Donald Trump’s supporters are confident, even cocky, that he’s winning. Election forecasts show him as a slight favourite in the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 5.
Yet if Kamala Harris pulls off a victory, it will happen, in no small part, because of places like Montgomery County, a prosperous, fast-growing suburb outside Philadelphia.
The county, in southeast Pennsylvania, was once a Republican power base that gave the elder George Bush a 22-point victory margin. But that’s before it doubled in size, flipped blue, kept getting bluer and in the last election favoured the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, by 26 points.
It’s not just one of the wealthiest places in the state; it’s a liberal bastion that led the nation’s push to same-sex marriage. And the Democrats here insist it’s going to keep trending their way this year, piling up crucial votes for Harris.
A powerful local politician said politics are realigning in unpredictable ways: Even if Trump gains votes from Black and brown men, which he insists still isn’t guaranteed, college-educated white voters are drifting the other way.
And the abortion debate is merely accelerating that trend, the politician, Matt Bradford, the majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, said over a coffee in his district.
“We are going to put up numbers among well-educated white folks — and white men — that we’ve never put up before,” Bradford said in a shop just off the highway outside Philadelphia.
“The political tectonic plates are moving in multiple directions at the same time…. I’m very confident. I’m damn confident in the affluent, well-educated suburbs where, yes, we [have] made tremendous strides.”
Bradford described a block party in front of his house a couple of weekends ago. He said three of his neighbours — lifelong Republicans, professionals in the pharmaceutical industry and a business owner — told him they’re with Harris this time.
“[They’re telling me], ‘This man is a threat to our way of life. To our country.’ They’re not traditional Democratic voters,” Bradford said. “They are people who recognize the singular challenge Donald Trump poses.”
Life before the shift
The neighbourhood has changed.
Jamila Winder recalls being part of the first Black family in her neighbourhood, when her parents moved here in 1983 for her dad’s job as a warden in a prison, in what was then a much less populated area.
She said she learned years later something her mother had kept from her as a child: The organizers of a school play wanted her and her brother to play the slaves.
Her mom agreed to have the kids in the play, on one condition: “My kids won’t be slaves.” Forty years later, Winder is co-chair of the county. And she’s organizing on behalf of Kamala Harris, a Black woman expected to win overwhelming support here.
Winder attended a Harris event the other day in a nearby county and got emotional. It was an event with Republicans, voting for her.
“I just felt a tear coming down,” she said.
Kevin McDevitt, like most people in this area, became a Republican after he moved here in 1984. He joined the local fire company and remembers being urged to register as a Republican.
“[I said], ‘OK,'” he recalled. He eventually ran for office as a tax collector in 2001, won and ran again four years later.
That’s when a rift occurred with his old party. As often happens in a partisan realignment, the initial spark was a local issue.
A bitter feud erupted locally over whether to build a hospital. McDevitt was for it. Opponents then started a rumour that it was a hospital that would perform abortions. People started putting flyers on car windshields outside church services.
“Then the lies kicked in,” he said. “They were pushing the lie.”
Amid a mounting swell of opposition, his Republican rivals ran an independent candidate against him, which split that party’s vote, and the Democrats won.
All these years later, McDevitt himself is a Democrat, now leading the board of supervisors in the county’s town of East Norriton.
Same-sex marriage: Snapshot of a changing culture
Events in this region show the driving forces pulling college-educated suburban voters, especially women, toward the Democrats in recent years.
It’s often described as educational polarization — college-educated voters shifting left, non-college voters shifting right.
In his book on Latino voters, former Republican strategist Mike Madrid says there’s been a shift in priorities for so-called country-club Republicans. He writes that they always voted primarily on economic issues, like tax cuts, even if they disliked other conservative policies, such as restricting abortion.
Now, Madrid observes, more of them are voting with their culture, not their wallet. And Montgomery County happens to be the epicentre of a great cultural battle.
The local register of wills started issuing marriage licences to same-sex couples, which touched off a furor, leading to court fights that put his county, and Pennsylvania, at the forefront of the national shift in the early 2010s.
The official at the centre of the storm was a Democrat, the first elected to that position here, D. Bruce Hanes.
There were people calling for his arrest, and they urged the Republican district attorney to charge him. In the state legislature, some Republicans wanted him impeached.
“I was there as he was thinking through this. He was nervous about the legal ramifications,” Jason Salus, chair of the county’s Democratic Party, said of Hanes’s dilemma.
“He’s now looked at as a hero,” Salus said.
It’s an example of how sometimes, a shifting political tide only becomes visible in hindsight. Take some of the current data that’s given Republicans reasons for confidence.
Republicans are putting up outstanding early-vote numbers in Nevada and good numbers in North Carolina, and the number of registered Republicans has surged in Pennsylvania.
But all of these data points rely on registered party affiliation — the number of people who have filled out a form declaring their latest party preference.
That doesn’t capture people, Salus said, who’ve changed their opinions recently and have not re-registered.
On a busy campaign weekend, Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Kamala Harris asked Georgia swing state voters at an Atlanta church to get their ‘souls to the polls.’ In contrast, her Republican rival, Donald Trump, served fries at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, where he mocked Harris’s claims of once being a fast-food worker.
Are these voters enough for Harris?
It’s a reason Democrats kept holding a generations-long advantage in registrations in southern states, years after they stopped winning.
Or look at what happened in Montgomery County, Salus said: Democrats began winning presidential elections in this county in the 1990s, but they still didn’t surpass Republicans in registrations for another decade and a half, until the Obama era.
“It’s a trailing indicator,” he said.
To state the obvious, Salus concedes that he’d rather be gaining ground in registrations than losing it, as Democrats’ registration edge over Republicans has significantly narrowed this year in Pennsylvania, due in part to a big conservative effort.
But at the same time, he said, this isn’t capturing all of those suburban voters turning against their party over issues like abortion and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot outside the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
Voters like Amanda Cappelletti’s dad.
She’s a Democratic state senator who, in normal times, disagrees about politics with her father, a registered Republican. But they agree about Trump.
He’s horrified, Cappelletti said, by the way Trump speaks about people, including remarks attributed to him by former staff allegedly disparaging veterans.
She said she meets these sorts of voters all the time. She described a recent seniors’ fair in her office, where some seniors started expressing similar feelings; she sent her official legislative staff away, so she could talk partisan politics.
“I had several people come up to me and tell me that they were Republican, and they were voting for me. They wanted to help get Kamala elected,” Cappelletti said.
“I’ve had many people at these types of events tell me these types of things, that ‘I’m a Republican, but I want Kamala.'”
On the evening of Nov. 5, U.S. election night, we’ll learn how many of these people exist — and whether there are enough of them to prevent Donald Trump’s return to power.