Journey through the ‘swing states’ #6: Pennsylvania, the moderate one that almost always hits the winner
All eyes are on Pennsylvania in the November 5th presidential run. If I may say so, it’s a bit of an exaggerated focus. Now, if Joe Biden won six of the seven decisive states in the last election, Donald Trump must win at least four more to return to the White House. This requires winning in the two states in which the still President surprised in the South (Arizona and Georgia), successfully defending his last victory in North Carolina and winning one of the three swing states from the North. It could be Pennsylvania, but it could also be Wisconsin, where Trump lost by half the margin.
Although I think the idea that Pennsylvania will “decide the election” lacks logic, as it will never do it alone, there is one thing we cannot take away from it. It is the largest of all the swing states. Being the fifth most powerful in the country, it comes right after two giants in relative decline that are overwhelmingly Democratic (California and New York) and two growing giants where Republicans have healthy but not super-safe margins (Texas and Florida).
The thirteen million inhabitants of Pennsylvania have served to fill newspaper pages with undecided voters, due to the unique characteristics of this territory, which we are going to get to know better. To begin with, it is important to say that It was here that the United States of America was founded, with Philadelphia (the largest city in the state) being the stage for the Declaration of Independence and the birthplace of the Constitution. Since then, it has never stopped being at the center of the action.
In 1780, Pennsylvania was the first state to abolish slavery. In 1791, the first to take up arms against federal taxes, in the famous Whiskey Rebellion. Around these parts, the expulsion and extermination of indigenous communities was not so evidentsince the founder of the first British colony in the region (which took the place of Dutch and Swedish colonies), William Penn, was a quaker.
This pacifist religion created a healthier relationship with Native Americans, who always respected the treaties they had negotiated with the colonists and, later, with the state. Nor did the expansion of the timber industry into the gigantic “Penn Forest” (Pennsylvania in Latin) led to relations with the native community becoming more tense, as the state received more migrants seeking economic opportunities and religious tolerance.
Culture, finance and industry
This spirit of openness led Pennsylvania to be, from an early age, a center of culture, one of the first universities in the United States was founded there, by Benjamin Franklineven before independence; of finance, with Philadelphia being the first home of the new federation’s central bank; and industry, with Andrew Carnegie beginning his steel production empire in Pittsburgh and John Rockefeller beginning his dominance in oil production in the western part of the state.
During the Civil War, the state had moments of glory and infamy. James Buchanan, a conservative Democrat who presided over the dissolution of the Union because he was too indecisive on the issue of slavery, was a native of Pennsylvania. In 1856, the first Republican Party convention was held in Philadelphia; In 1863, it was in the center of the state, at Gettysburg, that the Union turned the tide of war and Lincoln gave one of his most famous speeches. General George B. McClellan, a Democrat who advocated the end of the Civil War and concessions to the South, was also from Pennsylvania and was a candidate in 1864 to try (in vain) to stop Lincoln’s re-election.
This is how we see the historic duality in Pennsylvania’s political culture. There has always been a strong conservative movement and a strong progressive tendency, and the numbers on one side and the other have never been very different. Only in the most disastrous moments of one of the two parties did any candidate exceed 55%, with this distinction falling more often on the Republicans, who dominated while being the party that best represented the socially and economically moderate electorate of the industrial North.
Stage of major strikes
Despite being one of the thirteen founding states, it has a success rate (voting for the presidential winner) of 83%, having only voted for the defeated candidate ten times in history. Between the Republican Party’s first election in 1856 and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second (!!) election in 1936, Pennsylvania never voted for a Democrat. Between 1988 and 2016, he never voted for a Republican. Being a state decided by short margins, it has already had very strong sequences from both parties. As in Michigan, the relationship between the two parties and the idea of free trade ended up guiding trends in this hyper-industrialized state.
The scene of some of the biggest strikes in the history of the United States, in the coal and railroad sectors, it dominated national production in areas as diverse as chocolates or sauces, being the home of Hershey and Heinz. This led to Pennsylvania also being pioneer in opening departments dedicated to mediating labor relations and creating a welfare state and even an agency dedicated to highway construction. This territory was the first bridge between the original colonies and the huge western territory.
Mural alluding to the fight for women’s suffrage, on the grounds of a Kamala Harris rally in Pennsylvania
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Philadelphia belonged to the large urbanized area that ran from Washington to Boston, but the center of the state was much closer, culturally and economically, to the rural Appalachian mountain range, which extends to the southern reaches. The west side of Pittsburgh entered the Midwestern frontier spirit. This is one of the few states that clearly belong to two regions, in the east to the East Coast and in the west to the industrial belt today known as the “Rust Belt”.
The country’s economic engine, with gateway to the Atlantic via the Delaware River and the Great Lakes via Erie, Pennsylvania it attracted millions of migrants from impoverished Europe to the South and East, but also thousands of black people fleeing segregation to the South. Its population grew by more than 20% per decade throughout the 19th century and at least 10% per decade until 1930. From then on, and apart from an expansion in Baby Boom of the 50s and 60s, it has had a history of relative stagnation. This migration produced strong communities of Italian-Americans and Americans of German or Irish origin that marked the state’s history.
Number of Electoral College delegates by State
Biden recovered the Democratic Party, will Harris keep it?
The strong Catholic community in Pennsylvania marked the identity of the Democratic Party, which here has a historically more conservative tendency. Former governor Bob Casey, father of the current senator of the same name (who is heading to the polls this year for his fourth election), was one of the Democrats who fought hardest in favor of abortion restrictions, having lost a famous Supreme Court case in 1992. On the other hand, Pennsylvania’s tendency to support state action in the economy led to more moderate Republicans, such as former senator Arlen Specter (who switched to the Democratic Party in 2010, before being defeated that year) or the heir to the Heinz fortune, Senator John Heinz, who tragically died in a plane crash and left a widow Teresa, a Portuguese born in Mozambique who later married John Kerry.
This tradition of moderation came from the genetics of another Catholic Democrat, Joe Biden, born in the industrial city of Scranton, in the northeast of the state. Despite having moved to neighboring Delaware, he never let go of his connection with his homeland, where he always played at home. Known as middle class Joe or union Joe (middle class Joe, or union Joe), the current President was seen as too “down to earth” for a party increasingly linked to urban cultural elitesas his career progressed. Barack Obama chose him to balance the revolutionary nature of his candidacy, with a kind of symbol of the “old” Democratic Party.
House in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden lived as a child
Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
After he got old, it was Biden who had to come and recover this piece of the precious “Blue Wall”. Now, passed the torch to Kamala Harris, who sought to regain Obama’s dynamic with Tim Walz, his vice presidential candidate. We’ll see if it’s enough to stem losses in this state, which is 73% white and where Harris has just 12% African Americans and 8% Latinos to exploit her advantage with minorities.
Trump has been synonymous with Republican losses in Pennsylvania’s moderate and wealthier suburbs, but he has gone after many primary and secondary sector workers to compensate. Used to being broken in half (or in three)Pennsylvania will have to decide whether it will give victory to the first woman at the state level, or whether it will turn to the first Republican it helped elect in 30 years.
