By any measure, Pennsylvania was a catastrophe for the Democratic presidential campaign.

Vice President Kamala Harris lagged behind President Joe Biden's 2020 vote totals in all but 10 of the state's 67 counties. Four counties flipped from Democrat to Republican.

In the vote-rich collar counties around Philadelphia, where college-educated suburban voters saved Democrats in the last two federal elections, 30,000 fewer people voted for Harris than had voted for Biden — and 27,000 more voted for Donald Trump than four years ago.

In Philadelphia — the most crucial county in the state for Democrats — Harris trailed Biden's totals by a whopping 51,000 votes. It was the second consecutive election in which more voters turned out in Allegheny County than in Philadelphia, despite Philly having almost 300,000 more registered Democrats overall.

"The mood of the country since the pandemic has been very, very dour," said Christopher Borick, a professor of political science at Muhlenberg College. "It's not a happy electorate. And when it's not a happy electorate, the party in power is not in an advantageous position. When you're not feeling great, you look for change."

Harris' campaign opened 50 offices, hired 400 paid staffers and had busloads of volunteers knocking on doors and making phone calls to Pennsylvania voters.

It didn't work.

For the second time in three elections, Trump won the state — and this time, his 3.5 million votes marked the most any GOP presidential candidate has ever received in Pennsylvania.

The economy was tops on voters' minds, and they were reminded of that every time they went to the supermarket, even as inflation cooled off to pre-pandemic levels.

A look at voting results and exit polls shows how much change was desired even as the U.S. under Biden and Harris recovered from the pandemic better than in some other countries.

Trump increased the number of votes he received in 64 of the 66 counties, falling behind only in Allegheny and Greene counties.

Pennsylvania women didn't turn out in larger numbers for the second woman to lead the national ticket of a major political party, according to network exit polls reported by NBC. They accounted for 53% of the vote as they did in 2020 and went for Harris by 53% to 45%. She carried 91% of Black women but only 45% of white women.

Male voters preferred Trump, 55% to 45%, including 21% of Black men and 55% of Hispanic men. Hispanics overall backed Harris, but only by 52% to 46%.

With some ballots yet to be counted in Pennsylvania, Trump received just 117,000 more votes than he did four years earlier. Harris received about 105,000 fewer than the Biden-Harris ticket did in 2020

Even in Allegheny County, where voters turned out in higher overall numbers than anywhere else in the state, Harris received about 10,000 fewer votes than Biden did four years ago.

But it's Philadelphia that has Democrats most worried. After the party's dismal performance there — Harris received fewer overall votes in the city than Barack Obama did 16 years ago — the party chair, former Rep. Bob Brady, blamed the vice president's campaign for the low turnout.

"I would've liked to see the Harris campaign — especially the national campaign — coordinate with us a little bit," he told WCAU-TV. "Don't you want to go to the people that have a proven record that know how to do this stuff and can help you along with it? Didn't happen."

A senior adviser to the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania, Brendan McPhillips, fired back.

"If there's any immediate takeaway from Philadelphia's turnout this cycle, it is that Chairman Brady's decades-long practice of fleecing campaigns for money to make up for his own lack of fundraising ability or leadership is a worthless endeavor that no future campaign should ever be forced to entertain again," McPhillips said in a statement to WCAU-TV.

In a tweet, McPhillips continued his sharp criticism of the longtime party leader.

"When the elderly white man who has run the Philadelphia Democratic Party since I was in kindergarten refers to the sitting Vice President as 'that lady,' and lies about never meeting her ... well, we got receipts," he wrote.

But the campaign's woes extended far beyond the limits of the state's largest cities.

In rural Western and Central Pennsylvania, the Harris campaign tried to hold down Trump's margins by dispatching the vice presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who grew up on a farm and represented rural voters while in Congress, to hold down Trump's margins.

It didn't work.

In just four rural counties with large numbers of Republicans — Butler, Lancaster, Westmoreland and York — Trump outpaced his 2020 performance by almost 20,000 votes.

Northampton County, which has picked the statewide winner in all but three presidential elections since 1920, switched from Barack Obama to Trump to Biden back to Trump. Erie, Bucks and Monroe counties moved from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 as well.

"The national campaign, the Harris campaign and their affiliates, did a terrific job," said Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure, a Democrat. "There were waves and waves of door knockers coming into the district from New York and Connecticut and New Jersey to help turn the vote out. There were five or six contacts at peoples' doors. There were phone calls and text messages."

But in this case, McClure said, "The Republicans did a better job."

When Gannon University senior Josh Pfleger knocked on the doors of registered Democrats in Millcreek Township in Erie County before the election — a swing district of a swing county in the country's most-watched swing state — he heard a consensus from voters that he did not expect.

"I just wish there would be another candidate or something," voters in house after house told him.

Pfleger was campaigning for Pennsylvania state Sen. Dan Laughlin, a Republican, but describes himself as an independent who voted for Trump this election after feeling undecided.

As he door-knocked across Erie County, one thing became clear to Pfleger: Democrats everywhere were questioning their party.

"I could feel the dissatisfaction with the candidate and the policies being presented," he said.

