Former President Donald J. Trump has won Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes, according to The Associated Press, flipping the crucial swing state back to his column after President Biden’s victory there in 2020.
Pennsylvania was the largest prize among the swing states, and its trove of electoral votes was vital to Vice President Kamala Harris’s quest to hold the three “blue wall” states skirting the Great Lakes, a group that includes Michigan and Wisconsin.
Of all the battlegrounds, Pennsylvania’s diversity and size made it unique, a testing ground for appeals to rural and urban voters, industrial towns and sophisticated suburbs, and Black, Hispanic, white and Asian voters.
The stakes were made clear by recent history: Mr. Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania and in the Upper Midwest in 2016 sealed his startling upset of Hillary Clinton. Four years later, Mr. Biden’s triumph there ended the 2020 election, securing Mr. Trump’s defeat and the end of his presidency.
Both Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris made Pennsylvania their top prize, dumping more money into it than any other state by far. And it was in rural Butler, Pa., that a would-be assassin nearly took Mr. Trump’s life in July, an event that had an instant impact in Pennsylvania and beyond. Mr. Trump returned to Butler in October with Elon Musk, his billionaire benefactor, and in the closing weeks of the campaign, the former president held rallies in Erie, Allentown and, on Monday, Reading and Pittsburgh.
Republicans made significant gains across Pennsylvania in Tuesday’s election, holding or pushing key rural counties — Mr. Trump’s core base in the state — further right.
But Mr. Trump also won a sizable number of votes in key urban areas where Ms. Harris needed to count on high Democratic turnout. Lackawanna and Lehigh Counties shifted more than five percentage points toward Mr. Trump compared with his support in 2020. The counties contain the crucial eastern Pennsylvania cities of Scranton, Mr. Biden’s hometown, and Allentown. As of early Wednesday morning, Ms. Harris was leading in each county, but by a margin over five points slimmer than Mr. Biden’s in 2020.
Even Pennsylvania’s junior senator, John Fetterman, a Democrat with strong working-class appeal, acknowledged the bond that Pennsylvanians had with Mr. Trump.
“You can see the intensity,” Mr. Fetterman said a week before the election. “It’s astonishing.”
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