Pennsylvania Political Geography II: Bidenland

“Bidenland” is a term coined by Brandon Finnigan of the Decision Desk HQ website to describe a region of small, blue-collar cities in east-central and northeastern Pennsylvania.  It is less urbanized than the Philadelphia metro area to its south, but more urbanized than central Pennsylvania to its west.  It tends to be evenly divided between the two parties. 

The Blue Mountain line divides Bidenland into two regions: the anthracite coal region, from the city of Scranton (birthplace of the former vice president) southwestward to Northumberland and far northern Dauphin counties, and a string of counties to the south and east of the coal region, from Reading through the Lehigh Valley to the Poconos, that have become exurbs of Philadelphia and New York. 

Anthracite coal, which gives the coal region its name, is the hardest and purest form of coal, being over 90% carbon, and almost all of America’s anthracite reserves are in this part of Pennsylvania.  (Other coal-mining areas produce bituminous coal, which is 80-90% carbon.)  The heyday of coal mining in this area was in the late 1800s and early 1900s, coinciding with the great wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe.  This gave the area a high concentration of “ethnic” white residents; for example, Luzerne (loo-ZERN) County is the only county in the country where Polish is the most common ancestry, and Schuylkill (SKOOK’ll) County has one of the highest concentrations of Lithuanian-Americans in the country.  Unfortunately, the coal industry declined after World War II, and the area has struggled to find a role in the post-industrial economy.

The coal region can be usefully divided into two sub-regions.   The first is the Wyoming Valley, consisting of Lackawanna (LOCK-a-WAHN-a), Wyoming, and northern and central Luzerne Counties.  The Wyoming* Valley is centered around the cities of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre.  In 1900, this area was second only to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh as a population center in Pennsylvania but has lost ground as the coal industry declined.  Lackawanna County, which contains Scranton, is a Democratic stronghold, voting Republican for President only in the landslides of 1956, 1972, and 1984.  Scranton is the base of the Casey family (Bob Sr., who was governor from 1987-95, and Bob Jr., who has been U.S. Senator since 2007) and of William Scranton, a governor in the 1960s who led the moderate opposition to Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican convention.  Scranton politicians might have been even more successful if Ernie Preate and Kathleen Kane, two popular state attorneys general from the city, hadn’t ensnared themselves in scandal before they could seek higher office.

The second part of the coal region consists of Schuylkill County and surrounding parts of nearby counties (including the communities of Hazleton, Shamokin, and Berwick); call it Greater Schuylkill County.  It is more rural, and therefore more conservative, than the Wyoming Valley, but it still had a number of Democratic strongholds until the rise of Donald Trump, who gained more votes (in percentage terms) compared to Mitt Romney in Schuylkill County than any other Pennsylvania county.  The most prominent recent politician from the area, Lou Barletta, was a former mayor of Hazleton and Congressman whose blue-collar persona and staunch opposition to illegal immigration presaged Trump, but who was unable to replicate his success in a 2018 challenge to Senator Casey.  Another prominent politician from the area is Tim Holden, a moderate Democrat who served in Congress for twenty years but lost a primary after his district was redrawn to include more liberal parts of Bidenland.  Lest you feel too sorry for them, Barletta is now a lobbyist for Italian food merchants and Holden is on the state Liquor Control Board, both of which sound a lot more fun than serving in Congress, especially if free samples are involved.

The most heavily populated part of Bidenland- in fact, the most populous metropolitan area in the state outside Philadelphia and Pittsburgh- is the Lehigh Valley, consisting of Lehigh, Northampton, and southern Carbon counties and centered around the cities of Allentown and Bethlehem.  In many ways, it is a microcosm of the state as a whole, with declining industrial areas (just ask Billy Joel), growing urban and suburban areas, a burgeoning Hispanic and Middle Eastern population, and conservative rural areas in close proximity to each other.  Traditionally, Lehigh County (which contains Allentown and part of Bethlehem) was Republican, while Northampton County (which contains Easton and most of Bethlehem) was Democratic.  More recently, they have begun to switch places, with Lehigh becoming more Democratic and Northampton flipping to Donald Trump in 2016. 

