I do not know who thought focusing solely on the urban hubs and white, wealthy, college-educated voters was a winning strategy. There aren’t enough of them to win national elections. Those with a BA degree only number around a quarter of the population. Is it because these people are most likely to snort the inane agenda items of the woke Left? Probably. But it’s a loser strategy that ended up biting Democrats in the ass in 2024. In Pennsylvania, the approach to only cater to the rich and the educated lost them voters in virtually every county in the state.
“For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western PA, we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia,” said Chuck Schumer. Well, as it turns out, the opposite happened (via The Center for Politics) [emphasis mine]:
As Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer memorably put it on the day Hillary Clinton accepted the 2016 Democratic nomination: “For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western PA, we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia.”
After Election Night 2016, Schumer’s comments were widely derided—then slightly redeemed when Joe Biden rode record suburban support to victory in Pennsylvania and nationwide in 2020—only to once again look ridiculous after Election Night 2024.
To get a sense of the imbalance that developed instead, consider that Democrats have lost their voter registration pluralities in 15 counties since May 2015, eight of which are in the Southwest: Beaver, Cambria, Fayette, Greene, Mercer, Lawrence, Washington, and Westmoreland. The other seven are scattered across the Commonwealth, with Berks (Reading) and Bucks in the Southeast, Carbon and Luzerne (Wilkes-Barre) in the Northeast, and Centre (State College), Clinton, and Elk in Central PA. Conversely, the GOP lost a plurality in just one county, Chester in the Philadelphia suburbs, during this interval.
This dichotomy only increased over the past few years as Republicans started to make notable gains in deep blue and swing purple counties. For instance, Philadelphia saw the GOP pick up a net 28,441 registrants over the last nine and a half years, as Republicans successfully ate into core Democratic support by attracting non-white, non-voters to register and turn out for Donald Trump.
Beyond the City of Brotherly Love, Republicans posted five-digit net gains in crucial counties like Berks, Bucks, Erie, Lackawanna, Lehigh, and Northampton. Even in Allegheny (Pittsburgh), one of the Democrats’ best counties in the Trump Era, the GOP still netted 38,925.
These numbers highlight how Trump’s registration gains were made up of two distinct phases. The initial phase took place during his first campaign, when Trump won over Southwest residents and saw a surge of support in rural areas. In the second phase, which began during the 2020 cycle and continued on into 2024, the Trump campaign targeted traditional non-voters, particularly non-white young men, in cities like Allentown, Bethlehem, Lehigh, Philadelphia, and Wilkes-Barre.
Take, for example, two of the largest shifts outside of the Southwest, in Berks and Luzerne counties. This pair of once-blue counties initially shifted right because of their rural white sections, only for their sizable Hispanic populations to join the movement in recent years.
Overall, Republicans grew their margins in 64 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, the exceptions being Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery in the southeast. After considerable Democratic growth in this trio over the past few cycles, however, Kamala Harris seemed to hit a ceiling in all three counties last November.
Considering all of this, it appears that in their bid to maximize their support among wealthy, educated, moderate voters in the suburbs, Democrats focused their messaging almost entirely towards this select group. In the process, the party managed to practically reverse Schumer’s prediction. For every suburban voter Democrats won in the Trump Age, they seemed to lose two or three voters outside of the suburbs.
You need working people—I don’t know why this concept is complicated. It’s a voter bloc in the tens of millions, and the reason why Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012 is that he won healthy amounts of these voters, around 35-40 percent, or at least in that neighborhood. It’s not winning working people, but it was enough to put him over the top handily over the Republicans. The working class used to be the backbone of the Democratic Party, but these people weren’t woke, and didn’t adhere to the authoritarian ethos that modern Democrats want to force down our throats. Democrats thought the loudmouths of the party, all college-educated, illiberal, and insane, could replace these voters. It didn’t work. Reconciliation might be impossible since Democrats today hate the poor, hate those without higher education degrees, and shun rural communities.
Democrats have their work cut out for them, but they’re too preoccupied with the trivial right now.
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