As Erie County Goes
Erie County, PA has voted for the winner in the last four presidential elections. What does it look like for 2024?
David Urban knows Donald Trump can win Pennsylvania. In 2016, the native Pennsylvanian and former senior advisor to Trump helped deliver the Keystone State for Republicans. But in 2024, the BGR senior strategist sees a muddled map. Mystified by the “irrational exuberance for Vice President Kamala Harris,” he observed, “There are no themes except: we are not Trump and abortion.” Despite this, he admitted, “If we [Republicans] don’t pivot quickly, it will be hard. The Dems are so jacked-up.”
Urban is not focused on Pennsylvania out of home-state sentimentality. Most political observers understand that Pennsylvania is the tipping-point state—the state most likely to put either Trump or Harris over the 270 hump in the Electoral College.
Sure, Harris and Trump can theoretically win the Electoral College without it. But losing Pennsylvania makes that task immensely more difficult.
Victory in Pennsylvania runs through Erie County. As Urban told me, “Erie County is disproportionately important.” Tucked into the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, Erie County borders Ohio (to the west), Lake Erie (to the north), and New York (to the east), and makes up two percent of the state’s population. More than half of residents live in the city of Erie and its suburbs, while the remaining reside in small towns and rural communities. Erie County is also a good bellwether for statewide performance: in the 19 presidential contests since 1948, Erie voted the way of the state all but once (1988). In 25 statewide races since 2008, the county voted for the winner 23 times. In 2016, Erie went for Trump by a narrow margin (1,957 votes), and four years later, Joe Biden took the county by an even slighter edge (1,417 votes).
A microcosm of the state’s working-class electorate, Erie County is whiter, older, poorer, and less educated than the statewide average. But the city of Erie (population 93,517) is more urban and diverse, home to a sizable population of African Americans (16 percent) and foreign-born residents (6.6 percent). While the county’s overall electorate is home to a large enough bloc of traditional Democratic constituencies to make it winnable for the party, voters here are not so heavily Democratic that even weak party nominees are guaranteed to win.
Ethan Kibbe, a local reporter, put it best: “Candidates learn quickly that they can’t win Pennsylvania without Erie County. If you want to appeal to the average Pennsylvanian, you have to appeal to the average Erieite.” And the average Democrat here can be quite different from the average Democrat in, say, Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. Ejay Fyke, a local liberal campaign advisor, told me, “I know a lot of [area] Democrats with assault rifles.”
In 2016, Trump cracked the code in breaking through to many Erie Democrats. His denunciation of globalization played well in a region where blue-collar roots run deep, deindustrialization hit workers hard, and many still look to the industrial golden age with gauzy romanticism. But most of those jobs are now gone—and, with them, many Erieites. As of 2022, the county’s population was just above its 1960 mark, and its population had fallen by five percent since 2010. Nearly every family in the region has a son, daughter, or best friend who moved to the Sun Belt for work.
Trump’s campaign message in Erie that year was the political equivalent of classic rock: jobs, jobs, jobs. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, never visited the area (although her husband Bill and her vice presidential running mate, Tim Kaine, both campaigned for her in Erie). Magnifying that perceived cold shoulder, the Clinton campaign never even bothered to distribute yard signs. Sam Talarico, Erie County’s Democratic chair, recalled the importance of this, telling me: “Yard signs are pretty big in Erie. They kind of give you a sense of the enthusiasm. I know Hillary wasn’t big on yard signs 8 years ago. Yard signs say enthusiasm and people are paying attention.” Yard signs may not vote, but folks in Erie took note. Fyke said it was common for Erie County voters to tell him, “I used to be a Democrat, but they don’t care about us anymore.”
Democrats hit bottom in Erie the year Trump won. There was no cavalry coming to the rescue. A local Democratic insider admitted to me, “The Pennsylvania state Democratic Party only cares about Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.” New Democratic Party County Chair Jim Wertz took charge and changed course. To national strategists, the conventional wisdom is that Pennsylvania beyond Pittsburgh and Philadelphia is too big and too rural to organize. But Wertz zigged where others had zagged.
Opening satellite offices in Erie County’s outlying towns, Wertz rebuilt the party infrastructure. Spending only a few hundred dollars, he opened an office in Union City, which reminded rural Democrats that they were not alone. Upon seeing a brick-and-mortar headquarters, a local dairy farmer phoned Wertz, exclaiming, “Hot damn, we have not seen Democrats here in 25 years.” Wertz’s strategy reduced the party’s rural margins of defeat in 2020 and boosted their margins in the city of Erie and its suburbs, as Biden earned 10,000 more votes in the county than Clinton four years prior and narrowly carried it by one point—almost exactly mirroring his statewide margin (1.2 points) over Trump.
