Kamala Harris needed to outperform Joe Biden’s successes in Philly’s suburbs to win Pa. She did worse.

If she wanted to win Pennsylvania, Vice President Kamala Harris needed to run up the score in the Philly suburbs.

She didn’t.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Harris turned her focus to Philly’s suburbs — hitting the trail with former Republican U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney to make the case to moderate Republicans to put “country over party” and back her campaign against former President Donald Trump.

The theory was that there were former Trump voters in the suburbs who would be ready to vote for a Democrat rather than the only president to face two impeachments or be convicted of a felony.

But Harris failed to meet President Joe Biden’s 2020 margins, let alone exceed them. Across all four collar counties, her returns lagged slightly behind Biden’s totals as of Friday, with thousands of provisional ballots left to count.

In Bucks County, the one purple county left in the area, the former and future president held a narrow lead that, if it holds, would make Trump the first Republican presidential candidate to carry the county since 1988.

Down ballot, Republicans had stronger performances in the collar counties than in previous years.

Officials with both parties point to a variety of factors for Democrats’ underperformance — Harris’ truncated campaign, the impact of inflation, and persistent GOP registration gains. But Republicans in the collar counties are already looking at Tuesday’s results as an opportunity to begin to claw back support they have lost over the last decade.

Throughout the campaign cycle GOP leaders in the collar counties said, anecdotally, that they were seeing more enthusiasm and engagement around Trump than they ever had. More people were picking up signs and swinging by local GOP offices.

And, after having almost no presence in the suburbs in the first several months of the campaign, Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance crammed six trips to the suburban counties into the final weeks.

“They decided at some point that they really needed to do better here in the Southeast,” said Frank Agovino, who chairs the Delaware County GOP. “They knew the votes were here if they were going to pull it out.”

Trump campaign officials never expected to win the Philadelphia suburbs, though they said they believed they would win Bucks County, but they knew they needed to limit Harris’ gains in the area.

And they succeeded.

As of Friday afternoon, with thousands of provisional ballots left to count across the four counties, Trump held a 1,283-vote lead in Bucks County. In Delaware, Montgomery, and Chester Counties, according to state data, Harris had performed roughly in line with Biden’s margins — falling fewer than 10,000 votes short of her predecessor’s vote totals in the Democratic strongholds as of Friday.

Bucks County, where Republicans took an advantage in voter registration over the summer, was a key prize for Trump. And Republicans pointed to the voter registration shift as an early sign of his victory.

“I knew it would make nationwide attention because it was a county that hasn’t voted … Republican since 1988, and so getting that national attention meant national eyes,” said Scott Presler, a conservative influencer who worked to flip Bucks through his organization Early Vote Action.

Presler, who has been lauded by the Trump campaign for boosting GOP registrations, has a history of peddling disinformation about elections.

“We just saw an explosion of energy when we flipped the county. And then people thought in their minds, yes, we can flip Bucks,” he said. “And so what I knew all along, the nation then knew when we flipped the county.”

Ultimately, voters at the polls often cited the economy as their top issue.

In Warminster, Daniel Stevens, 34, said that made Trump the obvious choice.

“Do you want me to dump the mothballs out of my wallet?” Stevens said. “Let’s be real, we’re all trying to raise families, and we just can’t do that with our finances pinched.”

Democrats acknowledged that their messaging in that area had fallen short.

“Democrats have historically been bad at explaining what it is that we have done for people, and I think that is something that gives, Trump in this case, gave him the opportunity to say that he was the guy that was going to address people’s concerns. Particularly on the economy,” said State Sen. Steve Santarsiero, the chair of the Bucks County Democratic Party.

Some questioned whether Biden had exited the race too late, or noted how little time Harris had to build up her campaign. But broadly, suburban Democrats consistently returned to questions about messaging and outreach in the days after the election.

“When I’m in my Catholic men’s group every Saturday morning, they’re bringing up immigration and inflation,” said former U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, a Democrat who represented Bucks County from 2007 to 2011. “We have to listen and remember God gave us two ears and only one mouth for a reason.”

While Democrats regroup, Republicans in the collar counties see opportunity.

After years of the suburbs moving steadily towards Democrats, Guy Ciarrocchi, a GOP strategist based in Chester County, described Tuesday’s election as “the flower coming out of the rubble” for suburban Republicans.

“People are feeling good about getting involved again. And I’m seeing that all the time,” Agovino said.

Christian Nascimento, the chair of the Montgomery County Republican Party, said the country might be on the cusp of a political realignment. He pointed to the diverse set of voters who supported Trump.

“This election clearly showed a move to the right and a move towards conservatism throughout the country,” he said. “Now it’s on Trump and the Senate and House and party apparatus, like myself and the committee, to leverage that and build a kind of consistent, enduring conservative philosophy that can govern and deliver for people.”

But Monica Taylor, the Democrat who chairs the Delaware County Council, pointed out that turnout remained relatively high in the collar counties and that three of the four remained landslides for Harris — even if they weren’t the gains Democrats had needed to carry the state.

And she’s convinced Democrats can continue to build support in the collar counties.

“We are a blue county. I don’t believe that we are going back from that,” she said. “There are still areas where we have a lot of work to do to get more Democrats engaged.”

Staff writer Vinny Vella contributed to this article.

This story was updated with Friday numbers as more ballots were counted.