in the 2008 primary, yet only got 19,000 in the 2016 general.
Back to Luzerne County for a final example. As I stated earlier, this is a county that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 by margins of 9% and 5% respectively. Clinton lost this county in 2016 by 20%. I know we’ve heard about the “rural wave” among other explanations for what happened. Luzerne county certainly has it’s rural areas, but it also has smaller cities like Wilkes-Barre, Hazleton and Pittston. The county has a mixed past in presidential elections, but the biggest margin it had ever given a Republican candidate was 8% back in 1984 during the Reagan landslide. I’ll say it again. Trump just won this county by 20%. Hillary Clinton beat Obama here in the 2008 primary 75% to 25%. So this is not an Obama county that still holds a grudge against Clinton. This goes back to my earlier point. What would be an explanation for a county that voted so overwhelmingly for Clinton in the 2008 primary, finally getting their candidate 8 years later, and then abandoning her and the party in absurdly record numbers? I actually added this county to the database on a precinct by precinct basis for both the 2012 and the 2016 elections in hopes that it would yield some valuable information. I thought I would see the city precincts hold steady or lose a little Democratic support and see a huge shift in the more rural precincts. There was really nothing like that. It was almost a uniform shift from Democrat to Republican in every single precinct by anywhere from 10% to 20%, with many of them in the very high teens. Clinton only got 4,000 more votes here (52,000 vs 48,000) than she got in the 2008 primary. Obama and Clinton got a combined total of 64,000 votes in the 2008 primary. Obama got 72,000 votes in the 2008 general and 64,000 votes in the 2012 general.
That’s all I’ve got for now. I would love to say I have a great explanation for what my fellow Pennsylvanians were thinking, but I can’t. I have no idea what to make of this. Clinton seemed to do what she needed to do. She got her margins out of Pittsburgh and Philly. They were similar to what Obama got. She got her Democratic shift in the Philly Burbs. She did better than Obama there. What went on in the rest of the state is anybody’s guess, but it turned out to be record setting Republican margins for what was believed to be the worst candidate that side has offered up in a very, very long time.
Thursday, Nov 24, 2016 · 2:20:12 PM +00:00
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Spot Cat
Thanks for the Rec list! I wasn’t expecting that when I was keying a bunch of numbers into a spreadsheet. Thanks also to everyone for the discussion. I was hoping that would happen. There are a lot of ideas about what happened. Some legit and some not legit, but either way, I think as a party, we need to understand what happened and turn this trend around.
The state really seems to have been lost in the area north of the Lehigh Valley (Allentown/Bethlehem). There was a massive Republican shift in Carbon, Schuylkill, Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties. There were shifts everywhere, but the shifts in these counties were massive and completely unprecedented. All of them had 20+% Republican shifts from 2012.
I hope in the near future we can figure out what happened. Is it racism? That seems hard to believe since 3 of those 4 counties were Obama counties. It’s the old coal region, so did that play a part? Was it the candidate? Was it just time for some kind of change? I wish I had more answers, but for right now I just have numbers.
I will gladly share all of the data I have if someone wants to send me a message on how to do it. The data is in spreadsheet form that is very easy to navigate.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Friday, Nov 25, 2016 · 12:10:03 AM +00:00
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Spot Cat
I have no idea if this is going to work, but here it goes. The following link is intended to be a link to the spreadsheet that has the PA data by county back to 1976 with all of the margins and trends to the right of 2016. It also has a separate tab for the Luzerne County data by precinct for both 2012 and 2016.
As I stated in a comment, the US congressional district races in Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties had Republican shifts, but they were in the 8 % — 10%, not the 24% range of the presidential shift.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13rciKYDvqkc9H0fIspYexOxOvJ73RtsV6-IKo--LCIg/edit?usp=sharing
If that doesn’t work, please message me and I’ll attempt to fix it.
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