The area’s provincialism (another trait, I’ll admit, that it shares with the state as a whole) means that its politicians usually get outvoted by competitors from Philadelphia or Pittsburgh when running for statewide office.  The most successful Lehigh Valley politician of recent years is the exception that proves the rule.  Pat Toomey**, then the area’s congressman, challenged and nearly defeated then-Senator Arlen Specter in the 2004 Republican primary, by which time the state’s Republican base had grown so frustrated with Specter’s moderation that they would have embraced any viable challenger, whether he came from Allentown or Outer Mongolia.  Toomey’s preparations for a rematch drove Specter to switch parties, leaving him as the only Republican standing in time for the 2010 wave.  Toomey’s appeal, at least initially, was more ideological than geographic.

The northeastern corner of Pennsylvania- Wayne, Pike, and Monroe counties- is the Poconos.  A rural backwater for most of its history, the area’s population quadrupled from about 70,000 in 1950 to about 280,000 in 2010 as it developed its tourist industry and ties to New York City and New Jersey.  Like most of rural Pennsylvania, it was once solidly Republican (Wayne County was one of only four Pennsylvania counties to stick with Barry Goldwater in 1964).  In the 1990s and 2000s, Monroe County went Republican by increasingly small margins (George W. Bush carried it by only four votes in 2004) before going for Barack Obama handily in 2008.  Pike and Wayne counties, while still red, were closer than before.  By 2016, though, Pike and Wayne counties cast over sixty percent of their vote for Donald Trump, while Hillary Clinton carried Monroe County by less than a percentage point.

Political and Demographic Trends

Below are charts showing the presidential vote in the coal region (which I will define as Carbon, Columbia, Lackawanna, Luzerne, Northumberland, Schuylkill, and Wyoming counties), the exurbs (Berks, Lehigh, Monroe, Northampton, Pike, and Wayne counties), and Bidenland as a whole, both in absolute terms and compared to the national popular vote:

Two broad conclusions stand out from this chart.  First, Bidenland is usually a bellwether.  In the years covered, it was within five percent of the national popular vote with only two exceptions: 1964 and 2016.  Second, until recently, the coal region was reliably more Democratic than the exurbs.  This changed in 2008, when Obama did better in the exurbs than in the coal region, and even more dramatically in 2016, when Trump carried the coal region handily.  Let’s take a closer look at how individual counties voted, beginning with the four largest exurban counties:

In the 1980s, three of the four counties were Republican-leaning, as rural and suburban areas had grown relative to the cities of Reading and Allentown.  During the 1990s and 2000s, all three counties (the exception being Northampton, which was traditionally Democratic) shifted toward the Democrats as the party gained ground in suburban areas nationwide.  In the 2012 and 2016 cycles, though, Republicans gained in all four counties.  Even in Monroe County, which had gone from being largely rural to suburban and has a growing Hispanic population, Hillary Clinton won by less than her margin in the national popular vote.  Here’s a similar comparison for the three largest coal region counties:

The changes here are even more dramatic.  Lackawanna County, containing the city of Scranton and the most urbanized of the three, was always Democratic-leaning and was getting steadily more Democratic from the 1980s until 2012, but Hillary Clinton barely won the county in 2016.  Schuylkill County, the most rural of the three, was always Republican-leaning (even in 1996, when it voted for Bill Clinton, it did so by a smaller margin than the national popular vote), but Republican margins began increasing after the turn of the millennium, culminating in Donald Trump getting over sixty-nine percent of the vote there in 2016.  Luzerne County, in between the two, was slightly to the left of the nation from 1980 to 2012, but swung hard to Trump in 2016.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the population shift within Bidenland.  From 1950 until the most recent census, the coal region’s population declined slightly, from just over one million to just under one million.  The population of the exurbs, however, almost doubled, from about 700,000 to over 1.3 million.  So, the coal region, where Democratic fortunes tanked in 2016, is losing clout, but Republicans are also gaining in the growing areas around Reading, the Lehigh Valley, and the Poconos.  If Democrats want to regain their edge in Pennsylvania, they will have to reverse these trends.


*The state of Wyoming gets its name from this area, indirectly.  A poem (“The frontier maid, or A tale of Wyoming”) was written about conflict between Indians and settlers in this area during the American Revolution and was popular at the time the Wyoming Territory was established, inspiring the name.


**In the interest of full disclosure, I worked on Senator Toomey’s official staff from 2011-13.