Democrats picked up three U.S. House seats in Pennsylvania in November, flipping suburban districts while also easily defending a U.S. Senate seat and the governor’s mansion.
“The current coalition — urban, suburban women and these college-educated males — will likely put Pennsylvania back in the Democratic column,” said Mike Mikus, a veteran Democratic strategist who lives in the affluent suburbs of the 37th state Senate district.
Trump won the traditionally Republican district by 6 percentage points in 2016. But after its Republican state senator was elected to Congress in November, Democrats targeted the seat. They counted on flipping its educated populace of lawyers, consultants and doctors who fill its colonial-style houses and shopping centers that spill over the ridgelines outside Pittsburgh.
“There are college-educated men who have, at least temporarily, put their Republican Party membership card in their pocket for a while,” Mikus said of his neighbors. But, he warned, these new Democratic voters may only be willing to tolerate so much in a party swinging to the left. “They are somewhat conservative. They don’t like paying a lot of taxes.”
