Donald Trump made his biggest gains in the Northeast Pa. communities near Joe Biden’s hometown

SCRANTON — Matt Wolfson used to be a construction worker in New Jersey, and he said his union implored members to vote for Democrats every election. Then Wolfson got hurt on the job, and he felt the union didn’t have his back in the ordeal that followed.

“I changed party as soon as I got hurt and the union didn’t take care of me,” said Wolfson, 45, who is disabled and was able to collect early on his pension.

Wolfson, a Scranton resident, said he’d been optimistic former President Donald Trump would beat Vice President Kamala Harris in last week’s presidential election. But he hadn’t expected the Republican to win so decisively.

» READ MORE: Donald Trump won Pa. with more votes than any statewide Republican candidate in history. Here’s how he did it.

“I just wanted to give him a second chance,” he said while getting lunch in central Scranton on the day after the election. “We had a pretty good economy before COVID hit.”

Trump improved on his 2020 performance in every region of the state. But his gains were most dramatic this year in Northeast Pennsylvania, where voters in postindustrial cities and Pocono Mountains towns gave the president-elect the edge he needed to secure the Keystone State and the White House after losing both in his previous election.

Four of the top six counties where Trump saw his biggest percentage gains in votes from 2020 are in the Northeast, an Inquirer analysis of preliminary election results shows. Monroe County in the Poconos saw the biggest jump, with Trump’s vote total increasing 3.7% compared with 2020. Luzerne County, which includes Wilkes-Barre, was third with a 3% bump.

Scranton, President Joe Biden’s hometown, is the seat of Lackawanna County, which was fourth, with Trump getting a 2.9% increase. Harris narrowly won the county, but the immense gains Trump made compared with past Republican candidates has given the county a reputation as a bellwether in the political era defined by his rise.

Trump surprised by losing Lackawanna County by only 3.5 percentage points in his 2016 victory. In the previous election, then-President Barack Obama beat Republican Mitt Romney by 27 points in the county. In 2020, Biden appeared to have reversed the trend, beating Trump by 8 percentage points in the county. But Trump struck back this year by shrinking his deficit to just 3 points against Harris.

Those swings are emblematic of Rust Belt cities across the country, where working-class voters who were long loyal Democratic voters have embraced Trump’s economic populism, including his protectionist trade agenda.

Trump saw a combined swing of 2.5 percentage points in his margins in the 10 counties of Northeast Pennsylvania. He got 6% more votes this year there than in 2020, while Harris got 4% fewer votes than Biden in 2020.

In the state’s other 57 counties, the combined swing to Trump was only 0.9 percentage points, with the former president getting 4% more votes than in 2020, and Harris 3% less than Biden.

Scranton resident Leonard Vaivada said he saw Trump’s big win coming.

“It really wasn’t surprising,” said Vaivada, a 72-year-old retired house painter. “We really need a secure border. I don’t care about people saying it’s racist. No, it’s protecting your border.”

Many voters, he said, didn’t trust Harris on economic issues.

“She wants to give too many things away,” he said.

In Luzerne County, Republicans aren’t fighting to get over the hump, as they are in Lackawanna. They’re in the driver’s seat.

After Obama won the county in 2012 by 5 percentage points, Trump has racked up wins of 19 points in 2016, 14 points in 2020, and 20 points this year.

Luzerne County GOP chair Gene Ziemba said Trump’s embrace of “drill, baby, drill” energy policy plays well in the region, which is home to some of the greatest fossil fuel deposits in the world and was once dominated by the coal and railroad industries.

”This hits home. We are sitting on the Marcellus Shale,” he said, referring to Pennsylvania’s large natural gas reserves. Many people in the area are hoping Trump’s energy policies will create a local economic boom. “We’ve got cheap housing, and we’ve got a ready and willing labor force,” he said.

Another factor in Trump’s big win in the county, he said, was his growing popularity with Latino voters. Local Republican activists in Hazleton, which has a Hispanic majority, took it upon themselves to request and distribute 4,000 campaign signs provided by the county GOP in the run-up to the election, Ziemba said.

“The border issue here in our county here is huge, and we have a giant Hispanic population, who by the way love Mr. Trump,” Ziemba said. “We clean swept up here.”

About 18% of residents in the Northeast’s 10 counties are Latino, compared with 8% of the state overall, and polls showed the former president has been making inroads with Hispanic voters.

Ed Mitchell, a Democratic strategist who lives in Kingston, said his party has been in disarray in Luzerne since Republicans in 2012 took control of local offices following a county reorganization that saw the creation of a GOP-dominated county council.

“There’s no party-building,” Mitchell said, lamenting that between the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, Republican registered voters overtook Democrats on the county rolls. “We basically have no Democratic Party. We have a couple of people who get together.”

Mitchell now consults for an upstart group called Action Together NEPA, which is trying to rebuild political infrastructure for local Democrats and made gains in last year’s county council races.

“If the Democratic Party is going to come back, here in Pennsylvania anyway, they’re going to have build locally,” he said.

Staff writer Julia Terruso contributed to this article.