Erie Portends an Ominous Path for PA’s GOP
“We just got killed.” Tom Eddy knows his Republicans had a tough night. The chair of the Erie County Republican Party sighed and admitted, “Republicans, for some reason, chose not to come out and vote.”
At the top of the ticket, the Democratic nominee for Erie County executive, Christina Vogel, swamped the Republican incumbent, Brenton Davis, in a 25-point landslide. That onslaught was merely the start. Erie Democrats won every race of consequence: mayor, sheriff, city council, and 2 out of 3 county council seats. Pennsylvania’s swing county, yet again, pointed the way for the nation’s swingiest state.
Pennsylvania Democrats won up and down the ballot – and not just the three state Supreme Court justices. Pennsylvania Democrats took the swing counties and those Trump won by double digits. Out of Allegheny County’s 460 races, Democrats won 449. Nationally, Democrats won big and small, urban and rural. They took the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races and a California redistricting plan by double digits. In Georgia, Democrats captured statewide offices, their first in nearly 20 years. In Big Stone Gap, Virginia, voters elected two Democrats, an African-American and gay man, to serve on the town council. Democrats are gleeful; Republicans have reason to worry.
The party out of power inevitably wins off-year elections. But Democratic margins reveal this was something more. Steve Scully a veteran Beltway journalist and Erie native, explained to me, “These elections have become nationalized … we are five years into a Trump presidency, and he now owns the economy.” Inflation, tariffs, and a government shutdown turned voter focus to a shaky economy.
Sam Talarico, chair of the Erie County Democrats, agreed. He thinks the results reflect “the mood of the nation. Trump has historic disapproval ratings. The economy isn’t getting any better, it is actually worse, there’s layoffs, the price of food.” 2025 was no 2017. In that off-year vote, which followed Trump’s 2016 White House win, Erie Republicans lost the county executive race by 304 votes and mayoral contest by just 1,257 ballots, the closest the party had come in a generation to winning the mayor’s office. In 2017, Pennsylvania, “the old blue,” as one Republican told me, “Was the new red.”
In the Keystone State, and across the Rust Belt, tens of thousands of ancestral Democrats crossed the partisan Rubicon for Trump. In 2016, one-in-ten Trump voters were Democrats. Brian Shank was one of them. “I was a Democrat,” he told me, “I was union member Democrat.” In 2019, Shank officially switched parties to run for the Erie County Council and became the first Republican to chair that body in decades. Joining him were his parents, Shank told me. “They are old blue. They were the Kennedy generation. The Democrats were the party of the working folks and made sure that the union people were taken care … the working people were taken care of.” In 2017, the old blue was not only the new red. Trumpism was seemingly ascendant.
In 2016 and 2024, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania gave Trump the White House. But it was working-class Rust Belters in blue-collar towns and small cities, like Erie, who made it happen. In 2012, Obama won Wisconsin’s industrial Racine and Kenosha counties by a combined 13,070 votes. Four years later, Trump took both; by 2024, he won them by nearly the same margin as Obama, with 12,279 ballots. In 2012, Obama battled Mitt Romney to a dead heat in Michigan’s Rust Belt Lenawee County. By 2016, Trump rolled Clinton 57-36%. His 4,000-vote advantage in Lenawee was one-third of his margin in Michigan. Eight years later, in 2024, he tripled this advantage in Lenawee. The story is much the same in Pennsylvania. In 2012, Obama took Luzerne County by nearly 6,000 votes. In 2016 and 2024, Trump won what was once a coalmining, union stronghold, by 25,000 and then 30,000 votes. The old blue was the new red.
Like those Rust Belt counties in Michigan and Wisconsin, Trump also flipped Erie. In 2012, Obama won the bellwether county by nearly 20,000 votes. In three consecutive presidential elections, Trump either won Erie narrowly (twice) or lost it by a hair – 1,400 votes in 2020. But in these formerly blue Rust Belt counties, Trump votes are like his French fries and golf course: super-sized. He not only gets a chit in his column, but he has also taken what was once a Democratic ballot. One vote, like Shank’s, counts as two. One for the GOP and one taken from the Democrats. “The old blue is the new red” is more than a slogan. It is Trump’s skeleton key for victory. Scully knows Trump’s secret to winning his hometown, which is also the nation’s bellwether. He assured me, “In Erie, you gotta be on the ground.” He couldn’t be more correct.
