The culture of Pennsylvania's swing counties

Bucks, Chester, Montgomery and Delaware, the four counties around Philadelphia, cast 23.0 percent of Pennsylvania’s vote for governor in 2022 and 33.5 percent of the movement between the 2018 and 2022 races. The nine industrial valley counties, among them Lehigh, Berks and Luzerne, cast 18.8 percent of the vote and 8.8 percent of the movement.

Levittown, Bucks County

In 1951 Levitt and Sons bought 5,750 contiguous acres of Bucks County farmland near U.S. Steel’s Fairless Works. Between 1952 and 1958 the company put slightly more than 17,300 houses on the land in six models, across four municipalities and three school districts. The first family moved in on June 23, 1952.

The 2010 census counted the community about 90 percent white. William Levitt said that “we can solve the housing problem or we can solve the racial problem, but we cannot combine the two.” Daisy and William Myers moved into one of the houses in August 1957 and faced a year of racist harassment.

Bucks is the closest of the four collar counties in presidential years, at 0.8 points Democratic in 2016 and 4.4 in 2020. Its three neighbors shifted further than Bucks toward the Democrat, relative to the statewide change, between the two governor’s races.

Sources: American Communities Project; 2019-2023 American Community Survey; Hesitation Media analysis of county returns for the 2018 and 2022 governor races.

Maximilian Frank found that anti-Trump grassroots groups, many led by women, revived local Democratic organizations in six swing counties near Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley and helped Democrats there in 2018.

Together the four counties gave the Democrat a net 388,273 votes in 2022, up from 334,410 in 2018.

Pittsburgh and the mill counties

Allegheny County cast 10.7 percent of the 2022 vote and accounted for 15.8 percent of the movement. The counties around it moved in both directions.

Sources: American Communities Project; Hesitation Media analysis of county returns for the 2018 and 2022 governor races.

Pittsburgh, struggling by the 1970s and 1980s, developed health care as another major industry, Michael Camp writes in a 2024 review of Gabriel Winant’s “The Next Shift.” In the 2019-2023 survey, 28.3 percent of Allegheny County’s employed residents worked in education, health care and social assistance, and 7.6 percent in manufacturing.

Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol counted at least 37 United Steelworkers halls in western Pennsylvania in the 1960s and eight still operating as halls in 2022, the Harvard Gazette reported. The halls had hosted scout meetings, alcohol support groups, weddings and sports leagues. The authors found that workers turned to other, often more conservative groups, among them gun clubs.

Of the bumper stickers Newman recorded in union parking lots, 12 percent carried union messaging and 1 percent supported Democratic candidates. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 620,000 union members in Pennsylvania in 2025, 10.9 percent of wage and salary workers, down from 11.7 percent the year before.

The Diocese of Pittsburgh announced in April 2018 that it would group its 188 parishes into 57, after a 1990s consolidation that cut the count from 323 to about 225. The Very Rev. Samuel Esposito, the diocese’s episcopal vicar, told PublicSource that “the church is not a museum,” summarizing a refrain of Pope Francis.

Block Communications said on Jan. 7, 2026, that the Post-Gazette would print its final edition May 3, after company losses of more than $350 million over 20 years and a strike of more than 1,000 days. In April the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism agreed to buy the paper, CNN reported, with plans to print Thursdays and Sundays.

Hazleton and the valley cities

Fulfillment centers moved into northeastern Pennsylvania after late-1990s state tax breaks, and Latinos, mostly of Dominican descent, migrated to fill the jobs, according to Paul Shackel. Hazleton counted 1,132 Latino residents in 2000, 4.8 percent of the city, and 9,454 in 2010.

The Census Bureau’s 2019-2023 American Community Survey puts the Latino share at 63.1 percent.

Lou Barletta, once Hazleton’s mayor, told Fox Business in 2018 that “the city that I was mayor of was 50 percent Latino, and I won with 90 percent of the vote.” PolitiFact, checking that claim, put the Latino share at 37.31 percent in 2010.

Source: 2019-2023 American Community Survey five-year data profiles. Allentown was 12 percent Latino in 1990, NPR reported.

Justin Steil and Jennifer Ridgley write that Hazleton’s Illegal Immigration Relief Act, the first such local law in the country, divided native-born white residents from recent Latino arrivals in a city whose residents felt a sense of “class downgrading” after the economy restructured.

Jennifer Silva interviewed young working-class residents of a declining coal town in northeastern Pennsylvania. Silva found that they form political identities once steady jobs, unions, the nuclear family and religion have receded, and that coping with hardship becomes a reason to withdraw from conventional politics toward self-help and conspiracy theories.

