2016 Presidential Election: The Pivotal Role of Pennsylvania and the Rustbelt

Donald Trump’s 306 to 232 Electoral College victory in the 2016 presidential election was one of the biggest upsets in American political history. The Real Clear Politics’ average of the national polls on election morning predicted that Hillary Clinton would win the election by an Electoral College margin of 272 to 266. This prediction was based in part on polling showing that she would win the key swing state of Pennsylvania (Barrett 2016). The pollsters’ confidence in this prediction was strengthened by the fact that Pennsylvania had voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election since 1988. In fact, the final vote count indicated that Clinton would have won the presidency if she had been able to carry Pennsylvania and two other “rustbelt” states—Michigan and Wisconsin. Instead, Trump won those states by a total margin of 107,105 votes out of almost 14 million votes cast (Wasserman 2017). The Washington Post concluded that those 107,105 “effectively decided” the 2016 presidential election in his favor (Meko, Lu, and Gamio 2016).

This commentary will discuss the outcome of the presidential vote in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania. In particular, it will focus on the fact that the Republican candidate received a larger percentage of white, working-class voters than had been the case in recent elections. The outcome in Pennsylvania provides significant insight into the election results in other rustbelt states, particularly Michigan and Wisconsin. The shift of a significant number of working-class voters across these states also has important implications for unions, the progressive movement, and the Democratic Party. The question of whether this is a singular anomaly resulting from the unique candidacy of Donald Trump, or a longer-term realignment of voters, has critical implications for the future of American politics. I will discuss what the labor and progressive movements in the United States need to do in 2018 and 2020 to ensure that this realignment does not become the status quo.

For many years, the conventional political wisdom in Pennsylvania has been that in statewide elections, Republicans will win the more conservative, rural areas in the middle of the state and Democrats will win the more liberal, urban, and suburban areas in the eastern and western areas. Ultimately, the route to victory for Democrats involves them overcoming the Republican advantage in the state’s many rural counties by running up the vote total in the state’s largest city, Philadelphia, and winning its four suburban counties (Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery).

In the several presidential elections leading up to 2016, this formula for Democratic success proved accurate. In 2012, Obama had a huge margin of victory in Philadelphia (85%) and won three of the four suburban Philadelphia counties (he barely lost Chester). In 2016, Clinton also won big in Philadelphia, although her margin of victory was 3 percentage points less than Obama’s in 2012 (82%), and she carried Bucks, Delaware, and Montgomery counties, as well as Chester County. Since 1980, every candidate for president who has won big in Philadelphia and prevailed in the four suburban Philadelphia counties has carried the state. Except for Hillary Clinton. So how did she lose?

The evidence suggests that Clinton lost because of the defection to Donald Trump of a significant number of white, working-class voters who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Among these voters were union members and members of union households, although the often-made argument that union members put Trump in the White House appears to be overstated.

Postelection surveys indicate that only 76 percent of white, working-class voters in Pennsylvania who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 also voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Given that Trump won Pennsylvania by only 68,236 votes out of more than 6 million cast, a margin of 0.11 percent, it is reasonable to conclude that if Clinton had received the percentage of the white, working-class votes that Democratic presidential candidates have received in recent years, she would have won the state (Cohn 2017).

An examination of election results in Pennsylvania clearly shows that Trump made significant inroads among this group of voters during the 2016 campaign. Trump prevailed in fifty-six of Pennsylvania’s sixty-seven counties. The biggest demographic group in almost all of those fifty-six counties is white, working-class voters. He won all but one of the fifty-four counties won by Mitt Romney in 2012 (Clinton won Chester). And he topped Clinton in three counties (Erie, Luzerne, and Northampton) that Obama had won handily in 2012. Even more impressive is the fact that Trump won fifty counties by a larger margin than Romney had. And in ten of those counties, his margin of victory was at least 10 percent higher than Romney’s in 2012 (Fontaine and Zwick 2016).

