By MARC LEVYThe Associated Press

HARRISBURG — The drubbing Democrats took in Pennsylvania in this year’s election has prompted predictable vows to rebound, but it has also sowed doubts about whether Pennsylvania might be leaving the ranks of up-for-grabs swing states for a right-leaning existence more like Ohio’s.

The introspection over voters’ rejection of Democrats comes amid growing speculation about Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as a contender for the party’s 2028 presidential nomination.

Widely expected to seek reelection in the 2026 mid-terms, Shapiro was considered a rising star in the party even before he garnered heavy national attention for making Vice President Kamala Harris’ shortlist of candidates for running mates.

Some Pennsylvania Democrats say 2024’s losses are, at least in part, attributable to voters motivated specifically by President-elect Donald Trump. Many of those voters won’t show up if Trump isn’t on the ballot, the theory goes, leaving Pennsylvania’s status as the ultimate swing state intact.

“I don’t think it’s an indicator for Pennsylvania,” said Jamie Perrapato, executive director of Turn PA Blue, which helps organize and train campaign volunteers. “I’ll believe it when these people come out and vote in any elections but for the presidency.”

Pennsylvania’s status as the nation’s premier battleground state in 2024 was unmistakable: political campaigns dropped more money on campaign ads than in any other state, according to data from ad-tracking firm AdImpact.

Plenty of that money was spent by Democrats, but their defeat was across the board. Democrats in Pennsylvania lost its 19 presidential electoral votes, a U.S. Senate seat, three other statewide races, two congressional seats and what was once a reassuring advantage in voter registration.

Some of those losses were particularly notable: Democrats hadn’t lost Pennsylvania’s electoral votes and a Senate incumbent in the same year since 1880. The defeat of three-term Sen. Bob Casey is especially a gut-punch for Democrats: the son of a former governor has served in statewide office since 1997.

An echo of what happened everywhere

The same debate that Democrats are having nationally over Harris’ decisive loss is playing out in Pennsylvania, with no agreement on what caused them to be so wrong.

Some blamed President Joe Biden, a Pennsylvania native, for backtracking on his promise not to run for reelection. Some blamed the party’s left wing and some blamed Harris, saying she tried to woo Republican voters instead of focusing on pocketbook issues that were motivating working-class voters.

In Pennsylvania, finger-pointing erupted in the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia — where Trump significantly narrowed his 2020 deficit — between the city’s Democratic Party chair and a Harris campaign adviser.

The nation’s sixth-most populous city is historically a driver of Democratic victories statewide, but Harris’ margin there was the smallest of any Democratic presidential nominee since John Kerry’s in 2004, and turnout there was well below the statewide average.

Rural Democrats suggested the party left votes on the table in their regions, too. Some said Harris hurt herself by not responding forcefully enough in the nation’s No. 2 natural gas state against Trump’s assertions that she would ban fracking.

Ed Rendell, the former two-term governor of Pennsylvania and ex-Democratic National Committee chair, said Trump had the right message this year and that Harris didn’t have enough time on the campaign trail to counter it.

Still, Rendell said Pennsylvania remains very much a swing state.

“I wouldn’t go crazy over these election results,” Rendell said. “It’s still tight enough to say that in 2022 the Democrats swept everything and you would have thought that things looked pretty good for us, and this time we almost lost everything.”

That year, Shapiro won the governor’s office by nearly 15%, John Fetterman was the only candidate in the nation to flip a U.S. Senate seat despite suffering a stroke in the midst of his campaign, and Democrats captured control of the state House of Representatives for the first time in a dozen years.

Bethany Hallam, an Allegheny County council member who is part of a wave of progressive Democrats to win office around Pittsburgh in recent years, said the party can fix things before Pennsylvania becomes Ohio. But she cautioned against interpreting 2024 as a one-time blip, saying it would be a mistake to think Trump voters will never be heard from again.

“They’re going to be more empowered to keep voting more,” Hallam said. “They came out, finally exercised their votes and the person they picked won. … I don’t think this was a one-off thing.”

The ever-changing political landscape

Shapiro, assuming he seeks another term in 2026, would likely benefit from a mid-term backlash that has haunted the party in power — in this case, Republicans and Trump — in nearly every election since World War II.

The political landscape never stays the same, and voters two years from now will be reacting to a new set of factors: the state of the economy, the ups and downs of Trump’s presidency, events no one sees coming.

Rendell predicted that Trump’s public approval ratings will be badly damaged — below 40% — even before he takes office.

Democrats, meanwhile, fully expect Republicans to come after Shapiro in an effort to damage any loftier ambitions he may have.

They say they’ll be ready.

“He’s on the MAGA radar,” said Michelle McFall, the Westmoreland County Democratic Party chair. “He’s a wildly popular governor in what is still the most important battleground state … and we’re going to make sure we’re in fighting shape to hold that seat.”

In 2025, partisan control of the state Supreme Court will be up for grabs when three Democratic justices elected a decade ago must run to retain their seats in up-or-down elections without an opponent. Republicans have it marked on their calendars.

Democrats will go into those battles with their narrowest voter registration edge in at least a half-century. What was an advantage of 1.2 million voters in 2008, the year Barack Obama won the presidency, is now a gap of fewer than 300,000.

University of Pennsylvania researchers found that, since the 2020 presidential election, Republican gains weren’t because Republicans registered more new voters.

Rather, the GOP’s gains were from more Democrats switching their registration to Republican, a third party or independent, as well as more inactive Democratic voters being removed from registration rolls, the researchers reported.

Democrats have won more statewide elections in the past 25 years, but the parties are tied in that category in the five elections from 2020 through 2024.

Daniel Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said it is hard to predict that Pennsylvania is trending in a particular direction, since politics are evolving and parties that lose tend to adapt.

Even when Democrats had larger registration advantages, Hopkins said, Republicans competed on a statewide playing field.

Hopkins said Democrats should be worried that they lost young voters and Hispanic voters to Trump, although the swing toward the GOP was relatively muted in Pennsylvania. Trump’s 1.8 percentage-point victory was hardly a landslide, he noted, and it signals that Pennsylvania will be competitive moving forward.

“I don’t think that the registration numbers are destiny,” Hopkins said. “That’s partly because even with Democrats losing their registration advantage, whichever party can win the unaffiliated voters by a healthy margin will carry the state.”

Originally Published: November 28, 2024 at 11:53 AM EST