Daily Kos Elections' project to calculate the 2016 presidential results for every state legislative seat in the nation arrives in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the 46th state we've released data for. You can find our master list of states here, which we'll be updating as we add new states; you can also find all our data from 2016 and past cycles here.
Pennsylvania surprisingly, and distressingly, gave Donald Trump a 49-48 win over Hillary Clinton last year, a big switch from Barack Obama's 52-47 victory against Mitt Romney. Far less surprisingly, Trump also carried a majority of the Keystone State's 203 state House seats and 50 state Senate districts. Trump took 119 seats in the House and 27 Senate seats. Thanks to GOP gerrymandering, Romney carried 114 House districts and also won 27 Senate seats despite losing the state four years ago, though he and Trump traded quite a few constituencies in each chamber.
Republicans flipped the state House in the 1994 GOP wave, and while Democrats won small majorities in 2006 and 2008, Team Red retook the chamber in 2010. Republicans currently hold a 121-82 majority in the lower chamber, where members serve two-year terms. (Two Democratic-held seats are currently vacant; Daily Kos Elections always assigns vacant seats to the party that last held them.)
The Senate, meanwhile, has been in GOP hands continuously since 1994. Democrats held out hope ahead of the 2014 elections that they could at least force the chamber a tie, which a Democratic lieutenant governor would break in their favor. However, things didn't work out that way at all, and the GOP now holds a huge 34-16 edge, which would allow them to override Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s vetoes if not for their smaller House majority. Senators serve four-year terms: Odd numbered seats are up in presidential years, while the even seats are up in midterm cycles.
Before we dive into the numbers, there’s one big reason for Pennsylvania Democrats to hope that the next decade will treat them far better on the legislative front than the last few have. While state lawmakers draw up Pennsylvania's congressional districts, things work differently when it comes to crafting the legislature's own lines.
An evenly split bipartisan commission handles legislative redistricting, but the state Supreme Court (whose members are elected on a partisan basis) appoints a tiebreaker if needed. The GOP had controlled the high court for ages, and the Republican tiebreaker has voted to adopt Republican-friendly maps in recent decades. However, Democrats now hold a five-to-two majority on the Supreme Court, and since they’re very likely to keep that edge through 2021, we could see some very different boundaries for both the state House and Senate following the next census.
But for now, Democrats have to fight Republicans in the districts the GOP crafted itself. We'll start with a look at the House, and to help follow along, we've created an interactive map color-coded to show which 2016 presidential candidate won each district and which party holds each seat in the legislature. Democrats represent 17 of the 119 seats Trump won, while Republicans hold 19 of 84 Clinton districts. Nine of the 13 seats that swung from Obama to Trump are represented by a Democrat, while the GOP holds seven of the eight Romney/Clinton districts.
As our map shows, all the GOP-held Clinton seats are located in the Philadelphia area, where Republicans still do well down-ballot in what are otherwise Democratic-leaning suburbs. The bluest of the bunch is HD-74, which is located in highly educated Chester County and barely budged, going from 63-36 Obama to 60-36 Clinton. Republican Harry Lewis Jr. won a 2014 open seat 54-46 even as Wolf was carrying the seat 65-35 in the governor's race, and Lewis held on 51-49 in 2016. Clinton won by at least a 10-point margin in another eight GOP-held seats.
By contrast, the Democrats in Trump seats represent far more geographically diverse turf where working-class white voters helped Trump improve significantly over past GOP nominees. A few are clustered around Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, an ancestrally blue area that swung hard to the right in 2016. Several others are located in Western Pennsylvania around Pittsburgh, while the rest are scattered throughout the state. None of these 17 seats are located in the Philadelphia area.
The Democrat in the reddest seat is Frank Burns, who represents a district near Johnstown in rural Western Pennsylvania. Burns' HD-72 went from an already-tough 61-37 Romney to a brutal 70-26 Trump, but Burns won his fifth term 58-42. Trump also took more than 60 percent of the vote in seven other Democratic-held seats, two of which had backed Obama four years before. HD-123, based around Pottsville in rural Eastern Pennsylvania, went from 52-47 Obama all the way to 65-32 Trump, but Democrat Neal Goodman won without any GOP opposition for the third cycle in a row. Over in HD-119 near Wilkes-Barre, Democrat Gerald Mullery won his fourth term 56-44 as his seat swung from 51-47 Obama to 62-35 Trump. The one Democrat in a Romney/Clinton seat is Carolyn Comitta in Chester County's HD-156. Romney carried her seat by an ultra- thin 49.46-49.44 margin, but Clinton won it 54-42 as Comitta unseated a three-term incumbent by 25 votes last year.
