Small-Town Pennsylvania Is Changing, and Democrats See Opportunity
Politics came last at the 89th Ephrata Fair Parade.
After the cheerleaders, Shriners and Cub Scouts, after the Republican float piled with bales of hay, local Democrats, on Float No. 119, braced for a hail of boos and perhaps even candy projectiles. After all, it was late September in an election year in Ephrata, a conservative town in Lancaster County, Pa.
But that night, the booing was more sporadic than they expected; there were even a few cheers. The most concentrated jeering came late in the route, when a yard full of parade watchers greeted them with the anti-Biden chant “Let’s go, Brandon!”
The yard belonged to Brian Keith, 49, who has lived there for years. “It’s very much a conservative, right-leaning community,” he said.
But with more newcomers showing up, “it’s very much turning blue,” he said. “Give it another 10 years, and we’re going to be outnumbered.”
Exactly where the partisan balance lies in this stretch of Southeastern Pennsylvania could determine the direction of the country this November.
Pennsylvania is arguably the most pivotal state in the election, carrying 19 electoral votes, the most of the so-called swing states. After voting for the Democrat in every presidential election going back to 1992, the state went for Donald J. Trump in 2016 by less than a percentage point. Joe Biden won in 2020, by a little over a percentage point.
A primary reason for Mr. Trump’s success here is that Pennsylvania is a blue-collar state, with a large share of white voters without college degrees, a demographic that over the past eight years has become an ever-firmer base of Trump support.
Many of these voters were Democrats in the past, out of loyalty to the unions that ensured good jobs in steel mills and factories. But those days, and many of those jobs, are long gone. The hollowing out of manufacturing left behind a deep frustration and many blue-collar Pennsylvanians heard in Mr. Trump somebody who voiced their pessimism about the country’s direction.
But as the political parties have realigned along educational divides, the state has been changing, too.
Rural counties across western and northern Pennsylvania have lost population and are expected to shrink further in the coming years. But the state’s southeast has flourished, with population growing and pushing out from the suburbs of Philadelphia and Harrisburg into counties that were once mostly rural and conservative. Many of the jobs drawing newcomers are not in factories but in hospitals and universities.
The presidential race this year in Pennsylvania could be a test of which has advanced further: the partisan realignment trends that benefit Mr. Trump, or the demographic changes that help the Democrats.
White, non-Hispanic people without college degrees still make up a narrow majority of the state’s voting-age population, but their numbers are declining. Meanwhile, the number of white people who are college-educated and the number of nonwhite residents of voting age are inching up steadily. Both groups tend to vote for Democrats, though Republican strategists are hoping to make inroads with Latino and Black voters this year.
Pennsylvania’s Changing Electorate
White people without a bachelor’s degree make up half of the voting age population, but their share is shrinking.
Lancaster County, long associated with the timeless lifestyle of the Amish, reflects this new reality. Over the past decade, Lancaster has been among the fastest-growing counties in a slow-growing state.
“Fifteen years ago, if you were to walk around downtown and ask folks where they’re from, overwhelmingly, they would have said Lancaster County,” said Kyle Kopko, the executive director of the Center for Rural Pennsylvania and a Lancaster native himself. “Now it’s about 50-50.”
There is work for professionals in hospitals, labs and tech-driven companies, including a big business in the suburb of Lititz that makes concert equipment for rock stars. For decades, Christian groups have helped resettle thousands of refugees in the area, bringing Cambodians, Somalians, Cubans and Bhutanese to the city of Lancaster. Huge retirement communities are rising up around the city, attracting seniors from around the Mid-Atlantic, drawn by the lower cost of living and the state’s retirement-friendly tax structure.
White people without college degrees still make up a majority of the county’s adult population, but that share declined between 2012 and 2022. The number of college graduates, retired and working, grew by the thousands.
Political shifts have followed. Lancaster County is still the largest Pennsylvania county with a Republican-controlled county government, and it has voted Republican in nearly every presidential election for a century. It will almost certainly give a majority of its votes to Mr. Trump in 2024. But the margins are thinning. Mr. Trump won by about 16 percentage points in 2020, less than half of the 35 point margin by which George W. Bush won two decades earlier.
In recent elections, Democrats flipped local seats and judgeships in strong Republican boroughs and townships around the city, in some cases driven by organizing in the retirement communities. And as local Republican politics moved notably to the right in the Trump era, some more centrist Republicans found their partisan loyalty wobbling: A former chairwoman of the Lancaster Republican Party is now co-chair of Pennsylvania’s Republicans for Harris group.
