Joe Biden wins Pennsylvania: Here's how he reclaimed his home state and the 'blue wall'

YORK, Pa. – Democratic challenger Joe Biden won Pennsylvania and its game-changing 20 electoral votes that will send him to the White House, despite a major blitz of campaign visits by President Donald Trump, who tried to hold onto the state he flipped four years ago.

The nation has watched Pennsylvania since Tuesday as Trump's in-person voting lead was chiseled away by an onslaught of mail-in votes that heavily favored Biden. The counts trickled in speedily at times and at other times there were hours between updated numbers. Hour after hour, chunk by chunk, eligible votes were counted until Biden ultimately won the state.

Biden's victory in Pennsylvania gives the former vice president the final piece in reclaiming "the blue wall," the Rust Belt trifecta of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

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Trump claimed those three states in a shocking 2016 upset against Democrat Hillary Clinton, who was favored by Las Vegas odds and numerous polls to win.

With 99% of the votes reported Sunday, Biden had 3,355,387 Pennsylvania votes, or 49.7%, and Trump had 3,313,164, or 49.1%.

Biden was favored to win Pennsylvania, as Democrats had done in every presidential election from 1992 until 2016.

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It wasn't easy, though. Trump had a large early lead, and Trump supporters believed he would win it again.

But the former vice president received insurmountable support from mail-in voters, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and its suburban counties. He also did slightly better in the traditionally red counties that Clinton lost by big margins.

Biden won his native state, where he grew up in Scranton, and will become the second president from Pennsylvania. He joins that short list with James Buchanan, who preceded Abraham Lincoln and is sometimes remembered by presidential historians as someone who stoked divisions that led to the Civil War.

In Biden's effort to be the 46th president, he gained support from larger margins of college-educated women than the first woman to head a major party ticket four years ago.

"Joe Biden won this election on the backs of Pennsylvania women," said Jesse White, a political strategist at Perpetual Fortitude, a Democratic consulting and digital management firm in Harrisburg.

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Biden also won more than 90% of Black and Hispanic voters, according to Associated Press surveys.

The high turnout exceeded the record-setting and historic election in 2016.

Voters for Biden said they were largely driven to the polls or mail-in ballots because of racial justice and the coronavirus, which has infected at least 222,000 residents and killed 8,800 in Pennsylvania.

Trump voters were driven to the polls and mail-in ballots because of the economy, which they say is in decline because of shutdowns and not the president's handling of the virus, according to exit polls and interviews.

"I think he's handled it fine," said Cheryl Whitesell, a 70-year-old retail worker and retired business owner in Luzerne County, which Trump won in 2016 and this year.

"I think he did what he felt he had to do. The virus is a real thing, and I think he did the best he could."

The president connected with more than 3 million voters in Pennsylvania with his populist campaign style and large rallies that frequently went off script.

Going off script was an asset to his popularity in 2016 when voters saw him as the more genuine candidate. It started to hurt him by 2020 when voters said they wanted less chaos and more control over the coronavirus, a sinking economy and civil unrest.

"His campaign style helped him," said Republican strategist Charlie Gerow, CEO of Quantum Communications in Harrisburg. "What hurt him was a worldwide pandemic none of us expected or factored in."

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Biden was at home in PA

When Biden has made official visits to Pennsylvania during the last several decades, he has been introduced as the state's favorite son.

Biden grew up in Scranton until he was 10 when he and his immediate family moved to Delaware, but he continued to frequently visit friends and extended family in the decades that followed.

He has said that area taught him everything he needed to know about politics, and he's never lost his small-town roots.

It was Biden that former President Barack Obama asked to be his running mate in 2008, a year that Democrats thought Biden's Scranton roots would help attract more moderate and conservative voters to the change ticket.

And it was Biden that Clinton tapped to campaign with her in Pennsylvania during the final days of the 2016 election.

At a stop in Harrisburg on Nov. 6, 2016, two days before the election, Biden made a prediction that would become painfully true for Democrats about 48 hours later: the 2016 election would come down to small, middle-class towns.

That was exactly how Trump won on Nov. 8, 2016.

Biden also said during that stop that his heart was in Pennsylvania, and the loud cheers in the audience made it obvious the crowd of Democrats heard his words as more than campaign pandering.

Biden was an early favorite to flip his native Pennsylvania back to blue

Almost immediately upon Clinton losing, whispers began that Biden should run in 2020 because he was viewed by party leaders as the candidate who could flip his native Pennsylvania back to blue.

When Biden announced his candidacy in April 2019, he was viewed as the favorite to do just that.

By that point, Trump was ensnared in multiple scandals and accusations, as the electorate grew more divided.

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"He was a challenger who could be the candidate of change," said U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, Biden's friend and fellow Democrat from Scranton.

But while the majority of the country had an unfavorable view of the president's personality, he was repeatedly seen as the better presidential pick for the economy.

"None of us had any idea there would be a pandemic and a jobs crisis," Casey said. "He then became a change candidate in an environment where people wanted change in a big way."

Pennsylvania voters who chose Biden wanted change and it helped that the state knew him pretty well.

"They know who he is, where he came from," Casey said. "The campaign did a good job fortifying who he is and what his values are."

The campaign also spent five weeks in July, while the Pennsylvania unemployment rate was at its highest point in 40 years, explaining what Biden would do for the economy and jobs.

Being nicknamed the "healer-in-chief" and applauded for his empathy, Biden won "the decency vote" among suburban women, who gave him a double-digit lead over Trump with the biggest voting bloc in the state.

Biden also won because of the turnout. Pennsylvania is a state with a Democratic voter advantage of about 701,000, and turnout was high among Democrats in this cycle because of mail-in voting.

Ultimately, Biden built an insurmountable lead in Philadelphia and its surrounding collar counties that Trump could not overtake, even with big margins in the less populated red counties.

But Trump proved to be a tough competitor.

"Donald Trump is by far the strongest Republican candidate for president since Reagan won the state by 7 points twice," Casey said. "Trump has the ability to get Democrats to vote for him. There was no guarantee the state would slip back to blue."

But it did flip back to blue, and the state where Biden grew up on North Washington Avenue will send him back to Washington, D.C., where he will face his next challenge to get the coronavirus under control and bring together a deeply divided nation with a Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate.

"I have no doubt he is prepared to work very hard to bring the country together," Casey said. "That task is much harder than it was 10 years ago and exceedingly more difficult than it was 20 years ago. I think he’ll try very hard."

Biden fulfilled his campaign goal to win the soul of the nation. Now, he has to heal it.

Follow reporter Candy Woodall on Twitter at @candynotcandace.

This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Joe Biden wins Pennsylvania and the 'blue wall': Here's how he won