May 6, 2023 5 min read

To fully grasp the hold the Democratic Party once had on Washington, Greene and Fayette counties, the clock needs to be turned back to 1984.

In that election year, Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale carried all three counties by substantial margins even as he was being buried in a 49-state landslide by popular Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan. From 1932 and the victory of Franklin Roosevelt to 2000 and the defeat of Al Gore, all three counties consistently supported Democratic presidential candidates, with the exception of 1972, when George McGovern was routed by Richard Nixon.

Moreover, all three counties elected Democrats to represent them on Capitol Hill, in Harrisburg, on county commission seats, on city councils, township boards and made them judges. If you had political ambitions, being a Democrat was, for the most part, a necessary part of getting elected.

But then, around the turn of the century, the Democrats’ hold began to loosen. In 2004, President George W. Bush became the first Republican to carry Greene County since 1928. Four years later, GOP standard-bearer John McCain trounced Barack Obama in all three counties even as Obama was winning Pennsylvania by 11 points. Since then, the delegation the counties send to the statehouse has been dominated by Republicans, and all three of its county commissions are Republican-majority.

What happened?

Not one thing, but many things, most political observers believe: demographic shifts; the long-running decline of organized labor; the demise of voters whose loyalties were forged during the 1930s New Deal era; the rise of evangelical Christianity as a political force; guns; the fossil fuel industry; education; the divide between urban and rural America; the nationalizing of elections; and more.

“Those things are all interconnected,” said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta. “We’ve seen this across the whole country pretty much in rural America and areas where you have a small non-white population and a less-educated white population, and more religious. We’ve seen this shift.”

Washington, Greene and Fayette counties are hardly alone in moving away from the Democratic Party in recent years. The Mahoning Valley near Youngstown, Ohio, was once one of the Buckeye State’s most-reliably Democratic regions, but it supported Republican Donald Trump by big margins in the last two presidential elections. West Virginia, once firmly Democratic, is one of the reddest states in the nation. Iowa and Florida, once purple states, have become, at the very least, light red.

Terry Madonna, the veteran Pennsylvania political analyst who now teaches at Millersville University, said the national Democratic Party’s environmental policies and hostility to fossil fuels and extractive industries has played a part in the erosion of its support in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

“The progressive wing of the party has said no to the old industries in our country, coal and steel,” Madonna said. “I know they’re in decline, but let’s take natural gas, which is a huge part of the economy in that region. They see the economic benefits, particularly from fracking, and that puts them at odds at where the Democratic Party is going.”

Madonna also said Democrats’ stands on culture-war issues like abortion and gay rights have driven away tradition-bound voters in Pennsylvania and in other places.

The coal and steel industry were sources of jobs in all three counties at one time, and those industries have withered, along with unions like the United Mine Workers of America and United Steelworkers, which at one time reflexively endorsed Democratic candidates across the board and urged their members to support them.

The decline in these industries led to Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign and his “resonating message with hard-working, blue-collared individuals from Southwestern Pennsylvania, further distancing former Democratic Party members from its increasingly progressive, left-leaning agenda,” said Matthew Dowling, a former Republican state representative from Fayette County.

Dowling pointed out, however, “As a first-generation, lifelong Republican, I understand why my parents and grandparents were devoted to the Kennedy Democrat ideology of the early 1960s. Had I come of age then, I might have registered as a Democrat as well.”

Even as the Democrats have lost supporters in the counties around Pittsburgh, West Virginia and elsewhere, they have picked them up elsewhere. Pittsburgh suburbs like Mt. Lebanon that were once solidly Republican are now reliably Democratic. The same goes for the suburbs of Philadelphia, which were pivotal in President Biden securing the state’s 20 electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election. Suburban voters, who are more diverse and socially liberal than they were a couple of decades ago, might have once been drawn to Republican messages on taxes and spending. Now, however, they have become wary as the GOP has taken on a more populist, Trumpian hue.

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times reported on another Washington County – this one in Oregon – that has gone from being faithfully Republican to overwhelmingly Democratic thanks to an influx of young, educated and liberal tech workers.

Republicans picking up counties in Southwestern Pennsylvania has helped the GOP remain competitive across the commonwealth as the Philadelphia suburbs have slipped away. But Abramowitz explained that Republican-trending areas tend to be older and are largely not growing.

“Their share of the vote is going down,” he said. “At some point (the Republican Party) faces an existential crisis if they continue down the road of doubling down on appealing to noncollege white voters.”