York County is 35 miles from Baltimore — and on another political planet

YORK, Pa. — Tanya Carter had lived in the Baltimore area her whole life, but a few years ago she started to feel stuck.

She was living in the rowhome in Oliver where she grew up, and her oldest daughter, Tobi, had just died. Carter was looking for a fresh start.

While searching for housing on Google, she stumbled across New Freedom, Pennsylvania, a small community in southern York County. She made the roughly 45-minute drive and within minutes fell in love. In 2022, she moved to an apartment where from her balcony she can see cows and horses.

“There was no trash. It was quiet. It was peaceful,” said Carter, 52, a communications supervisor in the Baltimore City Sheriff’s Office. “I could breathe. My chest wasn’t aching anymore.”

From downtown Baltimore, York County is about 35 miles up Interstate 83, just north of the Mason-Dixon Line, where it borders Baltimore, Harford and Carroll counties. The political landscape, to put it mildly, is a lot different — think Ford F-150s flying flags in support of former President Donald Trump.

Carter, a Democrat, noted that she’s from East Baltimore and can handle her own.

For generations, York County has been a place where Baltimore-area government employees, including police officers and firefighters, live and commute to work. The community generally offers a lower cost of living and more tranquil lifestyle. And the political makeup of Pennsylvania — it’s much more Republican than Maryland and in many places deep red — is a better fit for some.

These Maryland expats now have a front row seat to one of the most dramatic battlegrounds in the presidential election. Four years ago, President Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by just 80,555 votes. And four years earlier, Trump topped Hillary Clinton by a scant 44,292 votes out of more than 6 million cast.

Both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have made multiple appearances in Pennsylvania, and their campaigns have robust ground games. And because Maryland is so reliably blue, local Democrats are making the trip up to York County to campaign in this deeply Republican area. Every vote, they believe, could make a difference.

“It’s the swingiest of swing states,” said Del. Lorig Charkoudian, a Democrat from Montgomery County who has organized canvassing efforts in York County. “It’s the one we need to win.”

A Republican hotbed

In 2020, York County — that haven for Baltimoreans, population 464,640 — delivered Trump his largest margin of victory in all of Pennsylvania. The county is 87% white, 8% Black and 9.9% Hispanic or Latino, according to the most recent population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Every countywide elected official is a Republican — except for York County Commissioner Doug Hoke. That’s because one of those three positions must go to a member of the minority political party under the law.

“It is a Republican county. It has been for a long time. And hopefully, it doesn’t change,” said Darryl Albright, vice chair of the East Manchester Township Board of Supervisors and a retired local police chief.

The city of York, the county seat, served as the fourth capital of the United States — not, despite a dubious claim, the first — and it’s where the Second Continental Congress in 1777 adopted the Articles of Confederation.

Besides government buildings, the city is home to a number of boutiques, restaurants and craft breweries.

But York has faced persistent challenges including tax-exempt properties, concentrated poverty and crime, though homicides from 2022 to 2023 dropped more than 65%. Some people who live in the county fear visiting the city and fret after every shooting that it has become a smaller version of Baltimore.

Some of York County’s best-known cultural exports are Utz, Snyder’s of Hanover and the York Peppermint Pattie. Natives include the artist Jeff Koons and the multi-platinum-selling rock band Live, which in 1994 released the album “Throwing Copper” that contains the song “Lightning Crashes.”

York Barbell was founded in 1932, and its headquarters off I-83 features the Weightlifting Hall of Fame as well as an oversized rotating model lunging into an overhead press. The county has a proud heritage of manufacturing. Local industries banded together to share workers and underutilized machinery to secure large defense contracts during World War II in an effort known as the York Plan.

These days, locals line up to collect free spring water from a pipe on the side of Seven Valleys Road. People celebrate when new chain restaurants open, and there’s a shoe-shaped house off U.S. Route 30 that serves as an Airbnb.

York County has also landed in the national spotlight for cultural war issues.

Two decades ago, a school board adopted a policy to mention intelligent design in biology class to make students aware of “gaps/problems” in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The ACLU of Pennsylvania and other groups sued, and a federal judge ruled that intelligent design is not science. The school district was ordered to pay $1 million in legal fees.

Last year, the Hanover Borough Police chief visited a store that gives tarot readings to educate the owner about an 1861 law that criminalizes fortune telling, leading to another federal lawsuit. And earlier this year, a different school district drew fire for cutting windows into the gender-inclusive bathrooms at a middle school, citing student safety concerns.

The state’s mixed politics mean it has a closely watched U.S. Senate matchup and down-ballot fights including for Pennsylvania attorney general — a race that features Dave Sunday, the Republican York County district attorney, and Eugene DePasquale, a Democrat who once served as a state representative and the director of economic development for York.

Baltimore commuters

Most people who travel for work stay in York County. But more than 25,000 people commute to Maryland, including 11,507 to Baltimore County and 4,854 to Baltimore, according to 2020 data from the York County Planning Commission and York County Economic Alliance.

