Is Pennsylvania Still a Swing State?

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There’s a debate raging on both sides of the aisle about the staying power of Donald Trump’s victory coalition. Is it a one-off? Was this really a permanent realignment? Or was it something in between? 

The Wall Street Journal produced a video breaking down the data that shows why Trump’s victory is probably a permanent realignment of American politics.

“I despise Donald Trump,” Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y said. Torres represents the district where the Madison Square Garden rally took place. “I feel like he is a threat to the norms of liberal democracy, but he’s a brilliant politician. He has brilliant intuitions, and he knew that he was making inroads into communities of color.”

Trump, who won only 9% of the vote in Torres’ district in 2016, and 15% in 2020, received 30% of the vote in 2024.

Torres added that it’s inconceivable that a Democrat could go into one of the reddest counties in America and win 30% of the vote. That fact alone should lead to his party’s all-hands-on-deck, hair-on-fire emergency introspection.

“Donald Trump’s greatest breakthrough lies not in cracking the blue wall in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin,” Torres added. “His greatest breakthrough lies in breaking the blue wall in the reliably Democratic urban centers of America, like the ultimate blue wall of the Bronx.”

Analysts are going to slice and dice the data, trying to wring out as much meaning as possible, but the Trump coalition that emerged from the election should scare the bejeebers out of Democrats.

Trump didn’t win the black vote. But he carried a healthy slice of young black males to deny Kamala Harris the kind of black majority a Democrat needs to win national or statewide office.  He didn’t win the Hispanic vote either, but he won the young Hispanic male vote, and that alone spelled doom for Harris. 

Robbin Laird, writing at The Second Line of Defense:

The Republicans have realigned. The party of Bush is now a coalition created by Trump. Trump has in effect been a political magnet that attracted the “iron filings” of a broad group of Americans, racially diverse, college educated and non-college educated workers (by which one means having degrees rather than confusing degrees with actually being educated in a life sense).

The Democrats now face the challenge of realignment. The modern Democratic Party has been shaped by identity politics. What will replace this focus? Who lead the effort? When and how successfully?

Perhaps nowhere has this “iron filings” effect been more successful than in Pennsylvania. Senator John Fetterman has been sounding the alarm about what’s been happening to his party for most of this year. He wonders whether the electorate had passed the Democrats by, making the race virtually unwinnable for Harris.

Semafor asked why he went on Joe Rogan’s podcast despite Democrats condemning him for it.

So, I was happy to show up there. And it also addresses an important kind of an issue, in my opinion, with the Democratic Party. We have a challenge. We have our own kind of “childless cat ladies” situation: “Bros.” People refer to these young guys as bros, and clearly that’s not a positive term. They’re described as dopes, or gullible, or brutes. People were really shocked when the whole childless cat ladies thing dropped, and it is dumb. That violates the basic, basic rule of politics. Don’t subtract, do addition. I think that was part of the new coalition that really delivered a pretty crushing victory for Trump.

Did the left really think that denigrating young white males, castigating them for their white male “privilege,” and fingering them as the villains in the culture wouldn’t have electoral consequences? 

Feterrman’s worries about Pennsylvania becoming red are justified. When you consider the urban vote for Trump in cities like Pittsburg, Philadelphia, and Allentown and the union vote that broke for the former president, it’s legitimate to wonder if Pennsylvania is still a swing state.

Democrats have shown no sign of abandoning identity politics. The radical left is still in the driver’s seat and will be for the foreseeable future. Until mainstream Democrats can wrest control of the party from the far left, Democrats are liable to continue to lose elections.