While Donald Trump improved on his predecessor’s results in Pennsylvania in 2012, Hillary Clinton fell short of the support won by Barack Obama. She won eleven counties compared with Obama’s thirteen, and in sixty-five of sixty-seven counties, she received a lower share of the vote than Obama had received in the previous election. In twenty-six of those counties, her share of the vote was more than 10 percent lower than her predecessor received in 2012 (Fontaine and Zwick 2016).

One of the best examples of Trump’s success in convincing voters to switch their allegiance from the Democrats to him is the vote tallies in Schuylkill County, a largely rural, white, working-class region in the northeastern part of the state. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 56 percent of the county’s vote compared with Obama’s 42 percent. In 2016, Trump captured 69 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 26 percent. This translated into 7,776 more votes for Trump than Romney received four years earlier (Cohn 2017; Fontaine and Zwick 2016).

Contributing to Trump’s win in Pennsylvania were the three counties that he was able to move from the 2012 Democratic Party’s win column in 2016. This was a notable achievement as all three of these counties—Erie, Luzerne, and Northampton—were longtime Democratic strongholds. Ultimately, these counties were emblematic of Trump’s win in Pennsylvania, and in the other rustbelt states.

The three counties had much in common. They once were prosperous blue-collar communities that had been devastated by deindustrialization over the last twenty-five years. Erie had been an important Great Lakes port where ships laden with iron ore for the Pittsburgh steel mills unloaded their cargo. And General Electric (GE) had operated a large production facility there that made locomotives for the railroad industry since the early 1900s. The demise of the steel industry ended Erie’s role as an important port, and over the last decade, GE has cut its workforce from fifteen thousand to two thousand nine hundred.

Northampton County was the home of Bethlehem Steel, the county’s largest employer for over a century, until it closed its huge mill in the 1990s. The closing devastated Northampton, and surrounding counties, resulting in significant unemployment.

Luzerne County had produced anthracite coal for over a hundred years until the 1970s when the thinning coal seams made mining unprofitable. It also had a significant textile and apparel industry until cheaper imports from the southern United States and from abroad resulted in the shutdown of the factories and clothing mills.

The counties were also similar in another way—they shared a strong union heritage. In fact, they had traditionally been among the strongest union areas in the state until, one by one, employers either closed their mills, mines, and factories due to an inability to compete with low-priced labor overseas or moved their jobs to the southern United States or abroad in search of lower labor costs.

In the 2012 presidential election in Erie County, Obama beat the Republican Romney by 16.1 percent. In 2016, Trump won the county by 2.0 percent, an 18.1 percent swing over the two elections. Obama won Northampton County in 2012 by 4.7 percent. In 2016, Trump reversed the vote, winning by 4.6 percent, a 9.3 percent swing. And in Luzerne, a county Obama won in 2012 with a 4.8 percent margin, Trump won handily by 20.1 percent, a swing of 24.9 percent in four years. The actual vote counts indicate that if Clinton had won these counties with the same margin that Obama had, she would have carried the state of Pennsylvania (Fontaine and Zwick 2016).

Many postelection analyses argued that one significant factor behind Trump’s victory was the support he received from union members and union households. While 2016 voter data for union households are not available for Pennsylvania, national exit polls indicate that while Trump did perform better among this group, the 43 percent share he received was only 3 percent more than the 40 percent received by Romney in 2012. As a recent analysis of the union household vote points out, what was more significant than the increased share of the union vote Trump received was that Hillary Clinton’s share of this vote fell by 7 percent compared with Barack Obama’s showing in 2012 (Rosenfeld and Denice 2017).

In addition, the union household vote that went to third-party candidates increased from 2 percent in 2012 to 6 percent in 2016. This suggests that nationally the change in the union households vote was less about support for Trump and more about a lack of enthusiasm for Clinton (Rosenfeld and Denice 2017). The shift of white, working-class voters, union members, and union households was also critical to the election outcome in Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as other states (Cohn 2017).