Erie, like Northampton, is one of the state's vaunted bellwether counties — a working-class corner of northwest Pennsylvania that has boomeranged from blue to red and vice versa since 2012.

Winning presidents have, in the last few elections, eked out victories by razor-thin margins in the county. This year, Trump won by under 2%, echoing his 2016 victory, while Biden did the same in 2020.

Most of Erie County's majority-white voters live in the city of Erie, once a Democratic stronghold that helped Obama win the whole county by more than 10% in 2012.

When Trump gained ground with working-class voters and took the county in 2016, it was a shock — and was thought to be an aberration, said Jeff Bloodworth, professor of American political history at Gannon University. Biden's victory four years later reinforced that idea.

"In 2016 you could maybe say, 'Well, the rural vote really came out; Democrats didn't see that coming,'" Bloodworth said. "But this time, it was everywhere."

Harris lost Erie County's suburbs and barely hung onto the city this election. The county once again mirrored national trends — even in reliably blue areas, Democrats this year lost ground.

According to the county's director of elections, Tonia Fernandez, a record number of Erie County voters switched their party registration ahead of this year's election, hinting that a red wave in the battleground community could mean more than what meets the eye.

"This has been an ongoing issue," Bloodworth said. "Democrats lost the white working class, and now they're losing the non-white working class, and that cuts to the party's very identity.

"It's not just about losing elections anymore. If you're a Democrat, who are you, if you're the party of the people and the people aren't voting for you anymore?"

For Republicans in Erie and elsewhere, it was imperative that they not repeat the mistakes of four years ago, when Trump railed against mail-in voting with false allegations about its reliability and convinced millions of his supporters that the process couldn't be trusted. This year, he did an about-face, and the GOP actively courted mail-in ballots.

"We realized that if we didn't get our people to vote and to use the system that was in place, whether we liked it or didn't like it, we were going to have the same kind of result that we had in 2020," Northampton Republican Committee Chairman Glenn Geissinger said. "So we committed to committing the resources, the time, the energy, to ensuring that our low-propensity voters were contacted, that they had the opportunity to vote, that they had a mail-in ballot, and that they then returned that mail-in ballot."

The Republican surge wasn't restricted to Pennsylvania. Trump swept all of the seven swing states that the campaigns focused on, even as all of the Democrats running for U.S. Senate in those states won their races except for Bob Casey in Pennsylvania.

AP VoteCast found that 42% of Pennsylvania voters said the economy was a bigger issue than in 2020, three times the 14% who named abortion even after Trump's three U.S. Supreme Court nominees overturned Roe v. Wade

"That was the driving force," said Vince Galko, a Republican strategist based in northeastern Pennsylvania. "You not only worry about paying your bills but what if my car doesn't start tomorrow or my washing machine breaks down. How do you fix it? That's the constant anxiety Pennsylvanians have been dealing with."

Former Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Greenwood, who crossed party lines to endorse Harris, said when the pandemic shutdowns abated, factories that had shut down couldn't meet demand quickly enough and supplies couldn't get through fast enough, forcing prices up and inflation to levels that hadn't been seen in decades.

"That's all very nerdy, frankly," Greenwood said. "The average person doesn't have the inclination to make an economic analysis of why groceries cost more."

That became apparent to the Democrats' foot soldiers as they fanned out to knock on doors and get people to vote for their candidate.

Erie County Young Democrats president and lifelong Democrat Phillip Seaver Hall said he felt confident Harris would take the swing county until one month before the election, when he felt the momentum of the vice president's early campaign begin to fade.

The explanation was in the aisles of the county's grocery stores, where prices were high — and not dropping.

Erie County's median household income — $56,000 — is about 25% lower than Pennsylvania's, and its unemployment rate is higher. It was hit hard by global inflation, despite national job growth and low unemployment.

"The day-to-day cost of living — you go and get two or three items at a convenience store, and you might as well take out a mortgage," lifelong Erie County resident and registered Republican Gregory Hayes said.

In three of the wealthier counties surrounding Philadelphia, Harris won majorities, but by smaller margins than Biden did in 2020. The fourth, Bucks County, backed the GOP nominee for the first time since 1988, as registration figures showed more Republicans than Democrats for the first time in 16 years.

"People were fed up with what was happening in our country," Bucks County GOP Chairwoman Patricia Poprik said. "With just about everything, they were looking for change."

But while Democrats also talked about Trump and fascism and the threats to democracy, and touted their support from Republicans crossing party lines, all that was nothing but a digression from the core issue of the economy, said Democratic strategist Joel Rubin, a native of Squirrel Hill.

"There was a lot of effort made to explain the economic woes, but people were hurting and they just wanted it to be addressed, and the campaign message focused on side issues, not the core issue," Rubin said. "Groups that Democrats rely on and mistakenly take for granted moved toward Trump in a manner that was fatal for Harris' campaign."

Hayes, a member of the Aviation Council of Pennsylvania Board of Directors who voted for Trump, said rising bills sealed his voting decision.

"The silly question that they keep asking is, 'Were you better off then than you are now?"" he said. "That was an easy answer there."

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