With presidential campaigns on hold, here’s what 2019 presidential campaign donation data can tell us about the state of the race

• Benjamin Pontz
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  Ben Pontz covered state and local government for PA Post. He previously worked as an Associate Producer with Smart Talk. He is a graduate of Gettysburg College where he double majored in political science and public policy with a minor in music and he served as editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, The Gettysburgian.

Joe Biden is staking his presidential campaign, in part, on his blue collar appeal, a bet that he can win back disaffected white working class voters who turned to Donald Trump and the thousands of African-American voters who stayed home in the 2016 presidential election.

Hillary Clinton struggled with both groups in 2016, which contributed to her losing Pennsylvania to Trump, the first Republican to win the state in a presidential election since George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell (D) predicted several months before the 2016 election that suburban Pennsylvanians would help Clinton overcome any working class voters lost to Trump.

“For every one of those blue-collar Democrats he picks up, he will lose to Hillary two socially moderate Republicans and independents in … suburban Cincinnati, suburban Philadelphia, suburban Pittsburgh, places like that,” Rendell told the New York Times in March of that year.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) added, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”

As it turns out, compared to 2008, for every one voter Clinton picked up in a precinct where college-educated whites were a majority, she lost 16 in a precinct where non-college educated whites were a majority, according to data compiled by Brandon Finnigan, founder and director of elections at Decision Desk HQ, and presented at the 2017 American Elections Symposium at St. Anselm College.

Trump won Pennsylvania by only 45,000 votes, so winning back even a fraction of those voters in white working class precincts or expanding support in the college-educated corridor of suburban Philadelphia could be enough for the Biden campaign. So far, though, it’s difficult to see a lot of enthusiasm for his campaign in those areas.

A PA Post analysis of about 500,000 campaign donations made by Pennsylvanians in 2019 shows that while Biden raised more money in the state than any other Democratic hopeful, he had fewer individual donations than either Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Biden’s contributions were heavily concentrated in Philadelphia and its main line suburbs, and in and around Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, Sanders, whose total number of donations more than doubled Biden’s, displayed strength throughout Western Pennsylvania as well as in smaller cities like Lancaster, where Sanders’s 3,322 contributions dwarfed Biden’s 724.

If Biden uses the same playbook of focusing all his efforts on voters in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, that could be a strategic error for his campaign, said Rob Speel, an associate professor of political science at Penn State Erie.

“In 2016, Hillary Clinton, objectively, ran a very poor campaign in Pennsylvania,” said Speel. “She spent almost the entire campaign in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas, ignoring the rest of the state. Trump went to cities like Erie, Altoona, Johnstown, and Gettysburg. And that was enough to create for him the margin of victory in the state.”

Four years later, Biden will be helped by his strength in the Philadelphia area and his roots in Northeastern Pennsylvania, but he will need to show an ability to generate more enthusiasm among voters elsewhere in the state than these fundraising numbers demonstrate, said Speel.

“I don’t think Joe Biden will make the same mistake [of ignoring parts of the state], which means I don’t think Donald Trump is going to have the same sort of advantages over the Biden campaign that he may have had over the Clinton campaign in 2016,” said Speel, “And therefore, he’s going to have to figure out other ways to win over some voters.”

Ashleigh Strange, a regional organizer with the progressive advocacy organization Lehigh Valley Stands Up, said that Biden still has work to do to win over working class voters who are not already part of the Democratic base. Part of the reason Bernie Sanders had such fundraising strength in more rural and working class parts of the state, she said, is that he built a political organization over the past four years, endorsing candidates like Jess King and Greg Edwards in their ultimately unsuccessful 2018 congressional bids. Strange believes that Sanders, whose name remains on the ballot despite his dropping out of the race, will still fare well during Pennsylvania’s primary on June 2.

Although Strange believes that ending the “reign of Donald Trump” will be a unifying goal for working class voters in the Lehigh Valley and across the rest of Pennsylvania, Biden has yet to fully win those voters’ trust. She expressed satisfaction that Biden has adapted some policy ideas from the Sanders and Warren campaigns, but noted that Biden argued against some of those very ideas in the Democratic presidential debates.

Biden’s vice presidential choice will be key to showing the type of voters who have supported Sanders and other more liberal candidates that he is willing to have a partner who will “hold his feet to the fire” on those issues, she said. She listed former Georgia state Sen. Stacey Abrams and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as choices that would excite voters who have yet to come around to Biden.

“Amy Klobuchar would knock the wind out of our sails,” said Strange. “A lot of folks are using the term ‘Blue Wave,’ but they’re using it somewhat incorrectly. They are seeing ‘blue wave’ as meaning, ‘I am a Democrat, and I voted and I got a bunch of other Democrats to vote.’ But the blue wave is new voters who have come to the Democratic Party and are saying, ‘These are the values I stand with, and I’m going to vote for the first time.’ That’s a blue wave. I think that if they want a blue wave, choosing someone as moderate as Amy Klobuchar would end in failure.”

