When Donald Trump came to Scranton as a presidential candidate in 2016, he made a promise that earned a standing ovation from the crowd.
Trump said he would bring large-scale anthracite mining back to northeastern Pennsylvania, even though much of the industry had died out by the 1950s.
That message galvanized the largely working-class crowd, as did much of Trump’s speech, said Chris Borick, who was in the audience that day and is now a professor of political science and director of the Institute of Public Opinion at Muhlenberg College in Allentown .
Trump won that election with strong support from the region, including Schuylkill County, where he received almost 70 percent of the vote, a percentage that has barely increased in the two subsequent presidential elections.
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Trump’s failure to restore coal mining in the area does not seem as important to his base as his pitch, Borick said.
Trump tells them the government has largely abandoned the region, including Schuylkill County, and promises to regain the support of those people, Borick said.
“It’s not necessarily the details they’re looking at, but the broader argument that he’s on their side,” Borick said. “Even if the evidence isn’t always there, they believe in him. His message absolutely resonates here, and his core doesn’t deviate that much.”
According to the final but unofficial results, Trump received 51,416 votes in Schuylkill County and Vice President Kamala Harris received 20,729.
Many of those who voted for Trump feel the global economy has hurt them, so they like his promises on tariffs, his plans to restrict free trade, and also his bombastic style, Borick said.
“They feel that they have been sold out by corporate elites, and that government economic policies have not protected them. Trump took advantage of that,” he said. “There’s no denying he’s a master salesman. He has been that way all his life.”
The district’s demographics also align well with Trump’s, with an above-average percentage of whites, an older population and a high concentration of working-class voters, he said.
“That is the core of his constituency,” Borick said.
Trump won all but one of Schuylkill County’s 125 voting precincts this election, with the exception of Pottsville’s Third Precinct, which Harris won by 15 votes.
This means that Trump has virtually won the province for the third election in a row. While his Republican predecessors — John McCain and Mitt Romney — won Schuylkill in 2008 and 2012, they didn’t come close to the vote share that Trump has, and both lost their races to President Barack Obama.
McCain received 53.1 percent of the votes from Schuylkill and Romney 55.6 percent, while Trump received 69.4, 69 and 70.5 percent in 2016, 2020 and 2024, respectively.
The percentage of Schuylkill voters registered as Republicans has grown over the past 15 years, which has benefited Trump, but he also caused some of that party switching, said Berwood Yost, director of the Center for Opinion Research and also from the Floyd. Institute of Public Policy at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster.
The Republican Party currently has a more than 2-1 lead in registered voters in Schuylkill, according to the county elections office.
“The county has gone from moderately Republican to strongly Republican,” Yost said, and the same is true for much of northeastern Pennsylvania. “Things have definitely taken a turn.”
That’s largely because working-class white voters are attracted to Trump’s promises, especially those who live in counties where college graduation rates are lower and median household incomes are below the state average, he said.
Many of those voters who have struggled with inflation have blamed Biden and Harris for those higher prices, he said.
“They feel abandoned,” he said, and they expect Trump to change that.
Among Schuylkill County municipalities and election districts, Trump achieved his highest total in South Manheim Township, where 1,348 voters voted for him, representing 74.4% of the vote.
He won more than 80% of the vote in 10 precincts led by Eldred Township where he won 84.9% of the vote, followed by Upper Mahantongo Township at 83.8, Hegins Township East at 81.8 percent, Hubley Township at 81.5, Tremont Township at 81, Porter Township east at 80.6, Porter Township west at 80.5, Tower City at 80.4, the first district of Pine Grove Township at 80.3 and Washington Township south at 80.2.
With many tight races at the national and state levels, Trump also likely increased the vote totals among other Republican candidates just enough to give them narrow victories, Borick said.
If the Democratic party wants to increase the number of registered voters, it needs to do a better job of talking about its candidates’ successes in helping workers and families, said Todd Zimmerman, chairman of the Schuylkill County Democratic Committee.
For example, he said that President Joe Biden’s infrastructure legislation helped fund the reconstruction of Route 61 between St. Clair and Frackville, that his CHIPS and Science Act has boosted local manufacturing, that his work on lowering drug prices has significantly reduced the cost of insulin and other drugs. widely used prescriptions, and his economic policies have lowered unemployment and, more recently, inflation and interest rates.
Zimmerman worries that if Trump makes good on his promise of mass deportation, there will be a labor shortage in sectors where immigrants now do most of the work, ranging from picking lettuce to roofing.
“It could be a rude awakening,” he said. “We need those employees.”
Yet many still think Trump is the one most likely to help the working class, Zimmerman said. The economy is already strong and likely to continue that trend, which many will attribute to the new president, he said.
Schuylkill County Republican County Chairman Gary Feathers was not available for comment.
Zimmerman advised the next Democratic presidential candidate to visit more locations that have benefited from their policies and host fewer rallies.
In Schuylkill, there were actually almost 500 more voters for Harris this election than for Biden in 2020, Zimmerman said, which was the party’s goal.
But that wasn’t the case in many counties, including Philadelphia, where Harris received fewer votes than Biden, not because people switched to Trump but because they didn’t vote at all, he said.
That is a problem the party must solve, he said.
“The Democrats haven’t come out,” he said. “It’s our fault.”
