A comprehensive look at the 2024 presidential campaign and Pa.’s results

2024 Presidential Results. Key: Navy – 65%+ Harris, Blue 60-64.9%, Royal Blue 55%-59.9%, Dodger Blue 50%-54.9%, Light Sky Blue <50%. Light Salmon <50% Trump, Coral 50%-54.9%, Orange Red 55%-59.9%, Red 60%-64.9%, Maroon 65%+. Ties are yellow (Nick Field via Dave’s Redistricting)

For three straight presidential elections, Pennsylvania’s arguably been the most pivotal swing state in the nation.

After Donald Trump was able to flip the Keystone State in 2016, only for Joe Biden to narrowly win it back in 2020, the commonwealth became the top target for both parties by the beginning of the 2024 election cycle. When it was all said and done, Pennsylvania  was once again the tipping-point state, as it was in 2016. Moreover, 2024 was also the third consecutive presidential contest where the final margin of victory was less than two points:

2016: 44,292 Votes; 0.72% Margin

2020: 80,555 Votes; 1.17% Margin

2024: 120,266 Votes; 1.71% Margin

Trump’s win in 2024 was still noticeably larger than his previous victory in 2016 and his defeat in 2020. So, how exactly did this happen?

The Prelude: 2021 to 2024

Biden’s Fall

Joe Biden was elected amid the COVID-19 pandemic because the public thought he’d do a better job ending the crisis and transitioning the country out of the morass. Biden’s campaign, however, was always positioned as a moral crusade, exemplified by his slogan: “a battle for the soul of the nation.” The former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair was also deeply concerned over how Donald Trump was affecting America’s image on the world stage. 

So as COVID-19 cases receded in 2021-2022, the public grew far more concerned about the after-effect of increased inflation, which hit its highest point in four decades. Yet all the while, President Biden’s focus remained on foreign affairs and the nation’s soul. This strategy was emblematic of Biden’s philosophy of defending institutions, and seeking to build them back up after the turmoil of the Trump years. The drawback is that it made Biden the institutionalist president at a time when Americans were souring on just about every institution imaginable. So as inflation and high prices persisted for years, swing voters saw Biden as part of the problem. 

Nonetheless, Democrats had a historically successful midterm election in 2022, losing just 9 House seats while gaining one Senate seat and two governorships. In Pennsylvania particularly, the party did especially well behind Gov. Josh Shapiro’s 15- point landslide victory. Not only did John Fetterman defeat Mehmet Oz in the commonwealth’s open U.S. Senate race, but Democrats also flipped the state House for the first time in a dozen years. Such a performance gave the Biden team confidence that their “soul of the nation” strategy – which they doubled down on with a September 2022 primetime address outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall – would not only secure a second term, but that Pennsylvania would once again be a key component. 

Trump’s Rise

As Biden began a slow, steady fall downward from the heights of his inauguration, Donald Trump rode a characteristically scattershot path to victory. Despite several assertions of “the greatest comeback in American history,” in these years Trump’s return was less of an unthinkable impossibility and more of a slowly growing and looming cloud.

Republican congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy refused to ensure Trump never held office again in the wake of his unprecedented attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. That included the Senate falling short in its effort to impeach Trump, which according to the Constitution, would have disqualified him from running for office. 

Throughout 2021 and 2022, while U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland was slowly building a case to prosecute Trump, the ex-president was still leading early 2024 surveys and therefore his endorsement remained a must-have for Republican congressional candidates. So when Ron DeSantis’ primary campaign imploded in early 2023, Trump was free to devote all his time to his anticipated rematch with Biden.

Consequently, Trump began working behind the scenes to win back billionaire media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk (who bought Twitter in 2022), as well as neutralize former foes like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeffrey Bezos. As a result, the social media ecosystem was far more Trump-friendly than it had been in 2020.

In retrospect, the fall of 2023 ended up being an inflection point in the race. That September, Donald Trump took a lead over Joe Biden in both the Decision Desk HQ and RealClearPolitics national poll averages that he’d never relinquish. That same month, Hunter Biden was indicted on firearm charges, a move that his father felt was political retribution caused by the various federal and state indictments of Donald Trump earlier that year. 

