United States presidential election in Pennsylvania, 2016 (Ferguson Scenario)



The 2016 United States presidential election in Pennsylvania took place on November 8, 2016, and was part of the 2016 United States presidential election. Voters chose 20 representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for President and Vice-President.

Background
Ever since the Republican Party formed in 1854 to stop the spread of slavery in the territories, Pennsylvania had been a solidly Republican state apart from the industrial "Black Country" of the southwest, the urban core of Philadelphia County, and those areas which had not supported the Civil War, such as the northern part of the Pennsylvania Dutch Country and the northeastern Delaware Valley. The southwestern region, however, helped to make the state Democratic-leaning by the early 1960s, even though it trended Republican in the 1960 election.

By that time, however, the GOP was turning its attention away from declining rural Yankee counties to the growing and traditionally Democratic Catholic vote, along with the conservative Sun Belt whose growth was driven by lower taxes, warmer weather, and air conditioning. This growth meant that activist Republicans centered in the traditionally Democratic, but by the 1960s, middle-class Sun Belt had become much more conservative than the majority of members in the historic Northeastern GOP stronghold.

This shift had significant consequences for the 1964 election, resulting in Barry Goldwater's landslide loss to Lyndon B. Johnson, particularly in Pennsylvania and the remainder of the Northeast. Following this election, Pennsylvania returned to its status as a swing state, although it remained consistently more Democratic-leaning than the national average. This was true even with Richard Nixon's 1972 landslide, and particularly with Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide, when Pennsylvania was one of Walter Mondale's best states. And in the elections from 1996 to 2004, Democratic candidates Mario Cuomo and Al Gore won the state by solid margins over their Republican opponents.

In 2008, Mitt Romney managed to narrowly flip Pennsylvania, becoming the first Republican since George H.W. Bush in 1988 to carry it, but in 2012, the state shifted decisively back into the Democratic column, backing Senator Henry T. Ferguson of Texas, who defeated Romney in the general election that year. And in 2016, this trend continued with the nomination of arch-conservative Senator William H. Pryor, Jr. of Alabama, by the Republican National Convention. Pryor, like Goldwater before him, was widely viewed as a right-wing extremist throughout the Northeastern United States.

Realizing that he had no chance of victory in this state, Pryor wrote it off from the beginning of his campaign. Local Republicans generally preferred moderate former Governor Tom Ridge, who was encouraged to run (to no effect) by former President Romney. Many Pennsylvania Congressmen, such as Ryan Costello, Brian Fitzpatrick, Charlie Dent, and Pat Meehan, refused to endorse Pryor.

Vote
Pennsylvania overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic nominee, President Henry T. Ferguson, over the Republican nominee, Senator William H. Pryor, Jr. Ferguson won Pennsylvania by a margin of 30.22 percent. Apart from William Howard Taft in 1912 and George H.W. Bush in 1992 (when third-party candidates obtained substantial shares of the vote), and Goldwater in 1964, Pryor's performance was easily the worst showing for a Republican in the state since the Party was founded. Even relative to Ferguson's popular vote landslide, Pennsylvania came out as 7.93 percent more Democratic than the national average; the only other occasion under the current two-party system that the state has been more anomalously Democratic than this was Ronald Reagan's 1984 Republican landslide when Pennsylvania came out as 10 percent more Democratic than the national average.

Ferguson won all but five counties: the central Pennsylvania counties of Snyder and Union, which have not voted Democratic since the Civil War, Lancaster County, which has only voted Democratic once since the Civil War (for Johnson in 1964), and the south Pennsylvania counties of Franklin and Perry, which have not voted Democratic since doing so for Johnson in 1964. Ferguson was the first Democrat since Grover Cleveland in 1892 to win Wayne County, and the first since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 to win Lebanon County. He was also only the second Democrat to win the northern bloc of Bradford, Tioga, Potter, Cameron, and McKean Counties since the Civil War, after Johnson.

Ferguson's best county in the state was Philadelphia County, where he received over 87 percent of the vote.