An old highway tells the story of Pennsylvania’s historic realignment, years in the making and solidified last Tuesday, when Republicans swept every elected statewide office—from U.S. president and Senate to row offices—for the first time since 1980. Nearly a century old, Route 309 begins around the northeast’s Wyoming Valley, continues through Luzerne County then past the Blue Mountain ridge and onward to the Lehigh Valley, where it passes Pennsylvania Dutch communities and enters suburban Philadelphia’s Bucks County before terminating at the state’s biggest city. Not long ago, Route 309 covered regions that exemplified Democrats’ commonwealth blue wall. But last week, in a dramatic red shift hastened by demographic outcomes improbable even in 2016, the areas around Route 309 proved most pivotal to Donald Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania, a key component of his White House win over Kamala Harris.
This highway long ran through reliable Democratic territory. This trend dates back to a day in October 1960, when John F. Kennedy’s campaign caravan traveled on Route 309 as it targeted working-class Catholic voters in small industrial cities and towns. Kennedy enthusiasm subsequently led Democrats to surpass Republicans in voter registration for the first time in Pennsylvania history. Since 2016, however, these same cities and towns have flipped red, leading to realigned counties like a Republican-majority Luzerne. Here, the descendants of ancestral Democrats have become Trump Republicans; last week, more recent Latino arrivals in these communities aligned with lifelong natives in supporting Trump.
The Latino shift in Republicans’ favor was dramatically evident in Luzerne County’s Hazleton, a small city where Route 309 runs through the downtown and past the old Altamont Hotel, the site of a Kennedy stump speech before 12,000 on that October 1960 day. Trump won every ward in Hazleton, where Trump’s overall vote share—62 percent—matched Latinos’ share of the city population. Even in 2016, when Luzerne’s voting margins fueled Trump’s narrow statewide victory, Hazleton still favored Hillary Clinton, though Joe Biden handily lost the city in 2020. This Election Day, the enthusiasm for Trump was hard to miss in Hazleton, where I spent the evening watching returns with friends. In the city’s Nanny Goat Hill section, an historically Italian neighborhood once reliably Democratic, residents displayed Trump regalia outside their homes. In that neighborhood alone, Trump carried nearly 65 percent of the vote.
Hazleton is a case study of political irony. Nearly 20 years ago, the city attracted national attention when its then-mayor, Lou Barletta, passed a municipal ordinance on illegal immigration that a court struck down. Barletta, who served four terms as a Republican congressman, was among Trump’s earliest supporters in 2016, and Hazletonians—in a county carried twice by Barack Obama—aligned with Trump’s message on the economy, immigration, and foreign policy. This year, Trump’s message once again reverberated in Hazleton, including among Latinos. In an interview with the local newspaper, one Latino woman cited inflation, and when asked about deportations, answered through an interpreter: “It’s not our worry. Trump can do what he wants.” Meantime, locally and throughout Luzerne, while the Trump campaign enjoyed record support among Latinos, the Harris campaign attempted to court Polish-American voters over the war in Ukraine—but without much success. “There are people at this table who are strong Trump supporters because we want this war to end,” one voter in the region told Politico. Overall, compared with 2020, Trump’s statewide gains were most significant in northeastern Pennsylvania, including around Biden’s hometown of Scranton.
The Trump momentum continued southward on Route 309, in Schuylkill County. His support was all-encompassing in a region once known for blue-dog Democrats, most notably Tim Holden, the then-senior member of Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation in 2012, when he lost in a primary to Democrat Matt Cartwright, who was unseated by Republican Rob Bresnahan last week. In this county, where the highway traverses forested remnants of the anthracite coal industry, Trump carried 71 percent of vote, except for one Pottsville precinct that includes the tony street long ago chronicled by John O’Hara in his novels of Pennsylvania’s upper crust.
Through the Blue Mountain ridge—site of a wildfire on election eve—Route 309 continues in the Lehigh Valley, including in Schnecksville, where Trump held his first major campaign event last spring. This year, Democrats’ voter registration advantage in this populous region—mirroring statewide trends—markedly dropped to 7 points over Republicans. Last week, Republicans overperformed in Lehigh County while flipping Northampton County. According to a Morning Call analysis, some of Trump’s biggest gains came in Allentown—Pennsylvania’s Latino-majority, third-largest city—where some wards saw a 25-point swing in the incoming president’s favor compared with 2020. Overall, Trump’s performance in this region of warehouses fueled Republican state representative Ryan Mackenzie’s congressional victory against Democratic incumbent Susan Wild. Trump’s best showing was in Northampton’s semi-rural, blue-collar Upper Mount Bethel Township. In Harris’s case, the vice president performed best in the three Lehigh Valley precincts encompassing Muhlenberg, Lafayette, and Lehigh University.
Past the Lehigh Valley, Route 309 enters suburban Philadelphia, including Bucks County, which Trump won, the first Republican presidential candidate to do so since 1988. This year, Bucks flipped red in voter registration despite Trump-era Democratic local gains. Despite commanding leads in wealthy county towns like Doylestown and New Hope, Harris could not overcome the support for Trump in formerly blue Lower Bucks, with its working-class demography similar to Luzerne. It was in Lower Bucks, not long before the election, where Trump made his famous campaign stop at a local McDonald’s.
Trump’s courting of working-class voters, transcending the demographics of his 2016 victory, also proved effective in Philadelphia, where Route 309 marks its terminus. Harris’s underperformance was foreshadowed in mid-October, when the city’s most powerful labor leader criticized her state campaign manager. “I don’t think she understands Philadelphia,” said Ryan Boyer, the first black head of the city’s building trades council, in a Politico interview.
In Philadelphia, Trump improved his margins in majority-black precincts. And according to a Philadelphia Inquirer analysis, Trump enjoyed dramatic gains in the city’s 114 majority-Latino precincts, where his vote share grew from 6.1 percent in 2016 to 21.8 percent this year. In the city’s Northeast—which counts a large immigrant population and where Republican Joe Picozzi flipped a state senate seat held for decades by Democrats—Trump made some of his biggest gains over his three races for the presidency. Trump scored his best citywide performance in a South Philadelphia ward, where he earned nearly 74 percent of the vote from a heavily Italian electorate that had seen, in the Biden years, the boxing of a Christopher Columbus statue and the removal of a statue of Frank Rizzo, a still-revered former Democratic mayor.
Looking forward, Democrats face the sobering reality of a working-class realignment toward the GOP. Their state-level leaders are U.S. Senator John Fetterman, a heterodox and even moderate voice despite his party allegiance, and Governor Josh Shapiro, who enjoys favorable approval ratings and harbors future presidential aspirations. Democrats face a significant challenge if working-class voters, in addition to Gen Z men, continue their rightward shift. Republicans have their own concerns. Pennsylvania’s suburbs, fueled by new luxury housing developments, continue to shift purple-to-blue in areas like the Midstate. And the party’s new strength among Latinos will be tested in the 2026 midterms. In 2022, Latino voter turnout plummeted in Philadelphia and smaller cities, driven by a little-understood factor: elections are held every four years in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, not every two. Civic engagement on this front will prove essential for Republicans to maintain their gains. For now, voters will wait and see if Trump can deliver on his promises.
Photo by Dough4872 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link