Even suburban voters, who tend to be more moderate, are starting to support policies like universal health care.

“Especially if he tries to pivot more to the center on something like health care for all or climate change, people are really seeing that even if they didn’t think it affected them before, it affects them now,” said Strange. “I don’t think that at least the folks in the Lehigh Valley that I’ve spoken to are going to let him do that. I just don’t see it.”

In 2016, Trump won Northampton County by five points, a place that President Obama won twice and John Kerry and Al Gore won before, while Hillary Clinton narrowly won neighboring Lehigh County. In Easton, the county seat of Northampton County, Sanders outraised Biden by a three-to-one margin and Trump by two-to-one. In Allentown, the county seat of Lehigh County, Biden, Sanders, and Trump each raised about $25,000 in 2019.

Overall, Trump raised more money in Pennsylvania than any of the Democrats, though he did so relying on far fewer donations. Trump’s campaign received 41,321 donations compared to 63,521 for Biden, 88,898 for Warren, and 166,459 for Sanders. Trump’s $3.22 million total amount raised in the state exceeded Biden’s $3.07 million and Sanders’s $2.68 million. (Combined, though, the top five Democrats outraised Trump by a three-to-one margin, totaling more than $10.2 million.)

Trump’s fundraising stronghold was Harrisburg, where he amassed almost $400,000 from just 558 donors, an average of more than $700 per donation. He also did well in Hershey, raising nearly $100,000 from just 99 donors ($1,000 per donation).

But neither Trump nor Biden could match the grassroots strength of Sanders, whose contributions averaged just over $16 compared to $48.30 for Biden and $78.05 for Trump.

“That does indicate less enthusiasm for [Trump] and perhaps in the rest of the state, at least among donors,” said Speel.

The last two times Pennsylvania played a major role in deciding a primary election, though, the winner was not the strongest fundraiser. In 2008, despite then-candidate Barack Obama having outraised her by tens of millions of dollars — buoyed by an innovative online fundraising operation — Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary. And in 2016, Trump lagged behind the rest of the GOP field in Pennsylvania fundraising before winning the state’s primary. He would go on to raise more than $86 million in small-dollar donations by the time of the general election. As of the end of the first quarter in 2020, Trump has $187 million more in his campaign warchest nationwide than Biden.

Measuring enthusiasm may be even more difficult than usual, though, as the November 2020 election approaches given that the two traditional metrics — small-dollar donations and attendance at campaign events — are both in doubt given lack of disposable income and social distancing restrictions associated with the spreading coronavirus.

Finnigan said that it is too early to know how the presidential election will play out in Pennsylvania. He believes events will ultimately determine how voters look at both Biden and Trump more than narratives about their fundraising strength or social media followings.

Still, he said, if he were the Biden campaign, he would spend time focusing on outreach to places like Lackawanna County, where Hillary Clinton’s three-point margin of victory was nearly 10 points behind Obama’s finish in 2012, and Luzerne County, which Obama won twice before Trump carried it by 20 points in 2016.

“There’s nothing that’s changed in that Republican shift in Luzerne and in Lackawanna County,” said Finnigan, noting that he monitors voter registration figures there every month and that, in tandem with the campaign finance data, Trump seems to be maintaining his relative strength there.

“There’s still more and more voters that are shifting towards the Republican party in those two counties,” Finnigan said. “Now, mind you, they are offset by the people that are changing their registration down in Chester, in Montgomery, and in Bucks County, but what we saw moving politically, four years ago, it doesn’t really stop.”

There may be enough new suburban voters to help Democrats build on their 2018 results, in which the party flipped three U.S. House seats. But relying on the suburbs, as Clinton did in 2016 and where the campaign donation data shows Biden’s strengths are — thus far at least — this cycle, is a risk.

Erie went for Trump in 2016 too, the first time a Republican presidential candidate took the county since 1984.

Speel said that, at least based on what he has seen, there hasn’t been much of an effort on the Democrats’ side to win Erie back.

“In northwestern Pennsylvania, where I live, the Biden campaign has a perfunctory effort, just like Hillary Clinton did,” he said, “but there has been anything beyond the same efforts she made — at least so far — in 2016.”

It’s the same story back in the Lehigh Valley.

“We’re starting to see things that used to be seen as not necessities as necessities, things like internet, things like health care for all,” said Strange. “I sense that hearing from the presumptive nominee that these things that people have been fighting for for a while are being brought to a head because of COVID-19, and those problems aren’t going to go away again afterwards — being able to hear that or see it in a mailer or anything — I think would go a really long way.”

Related infographics:

• 2019 donations to President Trump and former VP Joe Biden by Pennsylvania city.
• 2019 donations to President Trump and major Democratic presidential candidates.

Interactive graphics by WITF’s Steve Fiadewornu.