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Pennsylvania remains 'keystone state' in presidential elections
By Robert Speel, Penn State,
7 hours ago
Pennsylvania's role as a swing state in presidential elections is a modern continuation of a characteristic noted as early as 1802. At a rally celebrating the election victory of President Thomas Jefferson , Pennsylvania was reportedly referred to as " the keystone of the federal union " -- a keystone being the central stone in an arch that keeps all the other arch stones in place.
President Joe Biden (L) and Vice President Kamala Harris campaign at Girard College in Philadelphia in May. File Photo by Laurence Kesterson/UPI
Since the nation's earliest days, Pennsylvania has in many ways been at the center of the action. The state hosted the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in the 1770s and was the final state to make approval of the Declaration of Independence unanimous in July 1776. At the time of independence, Pennsylvania was also at the geographical center of the 13 original Colonies, with six states to its south and six states to its north and east.
The state hasn't always been a swing state, but it has usually been central to presidential campaigns -- and remains so today. Pennsylvania includes voters with a broad range of political views, usually keeping results close in statewide elections.
Meanwhile, the often-overlooked smaller metro areas of Pennsylvania, like Harrisburg, Allentown-Bethlehem, Erie and Scranton, are the true swing areas of the swing state .
Pennsylvania transitions from swing state to solid Republican
Through the 1940s, Pennsylvania continued to support Republican presidential candidates more than the rest of the country did as a whole. But then the state switched abruptly and began to support Democratic presidential candidates by margins larger than the nation's electorate as a whole for 60 years from 1952 through 2012.
That is partly because the power of the Republican political machine in Philadelphia disintegrated. There has been no Republican mayor there since 1952 .
When the South began to trend Republican in the 1950s and 1960s, and Philadelphia became more Democratic, the state of Pennsylvania also became more Democratic than the country as a whole in presidential elections. Pennsylvania continued to lack status as a swing state in Electoral College politics, as Democrats won all the close presidential elections there for 60 years, even when Republicans won nationwide. That included 1968, when Democrat Hubert Humphrey won the state; 2000, when Democrat Al Gore won Pennsylvania, but lost a close and disputed national electoral vote; and 2004, when Democrat John Kerry won the Keystone State.
The years when Pennsylvanians voted for a Republican presidential candidate were only those when the Republican won the nation as a whole by particularly large margins -- twice for Eisenhower, for Nixon's reelection, and twice for Reagan.
Pennsylvania returns to swing state status in the 21st century
However, early this century, in a series of closely contested presidential elections, Republicans began to sense opportunities for Pennsylvania to play a role in national Electoral College calculations.
The proliferation of state political polling meant campaigns could determine state-specific voting trends. Most states were found to reliably vote for one party in every presidential election -- spawning the labeling of "blue states" and "red states" that began after the 2000 election. That left only a small number of swing states with close polls to be perceived as crucial for victory.
During the 2000 election campaign, the media repeatedly emphasized that Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan were the key battleground states , based on polling and on their large share of electoral votes. When Gore was announced the winner of all three states early on election night, everyone assumed that he would therefore become president. However, later that night, the projection that Gore won Florida was retracted, leading to a long legal battle that ended with George W. Bush as president.
In the 2024 rematch of the 2020 election, both campaigns will likely continue to focus a lot of time and resources on the Keystone State as one of the main opportunities for an Electoral College majority in November.
Robert Speel is an associate professor of political science at Erie Campus, Penn State . This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article . The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
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