HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Republicans scored historic victories in Pennsylvania this week, winning the state’s valuable presidential primary, gaining two seats in the U.S. House of Representatives delegation and capturing all four state offices. have swept the ballot, including a U.S. Senate seat.
The strong performance means Donald Trump has won Pennsylvania in two out of three tries, after Republicans lost six consecutive presidential elections there.
Something similar happened in the other ‘blue wall’ states of Michigan and Wisconsin, in the Rust Belt states, where Trump again prevailed after his defeat in 2020. Still, Democrats held on in key Senate races in Wisconsin and Michigan, although just barely, and the results played a major role. different in every state.
The Republican victories were most pronounced in Pennsylvania, a state that was early labeled as this year’s leading swing state, where deep dissatisfaction with the status quo surfaced, more often than not to the Republicans’ advantage.
Voters had the economy on their minds.
The voters were in a bad mood
About a third of voters nationwide, including in blue wall states, said they felt like their families were “falling behind” financially, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide. That was an increase from 2020, when about 2 in 10 felt this way. In 2020, a majority of financially strapped voters voted for President Joe Biden, but this year about two-thirds supported Trump.
Berwood Yost, director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania, said Democrats faced a lot of pushback among swing voters: their deteriorating personal finances, fueled by inflation, and the feeling that many blamed Biden.
Yost said Vice President Kamala Harris ran a strong campaign but was unable to overcome headwinds.
“The mood among the electorate was so negative that they took it out on the incumbent party,” Yost said.
Some voters’ memories of Trump’s presidency improved as time passed. VoteCast shows that only 40% of Pennsylvania voters said they approved of Biden’s performance, while 54% said they approved of Trump when he was president. Four years ago, Trump’s approval rating in Pennsylvania was 49%.
In his victory over Harris, Trump won Pennsylvania by about 2%, with votes still being counted. That was about three times the margin of his 2016 victory. He lost Pennsylvania in 2020 by just over 1% to Biden.
Trump led Wisconsin by less than a point, as he did in 2016, after losing it by about half a percentage point in 2020.
In Michigan, Trump won by about 80,000 votes — many times his nearly 11,000-vote victory in 2016 and about half the margin of his 2020 loss to Biden.
In Pennsylvania, Trump gained ground in Democratic-friendly counties statewide, including Democratic bastion Philadelphia and the densely populated suburbs that swung hard against Trump in 2016 and 2020.
In Trump-friendly suburbs and rural areas, his margins grew across the board.
His strength also helped David McCormick defeat three-term Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, Republicans say, allowing them to retake the Senate seat the GOP lost in 2022 when Democrat John Fetterman replaced retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey.
In addition, a two-seat pickup shifted the state’s congressional delegation from 9-8 in favor of Democrats to a 10-7 Republican majority, giving the GOP a valuable boost in its fight for control of the House of Representatives. Retain delegates.
And for the first time since the attorney general’s office became an elected position in 1980, Republicans will hold all three statewide offices.
That includes treasurer, auditor general and attorney general, a position that was thrust into the national spotlight four years ago when Trump filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn his 2020 defeat.
The seats in the legislature were virtually unchanged: Republicans expected to maintain their majority in the Senate and hoped to undo the Democrats’ one-seat majority in the House of Representatives.
With more Republicans in the Capitol, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro — who made Harris a list of finalists for vice president — could be under more pressure to work across the aisle.
Trump visited Pennsylvania more than any other state and often brought Republicans to the stage.
Trump survived an assassination attempt in western Pennsylvania last summer — then returned there for a second rally — and drew a crowd to a McDonald’s in a politically divided suburb of Philadelphia, where he donned an apron and tried his hand at the chip shop.
Trump campaigned in conservative white areas, in heavily black Philadelphia and in a fast-growing belt of cities from Lancaster to Reading and Allentown where Latinos are settling, and AP VoteCast showed him benefiting from modest swings among traditionally Democratic voters.
Across the country, and in Pennsylvania, a clear majority of black and Latino voters supported Harris, but slightly more of them supported Trump this year compared to four years ago.
“I told Donald Trump in 2015 when he asked ‘what do I have to do to win Pennsylvania,’ I said, ‘come here often, Pennsylvanians like to know their candidates,’” said Rob Gleason, chairman of the state GOP at the time .
In Wisconsin and Michigan, Republicans won, but not by much
Democrats had a much better night in Wisconsin than in the other “blue wall” states, despite Trump’s victory.
Trump cut Democratic margins in the counties surrounding Milwaukee and Madison, and maintained or strengthened his margins in rural areas, suburbs and other conservative areas.
“There were a lot of people who thought we couldn’t do this,” said Brian Schimming, chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin. “That blue brick in that blue wall is now red in Wisconsin.”
Still, Democrats were buoyed by U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s narrow victory, and newly enacted legislative maps drawn by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers helped his party.
They made gains in both the Senate and Assembly, reducing the Republican Senate supermajority to a simple majority.
In Michigan, Harris carried Wayne County, which includes Detroit and suburbs with large Arab-American populations, but by a much smaller margin — about 90,000 votes — than Biden’s. Meanwhile, Trump increased his margins by more than 55,000 votes in two other large suburban counties, Macomb and Oakland.
Democrat Elissa Slotkin narrowly won Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, but Democrats lost the House seat she vacated to run for the upper chamber.
Meanwhile, they lost their majority in the state House, ending a two-year period in which a Democratic-controlled state House passed new laws on gun safety, abortion rights and other top priorities.
Republicans say Trump’s embrace of early voting and emphasis on inflation and immigration was effective.
In Pennsylvania, some Democrats said Harris should have chosen Shapiro as her running mate. Others suggested that Biden, who grew up in Pennsylvania and made it his presidential campaign base, would have done better.
Former Gov. Ed Rendell questioned whether Harris’ campaign responded effectively to attacks in the nation’s No. 2 natural gas state that it would ban fracking. According to VoteCast, two-thirds of Pennsylvania voters support the expansion of fracking.
Larry Maggi, a Democratic county commissioner in working-class Washington County just outside Pittsburgh, said Harris didn’t connect with people — especially men, and especially young white men — the way Trump did.
“That bravado talk, that tough talk, those kind of people,” Maggi said. “It resonated.”
Maggi, a Marine Corps veteran, recalled a conversation over beers in a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall with a friend wearing a red MAGA hat.
Maggi asked him why he likes Trump.
“Because he tells it like it is,” the friend replied.
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Associated Press journalists Hannah Fingerhut in Washington, Joseph Frederick in Philadelphia, Joey Cappelletti in Detroit and Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin, contributed to this report.
