The road to the White House goes straight through Pennsylvania. While there are a handful of other battleground states that could sway the upcoming presidential election, it will be very difficult for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump to find a path to victory without winning the Keystone State — and both candidates know it.
Simply put: “Pennsylvania will determine this election,” as Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-2nd) said during the Democratic National Convention.
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Pennsylvania has a long history of picking winners. The state has been won for the eventual president in 10 of the last 12 elections, and it’s one of only five states that backed Trump, a Republican, in 2016 and Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.
For this election, there are seven clear swing states according to polling, and Pennsylvania has more electoral votes (19) than any of the others — Nevada (6), Wisconsin (10), Arizona (11), Michigan (15), Georgia (16), and North Carolina (16). Assuming the other 43 states vote as expected, Trump and Harris would both sit around 220 electoral votes in the race to 270, and Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes represent about 40% of the difference.
And if that’s not enough to show this state’s grave importance in the upcoming election, just look at how much time and money both campaigns have spent here.
Last month, Trump was in York County weeks after surviving an assassination attempt during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), was speaking in Philadelphia.
Harrison Jones/USA TODAY NETWORK
Former president Donald Trump speaks during a rally at the New Holland Arena on July 31 in Harrisburg, Pa. It was Trump’s first appearance in Pennsylvania since his attempted assassination in Butler, Pa.
Earlier in August, Harris picked Philadelphia as the place to announce her vice presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
CHRIS LACHALL/USA TODAY NETWORK ATLANTIC GROUP
Vice President Kamala Harris stands with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, at a rally at Temple University in Philadelphia on Aug. 6.
As far as spending, both campaigns have allocated more money on advertising in Pennsylvania than any other state, according to AdImpact data from late August.
And whether Pennsylvania goes red or blue in November — Harris is leading Trump by 3 percentage points, according to the latest Washington Post polling data — could ultimately come down to voting in the Philly suburbs, which proved to be a major reason the state flipped parties from 2016 to 2020.
While Bucks, Delaware, Chester, and Montgomery counties each backed the Democratic candidate in both elections, Biden in 2020 significantly outperformed 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in those suburbs.
In head-to-head totals from 2016, Clinton won 57.27% of the vote in those counties compared with Trump’s 42.73%. Four years later, Biden received 59.56% to Trump’s 40.44%.
Eight years ago, the difference between Clinton and Trump in Pennsylvania was a narrow 44,292 votes, less than 1% of votes cast. If she had the same percentage of support among those four counties that Biden got four years later, she would have had 30,000 more votes, nearly making up the difference in the entire state.
Another factor will be voter turnout in these counties, which are some of the fastest-growing in the state. From July 1, 2022, to July 1, 2023, Montgomery (+3,698), Chester (+3,146), Delaware (+847), and Bucks (+427) each saw an increase in residents — a rarity in a state that had 57 of 67 counties experience population declines over that time.
And the growth in these counties from 2016 to 2020 translated to larger voter turnouts: While Clinton had 188,353 more votes than Trump in 2016, Biden had 293,094 more than the former president in 2020.
But the increase in population in these Democratic-leaning Philly suburbs doesn’t necessarily equate to more votes for Harris.
Republicans see great potential to gain ground in Bucks County, which sided with Biden by more than 17,000 votes in 2020 when registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 10,000. In July, WHYY reported Republicans had flipped the county and held a registration advantage over Democrats by more than 200.
All around Pennsylvania, canvassers from each party are battling to win over voters. While there are more than 160 million registered voters in the United States, it seems like the entire election could be decided by the nearly 9 million in this state.