Local Republicans are still confident this year, pointing to recent gains in registrations and efforts to encourage more voting among Amish people, a population that has mostly kept out of presidential politics. And the G.O.P. still dominates in the rural areas.
Ephrata, with a population of around 13,600, is a short drive away from the city of Lancaster. Founded nearly 300 years ago as a monastic community, Ephrata retained its quiet, devout character well into recent decades. But with all the growth across South Central Pennsylvania, the town might not be as cloistered as many of its residents once thought.
“It started slowly,” said Victoria Good, 70, who grew up in the farmland nearby, the grandchild of “plain people,” as observant Amish and Old Order Mennonites are known.
“As the years have gone by, it’s picked up more and more,” she said, sitting at her kitchen table. “Now, everywhere you go, they’re putting in another housing development.”
Some in Ephrata lament that the newcomers are bringing with them a faster pace of life. They do not get to know their neighbors, many of the longtime residents say. And they wonder if this influx of outsiders is at least partly responsible for problems around town, like the growing number of homeless people.
The political culture in Ephrata is nothing like in the city of Lancaster, where news of a drag queen story hour at the public library drew opposition from county officials and even a bomb threat. But some residents here see a shift nonetheless.
“They’re a lot more liberal,” Ms. Good said. She believes the newcomers do not show the same level of tolerance to the plain people that they show to Muslims and other groups. “They make fun of them to no end because they’re Christian,” she said.
Ms. Good’s grandson, Chandler Eby, 22, listened quietly from across the table. He is a committed Christian, and he said later that he had never felt looked down on by outsiders. A recent graduate of American University in Washington, D.C., Mr. Eby is an outspoken Democrat.
The night of the parade, a group of women gathered in the living room of a friend who lived in a residential community for people 55 and older that sits just outside of Ephrata. The development is a little over a decade old, with half-million-dollar homes sitting on what had once been farmland. The women were mostly retired, and most had come from elsewhere, or grew up in Lancaster, left and returned. When they first arrived, many of them quickly understood that they were political outsiders.
“I actually considered moving twice from here since I’ve been here,” said Sukey Starkey, 73, a retired schoolteacher who moved to the county from Virginia in 2018. She found a place that was much farther to the right than she had expected. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of here; these people are going to eat me alive,’” she said.
Then she gestured to the others in the room. “Until I found these nice people.”
The women were planning to march alongside the Democratic float that night. There was a sense of bravado to it; some had outed themselves as Democrats on Facebook, but striding through town in a “Harris-Walz” shirt was a different matter.
But prospects for Democrats were growing, they said, pointing out that the Harris campaign has a full-time, staffed office in downtown Ephrata, a first for a Democratic presidential campaign.
“I really think it has to change,” said Marilyn Kopco, 71, who moved to Lancaster four years ago. “If you’re pulling from other major cities,” she said, “they’re bringing with them big-city ideas.”
These differences run deeper than politics, said Debra DiTrapano, 60, a nursing instructor who grew up in Michigan and moved to Ephrata eight years ago. She said she had tried to understand the opposing point of view as a nurse would try to understand her patients.
“Different people moving into the area bring their own opinions, bring things that they’ve learned,” she said. “And you have people that haven’t changed, and have not experienced other parts of the world. That clash is more than party-party. It’s more cultural.”
The morning after the parade, the booths at the Ephrata Fair opened under a light drizzle. The volunteers running the Democratic Party booth were in good spirits. There had been a little run-in at the booth the previous day — a man yelled “baby-killers” so insistently that a police officer had to escort him away — but the reception to their float, they said, had been more positive than at any other time in memory.
On a sidewalk nearby, Galen Fox, 85, finished up an ice-cream-slathered apple turnover that he had bought from the Republican booth. His bright-red hat explained his politics: “Make Trump President Again.”
Years ago, Mr. Fox said, when he worked at a local concrete business, he had some dealings with Mr. Trump’s companies. He liked Mr. Trump then and likes his politics now.
Like many in his generation, Mr. Fox started working right out of high school, he said, and ultimately made enough money to build a home and retire early. He said he also paid for his son to go to medical school.
Things are not quite the same around here, he said. It is partly the new people, but it’s not only them. He brought up his son, who now works at a hospital in Lancaster and lives in a nearby suburb.
“He used to be a Republican,” Mr. Fox said. “He married a woman that went to college, and she’s a Democrat. And her father was a Republican.”
His son and daughter-in-law visited him the other day. “I brought politics up, and they both got on me,” he said.
He shook his head. “You go to college, you learn to be a Democrat.”