In particular, York County is home to more than 1,400 people who work for Baltimore or Baltimore County. That includes 362 employees of the Baltimore Police Department and 243 employees of the Baltimore City Fire Department, according to data obtained through a Maryland Public Information Act request.

The figures are not complete. For instance, they do not include people who work for either school system.

Jim Rommel used to be one of those commuters.

Rommel, 61, of Penn Township, worked for the Baltimore County Police Department for 35 years, retiring in 2019 as a corporal. He’s now a security officer for the Hanover Public School District.

He was born and raised in Baltimore County. But Rommel said he was policing in the same community where he lived and witnessed it “going downhill.” So, he said, it was “time to move.”

A lot of his colleagues, he said, were buying houses in Harford County. But he was attracted to the Hanover area after visiting a coworker there and realizing that he could buy a home for $40,000-$50,000 less.

He bought his home in 1996. The area was quiet. And the schools, he said, also had a good reputation.

On his commute back home, Rommel said, he could decompress.

“You’re not facing the same stuff you just left,” Rommel said. “You’re not rolling into your driveway to hear your neighbors going crazy next door, or crime going on down the street.”

Rommel said he plans to vote for Trump for the third election in a row, citing issues including the economy, illegal immigration and what he views as the federal government’s inadequate response to natural disasters such as Hurricane Helene.

Another Maryland transplant, Mike Loban, has been volunteering to help elect Harris, saying he is frightened about the prospect of a second Trump presidency.

Loban grew up on Frederick Avenue in Southwest Baltimore and retired in 2017 from Baltimore City Public Schools after 43 years. He had worked with students who could not attend school because of medical, physical or emotional conditions.

In the early 2000s, he moved to Hopewell Township, about 30 minutes south of York. Politically, he said he thought, “this is not friendly territory.”

Loban, 75, now of Springfield Township, about 20 minutes south of York, said that while many Democrats in local races don’t have strong prospects, any increase in their turnout can help influence statewide and national elections.

“From a political point of view, my culture shock is done,” Loban said. “I’ve adapted to the realities, and I try to focus on ‘What little bit can I do?’”

As a competitive state with a narrow Democratic registration advantage that’s continued to diminish, Pennsylvania is “truly up for grabs,” said Berwood Yost, director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll.

“What happens in a county like York — while it doesn’t seem like it’s all that important because it’s a forgone conclusion Trump will win — what is important is ‘Is the margin 30 points? Or 25 points?’” Yost said. “That could make a difference.”

The Maryland canvass crew

That’s why several Democratic and progressive organizations from across Maryland have focused their energy on Pennsylvania.

“Thankfully, most of the Maryland elections, they may be close, but they are expected to go Democratic,” said Dori Cantor Paster, leader of Silver Spring Progressive Action, a group of activists based in Montgomery County that works to tip tight elections. “We have the luxury of being able to work in neighboring states.”

On a recent Sunday morning, more than a dozen volunteers with another group from Maryland, Allies for Democracy, convened across from the Graul’s Market in the Hereford Shopping Center before making the drive up to York County.

Their aim was to hit the doors of known or likely supporters of Harris and make sure that they had a plan to vote.

At the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 229 hall, they grabbed a manila folder that contained their turf and downloaded it on an app that provided them with specific addresses as well as voter information including name, age and party affiliation.

Del. Mike Rogers, a Democrat from Anne Arundel County, also was at the union hall with his wife, Tonya, and others to do their own canvassing.

Rogers said he campaigned in 2020 for the Biden-Harris ticket in York County, where he discovered that fellow Democrats were surprised to see another member of their party. They committed to voting.

“It was that prompting,” Rogers said. “It was that personal connection at the door, which I believe, makes a difference.”

York County, he said, is also home to part of a swing district: Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District. The Cook Political Report recently shifted its rating in the race to toss-up.

Democrat Janelle Stelson, a former local TV anchor, is taking on Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, a staunch Trump ally and former chair of the House Freedom Caucus.

Geography also helps lure political volunteers.

People can campaign in York County and return home to Maryland at a reasonable time, Rogers said, adding that he wasn’t looking to travel to Pittsburgh.

Two volunteers with Allies for Democracy, Liz Entwisle and Malissa Ruffner, knocked on doors in West Manchester Township, a community of more than 19,000 outside York.

Entwisle, 72, a retired environmental attorney who lives in Baltimore County, is one of the original co-organizers of Allies for Democracy, while Ruffner, 69, a genealogist who lives in Northeast Baltimore, was canvassing for the first time.

Ruffner said she previously wrote letters and postcards but that time had passed in the campaign. So she decided to heed the words of former first lady Michelle Obama and “do something.”

With cellphones in hand to update their progress on the app, Entwisle and Ruffner walked the quiet subdivision of Colonial-style homes.

For the most part, neighbors warmly greeted them. “You don’t have to come in, sweetie,” one woman said after answering the door. “I’m straight Democrat.”

Carter, the communications supervisor in the Baltimore City Sheriff’s Office, doesn’t need a reminder to vote.

On Election Day, Carter said, she’s planning to meet up with five people who also moved from Baltimore to York County to cast their ballots.