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MECHANICSBURG, Pennsylvania — Pennsylvania is arguably the swingiest of swing states.

The Keystone State has voted for the winner in each of the last five presidential elections, and it has been a tipping point in each of the past three elections.

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It is one of only four states with one Democratic and one Republican in the U.S Senate. In the state government, Republicans and Democrats have split power in for the past decade. The state house of representatives is divided 102 to 101.

But this will not last.

A blue wave is likely to hit Pennsylvania this year, easily carrying Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) to reelection, and very possibly handing the state senate — and thus a governing trifecta — to Democrats. In fact, the blue wave already began two months ago as Democrats dominated in local elections and statewide judicial races in 2025.

It’s true that President Donald Trump has revived Republican fortunes in this state. Not only did he win twice, he also had large coattails, helping Republicans win the U.S. Senate races in 2016 and 2024.

But Trump will never be on a ballot here again, and that ought to make Republicans even more worried about today’s political currents. This may not be a mere tidal wave. Tidal waves eventually recede. The 2025-2026 Pennsylvania Blue Wave looks to instead be a sea change, in which the Keystone State becomes solidly Democratic for a decade or more.

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Pennsylvania After Trump

The key dynamic in Pennsylvania politics is the political realignment in which the working class is becoming solidly Republican, while upper-middle-class suburbanites are becoming more Democratic.

This realignment isn’t limited to Pennsylvania, and it didn’t start with Trump. Still, Trump put the realignment into overdrive, and Pennsylvania is where it’s most visible.

No Republican had won the state since 1988, when Trump ran in 2016, and Obama had won the state pretty easily. Then Trump came by and made massive gains in coal country of Central Pa., and in steel country around Pittsburgh.

You can explain Trump’s 2016 outperformance of Mitt Romney in 2012 just counting four adjacent counties running from former steel country south of Pittsburgh (Fayette County) to Blair County in Central Pennsylvania, with Cambria and Somerset in the middle. These counties have far lower incomes and educational attainment than the rest of the state, and they handed Trump his victory: Trump’s excess margin of victory across the four counties (compared to Romney) more than covers Trump’s statewide margin of 44,292 votes in that election. This is Trump country.

Look at Philadelphia’s collar counties, and you see the opposite trend: The upper-middle-class suburbs, especially Chester and Montgomery County, tacked hard toward the Democrats.

Crucially, this realignment is not symmetrical.

The Democrats’ upper-middle-class gains are largely about former Republicans switching parties, many out of disgust for Trump’s vulgarity and extraordinary dishonesty.

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Trump’s working-class surge includes many former labor Democrats, but it includes more disaffected non-voters coming out of political inactivity to vote for a once-in-a-lifetime candidate. Trump has consistently out what political analyst Sean Trende in 2012 called “The Missing White Voter.”

Looking ahead, here’s the most important asymmetry: Many of those former Republican voters are now firmly Country Club Democrats, while many of those working-class voters never quite became Republicans — they were simply Trump voters.

Thus, when Trump is gone, the country club will still be very Democratic, thanks to Trump, but the working-class whites will go back to being Missing White Voters.

There’s evidence of that right here in Cumberland County.

Cumberland County

“If you want to see what an election looks like without Trump on the ballot, look at the last one,” Cumberland County Commissioner Gary Eichelberger told me over lunch at a brand new upscale café in Mechanicsburg. “The reason the Democrats swept is because all our Republicans stayed home.”

In the local elections two months ago, Democrats won every county office and every seat on the Mechanicsburg Borough Council, plus tax collector.

Democrats carried Cumberland County in every statewide judicial race, too, on the way to a massive blowout in the 2025 elections. Trump Country votes Blue when Trump is not on the ballot.

Look at the results in Cumberland County this century, and you’ll see two different trendlines. Here is the Republican percentage in each presidential election since 2000: 62%, 64%, 56%, 58%, 56%, 54%, 54%. It’s basically an 8-point decline over 24 years.

Cumberland shows a far worse trend if you look at the governor races since 2002: 62%, 57%, 61%, 55%, 49%, 46%. That’s a 16-point drop over 20 years.

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Cumberland, in short, has a strong Democratic trend that is partly offset when Trump is on the ballot.

Population changes make the trend more worrying for the GOP.

The blue-collar counties becoming most Republican, such as Fayette County outside of Pittsburgh, are shrinking. The counties becoming most Democratic, like Cumberland, are growing.

Of the ten Pennsylvania counties that have shifted Republican the most since 2012, eight of them have lost population in that time, and the other two have grown at less than half the overall rate of the state.

Of the ten counties with the best trends for Democrats since 2012, all 10 have grown in population, and 8 of them have grown faster than the state. Cumberland has added nearly 50,000 people, a 20% growth rate. Chester County, the outermost of Philadelphia’s collar counties, has shifted 7.4% toward Democrats in the Trump Era while growing by nearly 15%.

All of these signs point toward a state about to fall off the left side of the plateau once Trump is no longer on the ballot.

The counterargument

Some Republicans don’t buy this theory. Lou Capozzi, the county GOP chairman in Cumberland, denies any Democratic trend in his county. He notes that Trump won Cumberland by about 10 points all three of his races here.

Republicans in and around the Cumberland Valley also want not to read too much into the governor races. In 2014 and 2018, the Democratic nominee was nearly a local boy, Tom Wolf, whose family name is one of the most prominent in neighboring York County.

Then in 2022, the Democratic dominance is chalked up to another local boy, this one a Republican: State Sen. Doug Mastriano. Mastriano, who represents two neighboring counties, Adams and Franklin, was the gubernatorial nominee in 2022. Republicans today admit that was a mistake. “Candidate quality matters,” they say to explain the dreadful 2022 election.

So what about 2025, when Dems dominated the state and swept Cumberland County? That, they chalk up to a colossal strategic error by the state party.

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Pennsylvania GOP leadership decided to center the 2025 elections on the judicial retention elections for the state Supreme Court — a vote as to whether to kick three Democrat-appointed justices off the bench.

Since these retention elections began in 1968, only one judge has ever been voted out of office. The state GOP was trying to convince voters to kick off three judges in 2025. This made Republicans look extreme, and it made the election be about abortion, which swung suburban moderates toward the Democrats and motivated college students.

And there’s a ready excuse if the 2026 elections go very poorly Republicans: It’s the midterm of a president’s second term, which historically is very bad for the party controlling the White House.

Also, there’s reason to believe that the independents and Democrats that Trump has picked up will remain Republicans.

Rich, a middle-aged white man at the Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg, was a lifelong Democrat because he saw Dems as the party of the working man. “I always voted Democrat, and I ended up voting for Hillary.”

Since then, he voted for Trump twice, and has given up hope in the Democratic Party. “In the last five to ten years, the Democrats have gone so far left that they don’t represent the working man anymore. … They represented unions. They represented the working man. They seem like they lost their touch with the base. Working-class people don’t seem to matter to them.”

Rich, like many independents and former Democrats, has transformed fully into a Republican. He’s not mostly a Trumper. “I think he’s a jackass,” Rich says of the man he supported twice. Looking forward, who would he support next? “I like the guy, what’s his name? The guy, the governor of Florida … Yeah, I like him.”

Can Democrats get out of their own way?

Rich captured the Democrats’ main problem: Themselves.

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The main countervailing force to a 2026 Blue Wave is Democrats’ own extremism. The main obstacle to a Democratic takeover of Pennsylvania is radical gender ideology, racial discrimination under the name of DEI, and an apparent hatred of police.

Shapiro has tried to tamp down all of these liberal excesses. If he can succeed, he can keep his state Blue for the foreseeable future.