Pennsylvania continues tradition as a “keystone state” in presidential elections

Pennsylvania's role as a swing state in presidential elections continues to this day, a distinction noted as early as 1802. At a rally celebrating President Thomas Jefferson's election victory, Pennsylvania was reportedly called “the keystone of the Confederation.” A keystone is the central stone in an arch that holds all the other archstones in place.

In many ways, Pennsylvania was a center of activity in the United States from its earliest days: Philadelphia was where the Continental Congress met in the 1770s, and it was the last state to unanimously ratify the Declaration of Independence in July 1776. At the time of independence, Pennsylvania was also the geographic center of the 13 colonies, with six to the south and six to the north and east.

While the state has not always been a swing state, it has often been, and still is, at the center of presidential campaigns: Pennsylvania has voters with a wide range of political views, and statewide elections usually end up being close.

Philadelphia voters are almost entirely liberal on all issues, while most rural Pennsylvania voters are typically conservative and skeptical of urban politics, but the state's major suburban areas are divided, with Philadelphia favoring Democrats and Pittsburgh favoring Republicans.

Meanwhile, smaller, often overlooked Pennsylvania metropolitan areas such as Harrisburg, Allentown-Bethlehem, Erie and Scranton are true battleground areas in swing states.

Pennsylvania moves from a swing state to a Republican-leaning state

As the regional political divide between the North and the South widened in the 19th century, so did Pennsylvania's important role in presidential elections. From 1828 to 1880, Pennsylvania was the only state to vote for the winning candidate in every presidential election. Pennsylvania voters vacillated between Democrat and Whig parties from the 1830s to the 1850s, but voted for every winning Republican presidential candidate in the 1860s and 1870s.

Pennsylvania was not a swing state for decades after the Civil War, and voters there supported Republican candidates in every presidential election from 1860 to 1932, including Progressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

Pennsylvania is moving toward the Democrats

Throughout the 1940s, Pennsylvania continued to support Republican presidential candidates more than the nation as a whole, but then the state suddenly reversed course and supported Democratic presidential candidates in greater numbers than voters nationwide for 60 years from 1952 to 2012.

One reason is the collapse of the power of Philadelphia's Republican political establishment: the city hasn't had a Republican mayor since 1952.

As the South became more Republican and Philadelphia became more Democratic in the 1950s and 1960s, Pennsylvania also became more Democratic in presidential elections than the nation as a whole. Pennsylvania has lost its status as an electoral battleground state, and for six decades, every close presidential election in the state was won by a Democrat, despite Republican victories nationally. These included 1968, when Democrat Hubert Humphrey won the state; 2000, when Democrat Al Gore won Pennsylvania but narrowly lost the national electoral vote; and 2004, when Democrat John Kerry won the Keystone State.

Pennsylvanians have only voted for a Republican presidential candidate in years when Republicans won the national election by particularly large margins: twice for Eisenhower, twice for Nixon's reelection, and twice for Reagan.

Pennsylvania returns to the swing states in the 21st century

But in a series of closely contested presidential elections early this century, Republicans began to sense an opportunity for Pennsylvania to play a role in the national Electoral College tally.

The proliferation of state political polls allowed campaigns to gauge state-by-state voting trends. Most states turned out to vote reliably for one party in every presidential election, and the labeling of “blue states” and “red states” began after the 2000 election. This left only a few battleground states with close poll results that were deemed essential to victory.

During the 2000 election campaign, the media repeatedly emphasized that Pennsylvania, Florida, and Michigan were key battleground states, based on polls and electoral vote counts. When Gore was announced as having won all three states early on election night, everyone assumed he would become president. However, later that night, the prediction that Gore would win Florida was retracted, and a lengthy legal battle ended with George W. Bush becoming president.

Pennsylvania continued to be seen as a likely Republican win state in the next three presidential elections, despite Democrats winning each time, and Republican efforts were sometimes criticized in the media and among political consultants as futile.

Pennsylvania flipped to Trump, then to Biden

But after Trump took office in 2016, Republicans made inroads in Pennsylvania, not only becoming the first Republican to win the state for president since George H.W. Bush in 1988, but also outperforming the national average.

Decisive factors included Trump's popularity in the state's rural areas and the Pittsburgh suburbs, and Hillary Clinton's failure to campaign in many cities outside the state's two largest metropolitan areas. Trump won unexpected (but very small) victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that year, widening his margin of victory in the Electoral College, and those three key battleground states have focused national media and political attention ever since.

Biden, a Scranton, Pennsylvania, native, recaptured the state for Democrats in 2020. But Trump still won a higher percentage of the vote in Pennsylvania than the national average.

In a 2024 rematch of the 2020 election, both sides are likely to continue to focus much of their time and resources on the Keystone State as one of their main opportunities to win an electoral majority in November.