What Democrats Can Learn From Pennsylvania's Red Shift

Trump’s vote total in Pennsylvania on Tuesday was about the same as President Obama’s, and it surprised many in the media. But according to David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it shouldn't have. He says the results were just the tail end of a trend that started decades ago.

Here's an excerpt from his piece in The Boston Globe:

The city of Pittsburgh remained Democratic Tuesday — the Clinton team got that much right — but the rest of southwestern Pennsylvania, where longstanding social and cultural conservatism mixed with the new, muscular economic populism, marched stoutly into the Trump column. In county after county in this region — part angry post-industrial, part agrarian, part Appalachian — the Manhattan businessman who vowed to bring jobs back to mining and manufacturing ran far ahead of former governor Mitt Romney, who lost this state to Barack Obama four years ago. Trump’s vote total in the Keystone State Tuesday was about the same as Obama’s, who took 52 percent of the vote in 2012.

David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a Pulitzer Prize-winning former politics correspondent for the Globe. He tweets @ShribmanPG.