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

President-elect Donald Trump won Pennsylvania the same way he won much of the rest of the country: he grew his support in rural areas while tamping down on Vice President Kamala Harris’ advantage in urban and suburban Democratic strongholds.

All told on Wednesday morning, Trump was out-performing his 2020 margins in at least 65 of 67 Pennsylvania counties with results still being tabulated. With about 3% of the vote left to count, Trump received more statewide votes than any Republican candidate in history, a performance fueled by working-class voters, including in majority-Latino communities and Rust Belt areas.

He also appeared to be carrying bellwether counties that are closely divided, such as Erie and Northampton, which voted for President Joe Biden in 2020. And as of Wednesday morning, Trump was slightly leading in Bucks County, though thousands of ballots remain outstanding. If he clinches there, Trump would be the first Republican presidential candidate to win the county since 1988.

“The fact that Republicans actually tried to grow in the suburbs, instead of being resigned to defeat, mattered,” said Guy Ciarrocchi, a GOP strategist from Chester County.

And Harris underperformed in Democratic strongholds like Philadelphia and its collar counties. The vice president was on pace to see the lowest margin for a Democratic presidential candidate in Philadelphia in more than two decades.

Here’s how Trump won Pennsylvania and the presidency.

The largely rural counties in the middle and northern parts of Pennsylvania that have previously made up the core of Trump’s base swung even harder toward him this year.

Despite most of these counties having a small number of voters, gains across those areas added up – rural voters make up the second largest voting group in Pennsylvania, behind suburban voters. And in Rust Belt areas and former manufacturing towns, white working-class voters that had swung toward Trump beginning in 2016 turned out for him in even larger numbers.

A large driver of his Rust Belt strength was in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

While Biden was a deeply unpopular president, Trump likely benefited from Harris having no ties to the Northeast.

In Lackawanna County, which includes Biden’s boyhood home of Scranton, Trump had improved on his 2020 vote total by about 3 percentage points, almost the same boost he saw in Luzerne County, a more Republican county he carried in 2020.

Harris, meanwhile, saw just under a 3% drop in both Lackawanna and Luzerne. As of midday Wednesday, with 98% of the vote counted, she’d netted 5,000 fewer votes in Luzerne than what Biden got there in 2020.

Monroe County, a growing exurb for New York transplants, which includes part of the Pocono Mountains, shifted five points blue from 2016 to 2020 but almost fully rewound that trend, moving nearly four percentage points to the right this year, a trend spotted across the state.

In smaller, more rural counties, small margins added up, too.

Take Schuylkill County, where Harris basically matched Biden’s numbers in 2020 but Trump, with 98% of the vote reported, had increased his margin by about 1,000 votes. Turnout there hit 79%, said GOP county chair Howard Merrick.

“I’ve never seen 79% turnout in Schuylkill County,” Merrick said. “But that was the plan - not from us but from the Trump people. They knew that to get people, they had to get the low propensity voters and they really worked at it and they made us work it.”

Merrick said volunteers from the party and the campaign had lists of independent persuadable voters who sat out recent elections and that they also had a ground game to ensure people who had applied for mail in ballots turned them in. The county also grew its overall registrations – and its GOP registrations not just since 2020 but by a few thousand voters just in the last few months.

Trump’s strength overlaid with where he spent time in the state. Over the last year, he made 31 visits to Pennsylvania and only seven of those visits were to Philadelphia and its suburbs. Two were to Allegheny. The other 22 spanned the state, most of them large rallies in red counties where he aimed to bolster a base by tapping into frustrations over the economy and tying Harris to Biden.

Trump’s focus on turning out more people in those areas was met with some skepticism by Democrats who questioned how much juice there was left to squeeze in a region he’d already grown from 2016 to 2020. His success relied upon less engaged voters, many of them young men, who the campaign and party targeted with a ground army and his message.

He also likely benefited from huge Republican registration gains across the state, and specifically in counties where he netted big vote gains. Luzerne and Bucks County both flipped from majority-Democratic to majority-Republican registration in the five months leading up to the election.

The GOP had for months projected confidence that Trump would improve his margins in Philadelphia, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 7-1. The party cited polling that showed Trump gaining with Black and Latino voters, and evidence that working-class residents have drifted from the Democratic Party.

That appeared to bear out.

Philadelphia was on pace to shift more than 2 percentage points to the right and deliver at least 50,000 fewer votes to Harris than it did to Biden, despite Harris’ strong field operation and rosy projections from the city’s top Democrats.

With some ballots still left to count, Harris was carrying the city with about 78% of the vote compared to Trump’s 20%. As of Wednesday afternoon, she had a 407,000 vote advantage over Trump, the lowest margin for a Democratic presidential candidate since 2000.

With some ballots still left to count, Harris was carrying the city with about 78% of the vote compared to Trump’s 20%. As of Wednesday morning, she had a 390,000 vote advantage over Trump – if that holds, it would be the lowest margin for a Democratic presidential candidate in more than two decades.

