“Joe Biden’s slim victory of 50% to Trump’s 48.8% in Pennsylvania not only thrust the former over the 270-vote threshold needed to win the Electoral College but cemented the commonwealth as one of the few remaining presidential battlegrounds. But to cast Pennsylvania as a “purple state” would be something of a misnomer.
As Christine Jacobs, the executive director of the Represent PA PAC, explained, ‘I tend to think we’re a checkerboard state. There are red pockets and there are blue pockets, but there are not many purple ones’—not unlike the country as a whole.”