To get a sense of how steep a task it would be for Democrats flip the state House under the current lines, we can sort every district in each legislative chamber from Clinton's greatest margin of victory to Trump's biggest edge and take a look at the seat in the very middle, known as the median seat. In the House, this median seat backed Trump 53-43, about 9 points to the right of his statewide win. This means that, even in a very good Democratic year, Pennsylvania's GOP-drawn map provides Republicans with a whole lot of room for error.
That doesn't mean Republicans hold on against any onslaught, though: In 2014, when Wolf unseated unpopular GOP Gov. Tom Corbett 55-45, he carried 112 of 203 seats in the House. Still, the GOP maintained its huge majority that year, benefitting from what was otherwise a bad climate for Democrats nationwide. If Democrats want to recapture the state House, they'll need to win not only voters who backed Trump, but also plenty of the people who supported Wolf and Clinton yet loyally voted Republican down the ballot.
We'll turn next to the state Senate, which may be an even heavier lift. The map actually is quite a bit better for Democrats: The median seat backed Trump 51-46, not nearly as bad as the House. (Because there are an even number of seats, we average the two middle seats' presidential results to come up with the median point in the chamber.) Wolf also won 28 of 50 seats in 2014. Nine Republicans sit in Clinton seats, while only two Democrats are in Trump districts.
If Democrats held all their seats, won all of those Clinton seats, and keep Wolf in the governor's mansion in 2018, they'd go from a 34-16 deficit to a 25-25 tie that would be broken by a Democratic lieutenant governor. (In Pennsylvania, the governor and lieutenant governor are elected together on one ticket.) But there’s a huge problem that we alluded to earlier: Only half the Senate is up every two years. This means that Democrats need pretty much everything possible to go right for not one but two cycles in a row.
And Democrats very much need a lot to go right starting in 2018 because Republicans intentionally drew the Senate map so some of their more vulnerable seats are only elected in midterm years, when lower turnout ordinarily favors the GOP. Seven of those nine Clinton-district Republicans will be up next year, and three of them sit in seats that Clinton carried by less than a 3-point margin.
The tightest result was in SD-44 in the Philadelphia suburbs, which swung from 51-47 Romney to 48.0-47.9 Clinton. Republican John Rafferty, who narrowly lost a bid for attorney general in 2016, won re-election 61-39 in 2014. SD-38 near Pittsburgh is a similar story. This seat went from 53-46 Romney to 48.3-47.9 Clinton, but Republican Randy Vulakovich had no opponent in 2014. Overall, the bluest GOP-held seat is SD-26 in Delaware County, a suburban Philadelphia constituency that is also up next year. This district stayed largely the same, going from 56-43 Obama to a similar 56-41 Clinton, but Republican Thomas McGarrigle won his first term 52-48 in 2014.
Of the two Democratic-held Trump seats, only one is up in 2018. SD-14, located around Wilkes-Barre, swung from 54-45 Obama all the way to 57-40 Trump, though Democrat John Yudichak won re-election in 2014 without opposition. The other is SD-45 near Pittsburgh, which flipped from 53-46 Obama to 49-48 Trump, but where Democrat James Brewster was likewise re-elected without opposition in 2016.
Altogether, Trump traded three Romney seats for three Obama districts in the Senate. The remaining Romney/Clinton seat is SD-10 in suburban Philadelphia's Bucks County, which switched from 50-49 Romney to 50-46 Clinton. Republican Charles McIlhinney, who is up in 2018, won re-election 59-41 in 2014. The final Obama/Trump seat is SD-15 around Harrisburg, which went from an extremely narrow 49.36-49.34 Obama to 50-46 Trump, and where Republican John DiSanto unseated a Democratic incumbent 52-48 in 2016. Somewhat prophetically, this was also the one Senate seat that backed Obama and Corbett.