Five charts that explain how the Philly suburbs helped Trump win

President-elect Donald Trump’s win was fueled by key gains in working-class communities in the Philadelphia suburbs, a new Inquirer analysis shows.

Trump limited Vice President Kamala Harris’ margins in the four collar counties, denying her tens of thousands of votes President Joe Biden won in the region in 2020 and halting the leftward shift that his own presidency accelerated there.

Ultimately, Trump won 37,000 more votes in the suburbs than he did in 2020, accounting for roughly one-third of his total statewide margin. Factoring in Democratic losses, suburban counties shifted toward Trump by 51,000 votes.

A key piece of Biden’s 2020 win came from shifting traditionally Republican parts of the Philadelphia suburbs blue and running up big margins in heavily Democratic towns like Main Line communities.

Both campaigns this year knew the suburbs — home to nearly one-third of the state’s voters — were key to victory. Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, campaigned in the suburbs seven times. Harris and her running mate Tim Walz made suburban stops six times.

Trump’s visits paid off. In 2024, he drastically improved his margins, flipping some working-class townships like Bensalem in Lower Bucks County and shrinking the Democratic lead in solidly blue communities.

Here’s a look at where he made his most significant gains:

Trump lost three of the four suburban counties but he narrowly flipped Bucks County, the last purple county in the region. Some of the most significant shifts toward Trump came in Lower Bucks County, helping him become the first Republican presidential candidate to win the county since 1988.

Trump flipped four towns that had voted Democratic in both 2016 and 2020 and three were in Bucks — Bensalem, Tullytown, and Penndel. The fourth was Lower Moreland in Montgomery County.

The president-elect had one of his most visual campaign stops in Bucks, at an event where he worked the fryer and served food at a drive-through at a Feasterville McDonalds.

The vast majority of suburban precincts — more than 1,000 of about 1,400 in the state — shifted Republican in 2024. Only 304 precincts shifted Democratic. In addition to Bucks, southeast Delaware County saw especially strong movement right.

The easternmost part of Upper Darby saw an 11.3-percentage-point swing toward Trump from 2020 to this year. Some of that bleeding was offset by gains in the Drexel Hill neighborhood on the western side of the township. Taken together, Upper Darby moved about 1.9 points rightward, on par with how the rest of the suburbs shifted.

Even in Montgomery County, a Democratic stronghold, the arc of towns that voted Democratic by 65% or more in 2020 was clipped this year. Municipalities like Upper Merion, Whitemarsh, Conshohocken, West Conshohocken, and Whitpain remained Democratic, but by less overwhelming margins.

Overall, the suburbs remain overwhelmingly Democratic — 25 municipalities that Biden flipped to Democratic remained Democratic in 2024 — but Trump’s inroads here were meaningful.

He recaptured for Republicans 10 towns in the suburbs that Biden had swung from Republican in 2016 to Democratic in 2020.

Trump performed better in suburban precincts where residents have lower-than-average incomes and where fewer than half the population held a bachelor’s degree.

Those are also the characteristics of places where he performed strongest elsewhere in the state in an election year when inflation was a chief concern for voters, particularly low-income voters.

Still, turnout remains a challenge in the lowest-income suburban precincts, which had lower turnout for Trump than in the precincts where income was closer to the average but slightly below.

Once bastions of chamber-of-commerce-style conservatism, suburban counties have been arguably the most critical areas for growth for Democrats in Pennsylvania and nationwide since Trump first took office in 2016.

Much of Trump’s gains may be attributed to inflation. But the margins are the first significant sign that Democrats may have a ceiling in the collar counties.

Staff writers Lizzie Mulvey and Chris A. Williams contributed reporting.