Yesterday on the floor of the Democratic convention, Ed Rendell, former Philadelphia mayor, Pennsylvania governor and DNC chairman, told me that Hillary Clinton would carry Pennsylvania because “for every vote we lose in western Pennsylvania, we’ll gain a vote in the Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh suburbs.”
Those votes would come, he suggested, from college-educated suburban women opposed to Republican stands on cultural issues and repelled, this year, by Donald Trump. That first explanation has been the standard one for some time, since Bill Clinton carried suburban Bucks, Delaware and Montgomery Counties outside Philadelphia in 1992 after George H. W. Bush had won them by double digit margins in 1988. The abortion issue (“choice”) did it.
That’s one explanation for this trend, apparent in affluent suburban counties outside the South and excluding Wisconsin. But there’s another explanation, I think, and that is that many of these counties have populations with increasing black percentages. The New York Times’ wonderful Mapping the Census graphic shows that in 2010 Delaware County’s population was 19 percent black and Montgomery’s 8 percent. Similarly, Oakland County, Michigan, once a Republican stronghold, was 13 percent black, and those percentages have probably risen since 2010.
The new black residents in these counties may be demographically upscale, but they also vote heavily Democratic. The question in 2016 is whether they will turn out in as great a numbers and give the Democratic nominee as high a percentage as they did in 2008 and 2012. My guess is no, but that any decline might be offset by new black residents, probably 90 percent Democratic, replacing whites who probably voted somewhere around 50 percent Democratic. Interestingly, Bucks County, only 3 percent black, voted just 50 to 49 percent for Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, while Delaware and Montgomery voted 60 and 57 percent for Obama.
This article by political demographer Brandon Finnigan in National Review takes a closer look at Pennsylvania’s demographic. Finnigan argues that Donald Trump has a real chance to win Pennsylvania, even granting Democrats big margins in Delaware and Montgomery Counties. My sense is that “choice” is not as important issue to women, at least those under 50, as it has been in the past, and that Democratic strength in the suburbs will depend increasingly on black voters.