Moreover, the Oct. 7 attacks against Israel precipitated a bloody battle in Gaza that dominated headlines and split the Democratic coalition. For a president obsessed with foreign relations, Biden would spend considerable time on this conflict, yet was unable to successfully stop the fighting.  

Biden’s staff began to notice accelerated signs of aging in the incumbent. Post-debate reporting and post-election books both identify this as the period when Biden’s decline became particularly precipitous. By early 2024, sizable majorities of voters (and even Democrats) told pollsters they thought Biden was too old and wanted an alternative candidate. The Biden camp, however, was convinced that voters would come around once they realized it was a binary choice between Biden or Trump.

After all, Biden’s 2020 primary campaign only prevailed when voters rallied around him to stop Sen. Bernie Sanders ahead of the Super Tuesday contests. Two years later, Biden was burdened by abysmal approval ratings, only to surge after the Dobbs abortion decision ignited the base and avoided a midterm wipe-out. The lesson Biden and his team appeared to take from these instances was that they weren’t obligated to answer the public’s concerns, that voters would instead be forced to once again flock back to them at the last minute. 

According to the book “Original Sin” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Biden’s longest serving aide Mike Donilon would frequently point to how they’d overcome aging concerns during the 2020 campaign and assert, “He’s going to get elected again with people thinking he’s too old”.

Moreover, in today’s ultra-polarized environment, Biden was never too far behind in the polls. In fact, as Trump stood trial in New York City and was eventually convicted, Biden was able to narrow the gap with Trump and seemed poised to pull ahead as they approached their unusually early summer debate.

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The Chaotic Summer

The Debate, the Shooting and the Switch

The June 27 debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was the equivalent of a political earthquake. Biden’s shockingly terrible performance, and his stubborn refusal to realize he could not recover politically, led to three-and-a-half weeks of questions as Democrats publicly fretted about how to push Biden out of the race.

Trump’s luck turned as well. Just four days after the debate, the Supreme Court on a party-line 6-3 vote delayed Trump’s Jan. 6 trial past Election Day. Another attempt to hold Trump legally accountable for his actions was avoided, freeing him to spend more time on the campaign trail and preventing a high-profile reminder of his failure to stop rioters from driving Congress from its chambers.

Only 12 days later, an assassin shot Donald Trump and killed an attendee during a rally in Butler. The failed attempt on Trump’s life served to further motivate his supporters, provided Elon Musk an opportunity to officially declare his support, and encouraged more bro-sphere podcasters to feature him as a guest. Furthermore, it undercut Democrats’ central argument that Trump was a fundamental threat to the Republic, as the media was newly sensitive to any commentary that could be seen as inciting violence against Trump. 

Within 48 hours, Trump announced JD Vance as his vice presidential pick, and three days after that, delivered his acceptance address at the 2024 Republican National Convention. As a result of this cavalcade of events, Trump’s lead in national and Pennsylvania polls hit their highest point of the entire campaign.

For as quickly as the race was turned upside down, it was upended yet again when Biden dropped out and was replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris. By early August, Harris was able to take the lead nationally and in the commonwealth, putting Trump behind for the first time since the fall of 2023. Newly-enthusiastic Democrats packed stadiums to see Harris and running mate Tim Walz, including for their debut in Philadelphia. Harris rode this momentum through her sole debate with Trump in early September, where she bested her opponent and consequently boosted her numbers to an all-time high.

Fall of Bad Campaign Decisions

At this point in the campaign, Harris was not only clearly up in Pennsylvania, but other swing states like Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. Yet by Election Day, Trump had caught Harris nationally and in nearly every swing state, as most polls found it to be a margin of error race in the final days. 

So what caused Harris’ lead to evaporate over the course of October? Well, there’s no shortage of theories, with one of the more popular premises suggesting that the Trump team’s TV ad avalanche concerning Harris’ past positions on transgender issues was the culprit. 

But Trump attributes his victory more to the border and immigration than any social issues. For their part, the Harris team found that the most effective attack ad from the Trump campaign wasn’t any of the ones dealing with transgender issues, but rather a spot featuring Harris praising ‘Bidenomics’.

