Daily Kos Elections is pleased to unveil Pennsylvania for our project to calculate the 2016 presidential results for all 435 congressional districts nationwide. You can find our complete data set here, which we're updating continuously as the precinct-level election returns we need for our calculations become available.
Four years after Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney 52-47 in the Keystone State, Donald Trump unexpectedly beat Hillary Clinton by a tiny 49-48 margin. Trump carried 11 of the commonwealth’s 18 congressional districts, trading two Romney seats for one Obama district. However, the massive swing in Pennsylvania’s 17th congressional district toward Trump more than offset his losses in the suburban Philadelphia 6th and 7th Districts.
We’ll start with a look at the 17th, a Scranton-area seat represented by Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright. Obama won the seat by an easy 55-43 margin, but Trump took it 53-43. We’ve seen similar swings in other seats with large white working-class populations, most notably in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Cartwright defeated a perennial candidate 54-46, but he should expect a much tougher re-election campaign in 2018.
To the south, Clinton narrowly won two suburban Philadelphia seats that Obama narrowly lost. Clinton took the 6th District, which is represented by Republican Rep. Ryan Costello, 48-46, while Obama lost it 51-48. Clinton also won the 7th, represented by GOP Rep. Pat Meehan, 49-47, an improvement on Obama’s 50.4-48.5 loss there four years ago. However, Democrats fielded weak candidates against both Republicans, and each man won with ease. Meehan is flirting with a Senate bid in 2018 and while he could give Democratic Sen. Bob Casey trouble, Team Blue would have a better shot at flipping his seat with him gone.
Both parties spent heavily to try and win the 8th District, a suburban Philadelphia seat being vacated by Republican Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick. But despite the swings in the neighboring 6th and 7th Districts, the 8th barely moved from 2012 to 2018: Trump won 48.2-48.0, a very slight improvement from Romney’s 49.4-49.3. Republican Brian Fitzpatrick, who is the retiring congressman’s brother, decisively held the seat for Team Red 54.5-45.5. This district is close enough that it should be a target in the future, but Team Blue needs to find a way to win over the many voters who back Democrats at the top of the ticket but still supports Republicans like the Fitzpatricks downballot.
The open 16th District, located around Lancaster County, was a long-shot Democratic target late in the cycle. However, Trump’s 51-44 win here was a little better than Romney’s 52-46 victory, and Republican Lloyd Smucker won by a larger 54-43. Republican Rep. Charlie Dent hasn’t been a Democratic target in years, even though his Lehigh Valley 15th District backed Romney just 51-48. But the 15th also drifted toward Trump, supporting him 52-44. The remaining eight GOP-held seats and four Democratic seats remain safe for the party that holds them. While Trump dominated in most of Appalachia, the Pittsburgh-area 14th barely moved from 68-31 Obama to 67-31 Clinton.
We have one small bit of housekeeping we want to address. Daily Kos Elections always relies on official, certified precinct-level election results for our calculations. However, Carbon and Somerset Counties have not made their official results public yet, and it may be some time before we get them. We elected to use the unofficial precinct results for those two rather than hold up the rest of the state. We’ll update our numbers once we have official results: While we doubt there will be anything but very minor changes, we’ll announce them in the digest.