In the wake of the 2016 election, Pennsylvania labor leaders recognized that many of their members had rejected the endorsed candidate of their union and voted for either Donald Trump or a third-party candidate. In an effort to better understand their thinking, leaders across the state engaged in “listening” sessions. What they learned, in part, suggested a disconnect between many members and the Democratic Party and their candidate for president (Henderson 2017).

From these members perspective, Hillary Clinton did not speak to them and the existential challenges they and their communities faced. Her style, and the baggage she brought to the election, made her vulnerable to the populist, anti-elite message of the Trump campaign (however ironic that message was given the candidate espousing it). And, for at least some white working-class voters, including some union members, attitudes about race and gender contributed to discomfort with the Democratic nominee. For them, this combination of concerns outweighed their union’s endorsement (Henderson 2017).

Donald Trump, however, spoke passionately to them about their most basic fears and concerns—safety, security, and jobs. His rhetoric about the system being “rigged” against working-class Americans and his targeting of straw men who threatened their way of life—immigrants, terrorists, the media, and liberal elites—rang true to these voters. In the course of these listening sessions, members regularly admitted that they had reservations about Trump, and that they normally would not support him, but given the candidates presented to them and the direness of their situation, they were willing to vote for Trump and hope that he could do what previous candidates had not been able to do (Henderson 2017).

Like Pennsylvania, as late as election day the pollsters fully expected Hillary Clinton would carry Michigan and Wisconsin on her way to winning the presidency. Instead, Trump edged Clinton in both states to secure his victory. As rustbelt states with many of the same challenges as Pennsylvania, the evidence suggests that the same dynamics that caused Donald Trump to upset Clinton in Pennsylvania led to his victories in Michigan and Wisconsin (Barrett 2016).

A national survey conducted by the Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation in the spring of 2017 reinforced much of what Pennsylvania labor leaders found in their listening sessions and suggested that the views of their members were widely held by white, working-class voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and beyond. The survey found that Trump supporters continue to believe that the economic system benefits others at their expense, particularly immigrants and people of color, and that the federal government favored these groups over them. In addition, the survey results directly support the idea that working-class, white voters continue to believe that Donald Trump is aware of their concerns about safety, security, and jobs and can do something to address these concerns. The survey results indicate that 57 percent of this group are very or somewhat confident that Trump can keep the country safe from terrorism, 61 percent believe that he can protect their individual freedoms, and 51 percent believe he can create additional jobs for their communities (Survey of Rural America 2017).

The 2018 and 2020 elections will be pivotal moments in the political history of the nation. If the working-class voters who put him in office come to believe that a Trump presidency and the Republican Party did not advance their interests as they had promised, they will again be looking for change. Will the labor movement, other progressive groups, and the Democrats be prepared to offer them truly pro-worker candidates and policies? Will these candidates connect with working-class voters on a visceral level? And will they focus unrelentingly on basic issues that workers see as most important, such as jobs?

If there is a silver lining to the 2016 campaign, it is the recognition on the part of working-class voters that the American economic system is “rigged.” This was one of Trump’s main themes in 2016. Unions, and other progressive groups, need to build on this belief. And they need to do so with a message that clearly identifies how the system is rigged and in whose favor, educating workers that the people who unfairly benefit from this rigged system are not immigrants and people of color, but the wealthy and corporations.

Unions and progressive groups will also need to decide whether to directly attack the Trump administration. If he is running in 2020, they will have little choice but to do so; however, this strategy is not without risk. As polls since the 2016 election have shown, most Trump voters are still supportive of the candidate they voted for and are unwilling to admit that he has frequently stumbled. Rather than pressing people to admit that their vote was a mistake, a more effective strategy may be to build on some of the concerns that drove them to support Trump in the first place. Assuming the administration does not deliver on its campaign promises, working-class voters may be open to a message of change in 2020. If labor and other progressive groups are prepared to present a candidate and policies that represent change, the Trump years could turn out to be an anomaly of historic proportions. If they do not, the increasing alignment of working people with conservatives and the Republican Party may become the status quo.