In short, his appeal to Hispanic Pennsylvanians has clearly succeeded.

The other much-studied bellwether county besides Northampton was Erie County, a jurisdiction Trump carried in 2016 and lost in 2020. This time, he has won with a slim margin. One surprise appears to have come in Centre County — home of Penn State University, a blue dot in a red field — a place Trump never won. Tonight, he leads by four percentage points with 83% of votes in.

All this looks to be a continuation of the political realignment that Trump has ushered into the region since 2016. But what of the elephant in the room: Philadelphia and its four suburban counties? The GOP nominee had fared worse than typical Republicans in the suburbs in 2016, and the trend continued in 2020. In 2024, though, he has stemmed these losses. Trump looks to have lost Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties, but by about the same amount as in 2020, possibly by slightly less. The fourth suburban county, Bucks, is on course to go red.

Philadelphia has always been a mixed tale for Trump. No Republican has won the Democratic stronghold since 1932, but Trump did better there in 2016 than Mitt Romney had in 2012, taking 15.32% of the vote where Romney had 13.97%. In 2020, while doing worse in the rest of the state, Trump improved in Philly, taking 17.86%. This time around, Democrats crowed that Philadelphia would give the party the votes it needed to win. “Voter turnout is extremely high,” Philadelphia Democratic Party Chairman Robert Brady told the press. “I’ve been doing elections for 50 years chair and I’ve been chairman for 40 years and now it’s the highest we’ve ever seen for this point.”

With 89% of the vote reporting, Trump appears to have defied Brady’s boast, taking over 20% of the vote. The old way for Democrats to win Pennsylvania was to run up a big majority in the major cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and hope it was enough to beat the Republican totals in the rest of the state. But Philadelphia’s centrality to Democratic plans is not what it was. It has become the party of the suburbs and now looks to more reliable turnout from those regions than from the city.

Republicans are also reassessing how to win in Pennsylvania, and Trump has shown the path forward for them. Someone unafraid to campaign in Democratic strongholds such as North Philadelphia, Reading, and Allentown can win enough votes there to make the difference statewide.

Trump has been working since 2016 to realign America’s voting blocs, shifting the Republican Party to a multi-ethnic coalition of workers and small businesspeople. That message resounded tonight in Pennsylvania — or at least in enough of it to make the difference in the national race.