Then there’s the issue of Kamala Harris herself, as the vice president’s personality proved to be a poor fit for this unusual race. While she was always a cautious and considerate candidate throughout her political career, the unique circumstances of this abbreviated campaign called for someone more willing to take bold chances.

“We shouldn’t have been playing this thing so safe,” her running mate Tim Walz concluded in March 2025. “I think we probably should have just rolled the dice and done the town halls. We, as a party, are more cautious.” Walz also echoed the post-election claims of Harris’ top advisors, that their own polls never showed her in the lead. “In football parlance, we were in a prevent defense to not lose when we never had anything to lose because I don’t think we were ever ahead.”

Meanwhile, progressives feel that a post-debate, centrist pivot away from her economic populist message caused her campaign to stall. They found the decision to hold three rallies with Liz Cheney in one day particularly galling. A few weeks after the election, David Plouffe answered these critics by asserting: “When you’re being attacked as being a crazy, out-of-touch, California liberal; when you have generals and former Republican elected officials saying ‘I’m for Kamala Harris’, that helps rebut that. In many respects, that’ll be more effective than what she would say herself.”  

Yet in their attempt to convince voters that Harris was moderate, they swung too closely back to Biden’s original institutionalist strategy. Instead of convincing toss-up voters that Harris wasn’t a radical, the approach gave the impression that Harris was part of the same old system people desperately wanted to change.

To that point, Biden and Harris’ complex relationship was an immensely important dynamic in this race that’s worth delving into.

Joe Biden first approached the “veepstakes” as a two-time failed presidential candidate in 2008, when Barack Obama sought out a gray-haired eminence for his VP. Obama asked for and received a pledge from Biden that he wouldn’t try to run for president again. As then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saw her favorability numbers skyrocket during their first term, some Obama staffers even considered swapping out Biden for her in 2012. With Hillary in a more advantageous position, Obama began to explicitly favor her for 2016, which caused Biden to grow deeply resentful, believing he’d done a good enough job as vice president to earn Obama’s support.

So Kamala Harris stepped into a fraught position, especially considering the lingering anger from Jill Biden and Biden campaign staff over Harris’ 2019 debate attack on Biden.

Once in office, Biden refused to spend any political capital to pave the way for Harris. After all, if Harris began to poll better than Biden for 2024, the clamor to replace him would begin to gain real traction. So Harris instead got saddled with tough portfolios, like the border, that caused her numbers to drop and pundits to doubt her effectiveness.

By July 2024, when Harris’ numbers finally did surpass Biden’s and she took over the nomination, it behooved her to make a clean break from Biden as she sought her own term. Harris, however, seemed to believe voters would judge her harshly if she knifed her former running mate. According to Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper, Harris pushed back against the suggestion that she separate from Biden. “If I were to really distinguish myself, how would that make me look? Disloyal,” she told them.

Biden didn’t help matters either, stubbornly insisting that Harris defend their record and reportedly telling her “No daylight, kid” before her debate with Trump. Harris appeared to take that advice to heart; appearing with Biden at his convention send-off, then for a joint event in Maryland, and even a third hand-off ceremony in Pittsburgh on Labor Day. 

Of course, Harris’ worst moment of the campaign arguably came when she refused to highlight any differences with Biden during her Oct. 8 appearance on The View. Not so coincidentally, mid-October is right around when Harris’ downturn in the polls began. 

All the while, Biden continued to make damaging gaffes on the campaign trail. First, he called to “lock [Trump] up” while stumping in New Hampshire. Even worse, during a livestream interview inexplicably scheduled right before Harris’ closing address in D.C., Biden called Trump supporters “garbage”, neutralizing a scandal that was hurting Trump in the final week of the race.

Election Results by Region

Southeast

Going into Election Day, it was apparent that Kamala Harris would have to put together record margins for a Democratic presidential nominee in Philadelphia as well as its four suburban collar counties: Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery. In 2012, Barack Obama set the high water mark for Philly with a 492,339 vote margin, while in the suburbs Joe Biden’s 2020 performance was best, as he won by 293,094.