Josh Novotney, a Republican consultant and ward leader in Philadelphia, said that’s an “insurmountable situation for Democrats.”

And Larry Ceisler, a public-affairs executive who has worked with Democrats, said Philadelphia was where Harris had to run up her score.

“The only place for her to go for those votes was in the city of Philadelphia,” he said, “because there was a higher ceiling in the city.”

As of Wednesday morning, Trump was outright winning in five of the city’s 66 wards – four in Northeast Philadelphia and one in South Philadelphia.

It’s a bruising loss for Harris here, given the amount of time and resources she poured into the city. The campaign had multiple campaign offices, including in Black and Latino neighborhoods and 15 of her 37 visits to the state were to Philadelphia, where she ended her campaign in a star-studded concert on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Following what appears to be a nationwide trend, Trump performed significantly better among Latino voters in Pennsylvania compared to past election cycles.

He was the clear choice for voters in Hazleton, Luzerne County, one of heavily Latino cities. Trump won Hazleton by 25 percentage points. Democrat Hillary Clinton won the city by 5 points in 2016.

“It’s not that I think the Democrats are bad, [Donald Trump] just knows how to run a country,” said first time voter Danilo Marte, 63, an independent who voted for Trump.

Trump has characterized Latinos as criminals, accusing Mexico of “not sending their best” and sending “rapists” instead. Most recently, a comedian at a now infamous Trump rally at Madison Square Garden called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

Marte, who is half Dominican and half Puerto Rican, said on Wednesday in Hazelton that he didn’t like the rhetoric but made his choice based on who he thought would be the better manager for the country.

“No matter what he says about Hispanics, he’ll know how to run the country and you have to separate the two.”

In Philadelphia, Trump’s share of the vote in the city’s 114 majority-Latino precincts rose to 21.8% – it was 6.1% in 2016 and 15.3% in 2020.

For example, he drew nearly 23% of the vote in North Philadelphia’s 7th Ward, where much of the city’s Puerto Rican and Dominican population is concentrated. He grew his vote total by about 1,000 votes in just that ward compared to 2016 – in the same ward, Democrats lost nearly 2,000 votes across the same timeframe.

City Councilmember Jim Harrity, who works with the city and state Democratic parties and lives in a majority Latino neighborhood, said lines to vote were long at his polling place, and he took that as a good sign for the Democratic party.

“Apparently it was split,” he said Wednesday. “We just didn’t make traction with the groups we needed to.”

The former president also improved markedly in the Lehigh Valley, including in Lehigh County. The diverse county is home to Allentown, Pennsylvania’s third-largest city that has a majority Latino population, including 34,000 Puerto Ricans.

Trump’s margins in Allentown also increased. He carried 37% of the vote in that city’s majority-Latino precincts this year, an increase of 7 percentage points compared to 2020 and a 17-point increase over 2016.

Sam Chen, a GOP consultant based in the Lehigh Valley, said Democrats have underestimated a shift among Latino voters for several years.

“Democrats just assumed that they’re always going to be there,” Chen said. “And the shift has been happening. It’s not an overnight thing, and I have not seen anything from the Democrats to try to stop that bleeding and shift it back.”

The voter-rich suburbs outside Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were a key target for Harris to run up her vote totals and offset Trump’s expected strength in rural areas and potential growth in cities. But those counties did not appear to be delivering Democrats much larger margins than they did in 2020.

“Winning the suburbs big was her only path,” Novotney said, “and it just wasn’t there.”

In fact, Trump improved in some places. As of Wednesday morning, with 98% of the vote counted, he was slightly leading in Bucks County, the reddest of Philadelphia’s four collar counties, where Biden won in 2020.

“I think for the first time since 1988, we’re going to win Bucks County,” Jim Worthington, a major Trump donor based in the county, said to a crowd of supporters who cheered and applauded before midnight.

Trump also appeared to cut into Democratic advantages in Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery counties compared to his performance in 2020. With about 96% of the vote counted, Harris carried Chester County by about 42,000 votes – that’s more than 10,000 fewer votes than Biden’s margin over Trump in 2020.

It was a similar picture in Delaware County, where 98% of the vote was tabulated as of Wednesday morning. Harris carried the county decisively, garnering 75,000 more votes than Trump. But that margin was smaller than in 2020, when Biden carried the county by nearly 88,000 votes.

And in Montgomery County, Harris held a 115,000 vote advantage with about 98% of the votes tallied. That’s compared to a 134,000 vote margin Biden held four years ago.

Ceisler said Democrats may have reached their maximum capacity in the suburbs four years ago.

“I don’t think there were any more votes in the suburbs,” he said. “They were tapped out.”

Inquirer staff members Chris Williams, Rita Giordano, Katie Bernard, and Ximena Conde contributed to this article.