Aggregate two-party presidential margins held rock steady in Allegheny county from 1996-2016, hovering between D+14.5 & D+16.5 as upscale suburbs turned from red to purple, while working-class Dem strongholds lost population, Dem allegiance, or both democracyjournal.org/magazine/57/ru…
Allegheny County voted ~17 points to the left of PA at the top of the ticket in 2016, & ~19 points to the left of PA for Gov & Senate in 2018. So Biden+25 in Allegheny County in 2020 would actually be consistent with recent state polling
... & with this👇👀
For purposes of comparison with that photo, here's how heavily Franklin Park & other North Hills suburbs voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Interactive map at link! archive.theincline.com/2016/11/10/map…
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Gonna re-up this article now for the midnight obsessing about Pennsylvania county level results crowd: Wrote it 16 months which is to say a century ago but holds up pretty well americancommunities.org/in-pennsylvani…
As a reminder this is what Pennsylvania looks like through @AmCommPro's very helpful categories. Many "rural middle America" counties, lots of ex-industrial/partly recovered "middle suburbs", then exurbs & urban suburbs in the Philly collar & around Pittsburgh
Fully half of the population of PA lives in a Middle Suburb or Rural Middle America county. But also: fully half does not: concentrating instead in Urban Suburbs, Exurbs, College Town, or Big City (=Philadelphia) counties
Three carefully reported articles from non-metro PA that should be read together. They offer radically different takeaways, but by listening carefully to diff voices capture the same reality: very real currents moving in opposite directions, w/gender & esp generation key divides
First, from @JuliaTerruso a really thoughtful account of aging white men continuing to move away from the Democratic party in Carbondale, as union jobs & allegiance forged 2 generations ago fade, & messages about "far left" extremes resonate... with some inquirer.com/politics/penns…
But note the civic stalwart aging moms rejecting the Trump msg... & the 20something daughter sad about political division but outspoken on racial injustice: “My heart hurts for the minorities in this town because I don’t feel like they’re treated properly."
#GeorgeFloyd solidarity protests have been held in over 135 different communities across PA already. Here's one way to think about the new geography they trace. I've mapped them on top of the @AmCommPro map. Notice how many are in Rural Middle America & Middle Suburb counties.
Fully half the state's population lives in those two county types. But "rural middle America" doesn't match stereotypes (few folks work in agriculture; more are middle income than poor). And "middle suburbs" don't look like the upscale sites of privilege the term suburb may evoke
PA's more rural counties swung extra hard for Donald Trump in 2016. But because the Middle Suburbs are home to fully a third of the state's population, the swing there was critical. These are the state's former industrial heartlands: and onetime union & Democratic strongholds
It's hard not to read the PA HD 34 primary results as evidence in the debate over whether protests in response to the murder of George Floyd will cause white suburban backlash. (quick thread)
(First pausing to emphasize that any debate over electoral consequence should not distract from the existential issues of race-based structural and physical violence Floyd's death reflected—nor from the urgency of supporting protestors putting themselves on the front lines now).
If suburban whites were going to react to the events of recent days by pulling back from progressive candidates or those speaking up for racial justice, we should have seen that yesterday in PA HD 34. It's a 70% white district, whose past was riven by court-ordered integration
Pennsylvania today (April 3) has over 8,400 known cases of COVID-19. Some of the county-level variation reflects lags in testing, but it's also about differences in mobility, connection, density, labor, & vulnerability. TL;DR: We should really, really worry about Luzerne.
Here's what the data looked like a few days ago. I traced on the regions @4st8 & I spent lots of tweets defining, back a lifetime ago in November. The differences btwn NEPA & the region we decided to call Upper Susquehanna, & btwn Upper Susq & North Ctrl further west, is clear
Here are the same regions traced onto the @AmCommPro map that categorizes counties by demography+economics