Election Prophesy: Pennsylvania

On February 3, 2015, shortly after the 2014 mid-term election, I pointed out that Pennsylvania had become a key swing state, that it was trending Republican (even though the state hadn’t voted GOP for president since 1988).  In “Swinging Pennsylvania. Who knew?”, I wrote:

Pennsylvania has 18 congressional districts, 13 Republican, 5 Democratic. Both houses of the state legislature are Republican. And why not? The bulk of the state is Appalachia (see map [below]), dominated by the lower income white population that is leaving the Democratic Party, their cousins having already delivered West Virginia to the GOP.

Four months later, in a post titled, “Quinnipiac Poll Shock: Trump Catches Clinton in 3 Crucial States,” I called the Quinnipiac Poll “a blog favorite,” because it “rightly considers Pennsylvania, along with Florida and Ohio, one of three swing states that could well decide the 2016 election.”

Finally a year after that, this past June, I published “If 2016 is about race, Trump could win,” where I said the Keystone State “is THE key state, as was Florida to Bush’s win in 2000 and Ohio to Bush’s re-election in 2004.”

Pennsylvania, along with Florida and Ohio which George W. Bush won in both 2000 and 2004, plus all the states Romney had carried in 2012, gave Trump 273 electoral votes of a needed 270, just enough to win.