In Erie, the old blue is not the new red so much as it is purplish-blue, because Democrats mind their ground game. Last year, Kyle Foust, Erie County’s Democratic controller, told me, “You gotta go door-to-door. That didn’t go out of style with vacuum cleaner salesmen.” In 2024, Erie Democrats lost the county but still would have sold a bunch of Kirby’s. In his campaign for Erie County’s state Senate seat, Jim Wertz knocked over 10,000 doors. Democrats fielded a dozen paid staffers in the county, which resulted in an eye-popping 73.8% voter turnout. But this was not new, nor was it even close to the record. In 1992, Democrats engineered 87% turnout for Bill Clinton’s romp to victory. Greg Hayes, a local Republican activist, understands this advantage all too well. He told me, “When they [Democrats] call for volunteers for door-knocking, they get 40, 50, 60 of them. We [Republicans] get three or four. For a fundraiser, they’ll have 300 people. We’ll have 30.”
Donald Trump is a one-man turnout machine. When Trump is on the ballot, Republicans win Erie and the Rust Belt. When he is not, they lose. Tom Eddy understands why: showmanship. In 2015, Trump, like every other GOP hopeful, campaigned at the Iowa State Fair. While Ted Cruz devoured a porkchop-on-a-stick, Trump gave kids free rides on his $7 million helicopter. Eddy thinks this is the key to understanding Trump's appeal, a showman whose very antics remind wary voters that he is no career politician.
Eddy told me, “They [other Republicans] don’t have that, ‘I’ll take you for a helicopter ride.’ They don’t have that sense of pizzazz.” Pizzazz matters. In 2024, Eddy funded the Erie County GOP’s efforts on the proceeds of Trump paraphernalia sales. Greg Hayes knows that one Trump rally, (of which there have been 5 in Erie) can offset the Democrats’ ground game. He told me, “You can go around and do all your personal hoopla as much as you want for a month and you won’t get nearly as much of a bump as say 5-seconds up on that podium [with Trump].”
In 2025 there were no rallies or helicopter rides. Correlation is not causation but Erie Democrats enjoyed a six-point turnout advantage over the GOP; statewide it was a 9-point margin. This is what worries area Republicans. Eddy understands that Trump’s pizzazz will soon pass with no showman successor in sight. He told me, “I don’t see that [energy] happening in ’28 with Vance or Rubio, or whoever.” Eddy is not alone in his worries. An internal Erie Republican Party “post-mortem” offers a scathing audit of what it termed a “historic drubbing.” From mail-in voting to a digital presence, Erie Republicans bemoaned their “underdeveloped party infrastructure.” Hayes sees this resulting from a split GOP. He told me, “There’s a divide in the Republican Party in Erie County and Pennsylvania.” And this divide is one that separates the pre-Trump GOP from the old blue that is new the red.
Hayes thinks the Republican Party is still controlled by a pre-Trump faction. He told me, “It was always kind of the old boy’s group, people that have been involved since before I was born, kind of thing, and I’m in my 60s.” For proof of this, Shank points to the 200-seat county GOP central committee, which currently has 40 members. Hayes admitted, “It seems that there’s all this Trump energy, all this potential to get people who love Trump to then become active Republicans. And there’s like a disconnect.” Shank is mulling a run to head the Erie County GOP. “I’ve been asked to run and I said ‘well, If I’m nominated, I will accept and I will run and utilize the system to the best of its ability’.”
2025 could be a harbinger of the GOP without Trump’s showmanship and turnout. Eddy is clear about Trump’s 2028 flirtation: “He knows he can’t run.” Shank chortled at the prospect of Trump in 2028. “I think he says that knowing that it makes heads explode … I think that's why his supporters love it so much,” he said.
Trump won’t be on the ballot, but the negative polarization will remain. Eddy admitted, “I have friends that are pure Democrats … but my sisters don’t talk to me.” Lindsey Scott, the chair of the Crawford County Democrats, posed for a photo at a No Kings rally with a protester. On the protester’s guitar was “86 ‘47.” 10 million social media views and many deaths threats later, Scott still oversaw a Democratic sweep in Meadville.
Trump’s one-man ground game will disappear in 2028. Shank and Hayes think Republicans can replicate his energy through the Trumpist grassroots. But Eugene DePasquale sees opportunity. The new state chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party told me, “Trump when he is running goes everywhere, I give him credit for that … You get credit from people for just showing up.”
As party chair, DePasquale’s plan is for Pennsylvania Democrats to show up so they will hear the magic words from voters. “I don’t agree with you on the everything, but you listen to me, and you did what you thought was right and you fought hard for what you believed in.” To turn Pennsylvania blue again, DePasquale thinks, Tthat’s what we [Democrats] have got to get back to.” Whether the old blue remains the new red or reverts depends on it.