Yet Harris finished nowhere close to those marks, winning Philadelphia by 424,260 and the collar counties by 243,386. Had Harris hit Biden and Obama’s margins, those 117,787 votes would’ve nearly erased Trump’s statewide advantage of 120,266. Just two years ago, Gov. Shapiro won the suburbs by 388,273, the best showing yet for a statewide Democratic candidate. That wide gulf between Shapiro and Harris illustrates just how far short she fell from her potential ceiling.

This reality is particularly damning for Democrats, because in the Trump Era they depended on substantial suburban margins to make up for Republicans posting record rural results and steadily eating into Dems’ urban advantages. To wit, Harris’ aforementioned Philly margin was far behind Hillary’s (475,277) and Biden’s (471,050) margins, thanks to Trump’s ongoing improvement with non-white voters. 

As for the suburbs, by a slim 291 votes, Donald Trump managed to become the first Republican to carry Bucks County since George H.W. Bush in 1988. He pulled this off by securing support in ancestrally Democratic Lower Bucks, carrying precincts in places that have been trending red for a while now, like Bensalem, Falls and Middleton townships. Not so coincidentally, Bucks is also the only collar county that’s recently lost population in several spots, Lower Bucks among them. Concurrently, Harris couldn’t continue to maximize her gains in white-collar Central Bucks, where she held one of her most high-profile ‘Country Over Party’ campaign events alongside dozens of Republicans in Washington’s Crossing. 

Lehigh Valley

Four years ago, the Lehigh Valley was perhaps the sole region where Biden left votes on the table, thanks to his underperformance with Hispanics. Pennsylvania is home to hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans, not only in Philadelphia, but in cities like Allentown, Bethlehem and Reading as well. 

Democrats were hopeful that the crude comments made during Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York City would inspire Puerto Rican voters in these areas to turn out and support Harris. Despite ample anecdotal evidence, however, this surge never arrived and Harris saw her Hispanic support plummet. 

Take, for example, the majority Hispanic city of Allentown. As pointed out by J. Miles Coleman of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Allentown swung nearly 20 points towards Trump between 2016 and 2024. At the same time, the Allentown Morning Call found, Trump improved on his 2020 showing against Biden in all 20 of the Hispanic-heavy precincts they surveyed.   

This all meant that Harris performed well behind Biden’s pace in Lehigh County, which Biden won by 14,080 votes (7.58%), while Harris carried it by just 5,110 (2.69%). In neighboring Berks County it was a similar story, as Trump added another 8,742 votes onto his 2020 margin. He also carried the bellwether county of Northampton – which along with Erie was one of PA’s two Obama/Trump/Biden/Trump counties – by 3,162 votes (1.77%) after losing it by 1,233 votes (0.72%) four years ago.

South Central

Amid the larger statewide swing towards Donald Trump, several counties in this region actually moved towards Harris, with neighbors Adams and Franklin forming a line of blue-trending counties running all the way up to Union. In fact, most of the counties where Harris bested Biden were rural counties where Trump apparently hit his ceiling.

One exception was Cumberland County, which thanks to the sprawling Harrisburg suburbs, was one of the few areas in the nation to shift towards Democrats for three straight presidential elections. To that point, Harris’ 44.45% was the most for a Democratic presidential nominee since LBJ won it in his 1964 landslide. 

Yet the most populous counties in south central Pennsylvania, Lancaster and York, stayed loyal to Trump. Democrats were initially hopeful that they could make in-roads here, especially after Josh Shapiro nearly carried Lancaster in 2022. Nevertheless, Trump was able to secure a small increase in his Lancaster margin, improving from 44,362 in 2020 to 46,142 in 2024. His growth in York County proved even larger, as he picked up 4,339 votes from four years ago. As a result, Harris’ gains in the other regional counties here were fully nullified.  

Southwest

Whereas Harris lost a ton of ground in Philadelphia, it was an entirely different story across the state in Allegheny County. Trump’s improvement there was one of his weakest anywhere in the state, gaining just 1,525 votes or 0.18% from his 2020 performance.

In nearly every neighboring county, however, the swing towards Trump continued. After a temporary reprieve in 2020, Appalachia continued to somehow become redder and redder as Trump posted some of the best numbers here for a Republican presidential nominee in a century. Leading the way was Westmoreland County, where Trump won by 60,104 votes, his second-highest margin statewide.