Biden’s “everyman” persona and Scranton roots played well in Erie four years ago. But in 2024, Erie Democrats, like others across the nation, began having second thoughts. As Talarico described it, “We had so many people tell us that he [Biden] really needs to get out.” With Biden, Talarico saw a trickle of volunteers, but the entry of Harris into the race has charged local Democrats. “People are calling and asking, ‘What can I do?’ Canvassing and phone banking are way up. And the interest is way up. So, everything is pointing in the right direction right now we’re doing the things we think we need to do,” he said.
A well-funded and organized campaign does not promise victory. Urban points to the issues, saying, “We [Trump] did it before, we can do it again.” To do so, Urban counseled, “the [former] president needs to get refocused on the issues.” Urban is correct. Harris’s 2019 stances on fracking, gun buy-backs, and illegal border crossings are kryptonite to Erie County’s normies. Still, Urban admits, Trump is struggling to effectively hit Harris on what are real political weaknesses, admitting that Trump is “terrible at talking about policy accomplishments. When he is off-prompter he is much more fired-up about the hand-to-hand political combat.”
Locally, the Trump campaign is as dysfunctional as its candidate. In 2020, the Erie County GOP organization was essentially defunct. A new county chair is energetic and capable, but old habits persist. Local Republicans are reportedly at odds with one another. Moreover, Trump continues to resist mail-in voting, even as Democrats have made effective use of it in recent elections.
Meanwhile, Democrats have invested heavily in Erie for 2024—and in Pennsylvania in general. The Harris campaign just opened its 50th office in the state in August, and they appear to have an advantage in Erie once again this cycle. Democrats will possess a well-oiled political organization, while the GOP continues to be roiled by infighting. Four years ago, this organizational strength led Pennsylvania Democrats to victory. In the short-term, this is good news for Democrats.
However, the long-term picture looks different. As the national party has shifted more to reflect the policy priorities and views of highly educated urbanites, many of Erie’s normie Democrats feel abandoned. After 2016, the party began to pay more attention to rural voters, and this cycle, the Harris campaign has lavished attention upon the city of Erie. To support the local party, the Harris-Walz campaign rented office space from Erie Democrats before opening its own brick-and-mortar headquarters. This is staffed not by novices but by professionals who cut their teeth in U.S. Senate campaigns.
In August, the campaign planned for Erie to be Harris and Walz’s final joint appearance before the Chicago Convention. This event was undone by logistics (the local police were occupied with a large summer festival). Walz and Harris toured Western Pennsylvania, instead. Walz, however, compensated for this near-miss with a raucous rally in Erie during the first week of September. A Harris visit is all but inevitable, and she will reportedly be followed by a series of “super-surrogates.”
But organizing only sticks if good governance follows. One example of what this could look like comes from the state’s new Democratic governor. In summer 2023, an overpass along I-95 near Philadelphia collapsed. Many observers predicted it would take months of reconstruction, and that the economic damage wrought by transportation delays would cost the state billions. Then, Governor Josh Shapiro coordinated a strong response and rebuilt it in just 12 days, for which he was widely lauded.
One year later, another set of Pennsylvania bridges were destroyed. As the remnants of Hurricane Debby devastated towns and infrastructure across rural, north-central Pennsylvania, Shapiro dispatched emergency responders and declared a state of emergency. But unlike in Philadelphia, he made no immediate in-person visit, and state officials have termed the reconstruction timeline for the region’s bridges and many roads “long term closure.”
Shapiro’s masterful response to the I-95 bridge collapse rightly earned him political stardom, but when a storm wreaked havoc on a far-flung and sparsely populated area, the state’s reaction was noticeably less robust. The episode reminds me of what a Democratic strategist recently told me: “Voters see we are quick to help corporations but not regular people. They think, you aren’t doing anything for me.”
Nearly a month after the devastating floods, Shapiro visited the region. In conversations with residents who have lost homes and property, he repeatedly offered, “I’m so sorry.” That’s a good start, but rural Pennsylvanians, like Philadelphians, also deserve robust action. That is Shapiro’s real test.
In Erie and across Pennsylvania, the Harris campaign holds the organizational advantage. Democrats will push the early mail-in vote and then canvass the stragglers on Election Day. That may very well prove the difference in a close contest.
Over the long term, though, Democrats cannot build an enduring majority in the state by performing political miracles only in Philadelphia. Folks in Erie don’t expect a miracle, but they do want good-paying jobs so their grandkids will live down the street once again. Whichever candidate figures this out first will likely pull out a close victory in Pennsylvania’s bellwether county.
Jeff Bloodworth is a professor of history at Gannon University (Erie, PA). Bloodworth holds a Ph.D. in modern United States history from Ohio University’s Contemporary History Institute. (Twitter: @jhueybloodworth)