Bethlehem Steel’s 1,800-acre plant employed more than 30,000 people by the late 1930s and closed in 1998. Lehigh County’s population grew 7.2 percent from 2010 to 2020, faster than any collar county’s. Amazon had more than 3,000 Lehigh Valley workers in 2024, NPR reported.

John Kennedy, a political scientist at West Chester University, told Fox 29 on Oct. 1 that “no county in the state mirrors the overall state performance as Northampton County.” Relative to the statewide change, Lackawanna shifted 3.8 points toward the Republican, and Lehigh and Northampton 0.2 points each in the same direction.

The 2020 Religion Census counts 96,397 Catholic adherents in Lackawanna County, 446.5 per 1,000 residents. The Diocese of Scranton closed Our Lady of Grace Church in Hazleton on June 13, 2026, and its decree page also lists Saint Michael Church in Scranton, closed Sept. 20, 2025, and Saint Adalbert in Glen Lyon, Dec. 6, 2025.

The Inquirer reported in May 2021 that Alden Global Capital had bought the Reading Eagle out of bankruptcy two years earlier for $5 million, and that the paper emerged with 111 jobs, half the number it had entering bankruptcy. The Morning Call’s newsroom numbered about 45 that month, when Alden’s purchase of its owner, Tribune Publishing, closed.

Lancaster County and the south-central corridor

The Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College counted 257 church districts and an estimated 43,640 people in the Lancaster County area settlement in 2024, first on its list of the 12 largest. PolitiFact reported in October 2024, citing the center, that Pennsylvania held about 93,000 Amish, children included.

The center’s director, Steven Nolt, put Lancaster County’s Amish at about 38,000, more than half under 18, and called a circulating claim of 180,000 Amish voters “completely false.” He and Kyle Kopko report that both the Amish vote total and the Amish turnout rate in Lancaster County were lower in 2024 than in 2020.

Puerto Ricans arrived in central Pennsylvania’s Dutch Country as migrant farmworkers after the 1940s, Ivette Guzmán Zavala writes, in a region where Mennonites and Amish are taken as the archetypal conservative, Protestant, agricultural, white “Dutchies.” Manufacturing employs 15.4 percent of York County’s employed residents and 14.4 percent of Lancaster County’s, against 11.5 percent statewide.

The eight counties from Harrisburg to Lancaster and York cast 15.5 percent of the 2022 vote and accounted for 17.1 percent of the movement. The Republican won the eight together by a net 27,954 votes, after 33,319 in 2018.

Cumberland shifted 6.9 points toward the Democrat relative to the statewide change, more than any other county.

Philadelphia

Philadelphia cast 9.3 percent of the 2022 vote and gave the Democrat a net 361,592 votes, the largest raw margin of any county. The city cast 10.1 percent fewer votes than in 2018, and its net Democratic margin fell by 58,018 votes, the largest decline among the 67 counties.

In the 2019-2023 survey the city is 38.9 percent non-Hispanic Black, and 32.5 percent of its employed residents work in education, health care and social assistance. From the 2016 to the 2020 presidential race it shifted 5.5 points toward the Republican relative to the statewide change.

The 41 rural counties

Colin Jerolmack and Edward Walker describe a rural, white, mixed-income Pennsylvania community that supported shale gas drilling through quiet mobilization, support that rested on partisan identity and obligations to the community even where residents gained little personally.

Penn State’s News Literacy Initiative says two Pennsylvania counties have no local newspaper and 18 have one.

The rural center and north cast 18.5 percent of the 2022 vote and 19.2 percent of the movement, about 69 percent of it toward the Republican. Greene County shifted 12.9 points toward the Republican relative to the statewide change, the largest county shift in either direction.

Votes cast in the 41 counties rose 13.8 percent between the two races.

Where to look on election night

The live county table at hesitation.media/election/#counties shows each county’s count against the margin it would post in a tied statewide race.

• Bucks, Chester, Montgomery and Delaware against one another, then Allegheny and Butler.
• Cumberland, Dauphin, Lancaster and York in the south-central corridor.
• Northampton and Lehigh in the Lehigh Valley, then Luzerne, Lackawanna and Schuylkill.
• Philadelphia’s total votes cast against the 2022 count, as well as its margin.

Race breakdowns cover PA-01 in Bucks, PA-07 in the Lehigh Valley, PA-08 in Luzerne and Lackawanna, and PA-10 across Dauphin, York and Cumberland.

The method, caveats and every source are under How we did this.