The Harris campaign tried to keep margins down by sending Harris and Walz to stump in Beaver County on Aug. 18. Despite some recent Democratic wins – Bob Casey,Tom Wolf in 2018, and Josh Shapiro in 2022 – these efforts were unsuccessful, as Trump improved upon his 2020 performance here, increasing his margin from 16,637 (17.63%) to 19,641 (20.64%).

Ironically, the one county in the southwest region where Harris slightly improved over Biden was Butler, site of the failed assassination attempt against Trump. So while the shooting had an aforementioned impact on the national campaign, contrary to Sen. Fetterman’s claim, there was no apparent effect specific to this region. 

Northwest

Erie County continued its incredible track record as a bellwether for the commonwealth. Since 1948, the winner of Erie also won Pennsylvania in 19 of the past 20 presidential elections (the sole exception was supporting Michael Dukakis in 1988).

In spite of that, President Biden never visited this county during his four years in the White House. Conversely, Donald Trump made Erie his first Pennsylvania stop of the 2024 election cycle, holding an area rally on July 29, 2023, months before any potential primary contest.

Over a year later, Trump returned to the city on Sept. 29, 2024 for another event in a smaller building, and gave his opponents ammunition by admitting to denying his workers’ overtime pay. “I hated to give overtime. I hated it,” he told the largely blue-collar crowd. “I’d get other people. I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other people in.”

A few weeks later, Kamala Harris made her first campaign visit to Erie, drawing thousands to the Erie Insurance Arena that Trump could fill in 2023, but not 2024. This was all part of a nationwide trend of crowd size analysis that gave Democrats so much hope in the final months of election season.

As for the differences in results between 2020 and 2024, Trump didn’t flip many suburban precincts around the city; in fact, only a few Millcreek districts switched sides from 2020. Nonetheless, Trump shifted the margins in the city and elsewhere enough to go from losing the county by 1.03% to winning it by a nearly identical 1.02%.

Northeast

As recently as a decade ago, a deep blue line would flow uninterrupted through Lackawanna and Luzerne counties, part of a Scranton/Wilkes-Barre corridor that powered Democratic candidates for years. In 2016, however, Donald Trump transformed the region by gaining more than 10 points each in those counties. While native son Joe Biden widened Hillary’s three point advantage in Lackawanna to eight points, Harris managed to do even worse than Hillary here, winning by less than three. 

In addition to eating into Democratic support in the cities of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre themselves, Trump won back precincts in places like Moosic, Old Forge and Taylor in the southwestern portion of Lackawanna. Meanwhile in neighboring Luzerne, Trump’s margin grew to 29,940, considerably higher than the 26,237 and 22,056 margins he posted in 2020 and 2016 respectively.

Furthermore, Trump became the first Republican presidential nominee to carry Monroe County since 2004; prevailing by just 669 votes in a county Biden won by 5,334 votes four years ago. Since Monroe is about 17% Hispanic, this is yet another sign that Harris lost major ground among Pennsylvania’s Hispanic voters.

Conclusion: Candidate Quality

After three straight brutally competitive presidential elections, Democrats find themselves losing ground among nearly every demographic both nationally and in Pennsylvania. Many party leaders and pundits will recount the story of 1992 and advise a pivot to the center. This advice, however, ignores the fact that Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis were both moderate, DLC Democrats. The difference was Clinton’s far superior communications skills, which allowed him to fight back against Republican attacks much more effectively than Dukakis ever could. The takeaway appears to be candidate quality is a considerably more consequential factor in elections than candidate ideology. 

All three Democratic nominees over this period (Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris) were flawed candidates, who’d previously failed to impress a national electorate. Even with Biden’s 2020 win, they could overcome their deficiencies for a time, but they were all ultimately unable to change the actual political environment. Instead they were always reacting to Donald Trump, who despite never winning a majority, managed to dominate American politics over three election cycles. 

Given all of the above, the takeaway is that swing voters who decide elections aren’t looking for a candidate who shares their ideology, their race or their gender; they’re looking for a candidate who inspires. 

Nick Field is a freelance reporter based in Philadelphia.

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