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Without Philly in 2020, Trump would have won Pennsylvania with 53% of the vote. With it, he lost with 49%. Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes – and Philadelphia by 470,000.
Philly – on the opposite side of Pennsylvania from Pittsburgh – is the US’ sixth-largest city, with 1.6M people in its city limits and 6.2M in its metro area. It dwarfs the size of any other city in Pennsylvania, with 5x the population of Pittsburgh. The economy of its metro area equates to about half that of the entire state.
Philly has experienced industrial decline. Unlike Pittsburgh, though, its economy was more diversified and less reliant on a handful of large companies. It lost 25% of its population between 1950 and 2020, although the trend may have since reversed: Between 2010 and 2020, the population rose 5.1%. Several universities are based in Philly, as well as companies like Comcast, Dupont Chemical, and numerous financial firms.
Philly’s population – overwhelmingly educated, black, or union – makes it Republicans’ kryptonite. The city hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1852. In 2020, Biden won 60% of the vote in Allegheny County, around Pittsburgh. He won 81% in Philadelphia county.
So how were people feeling about this election? What did they care about?
Near a wealthy neighborhood near the trendy South Street, a middle-aged woman and life-long Philly resident said the city is feeling “scared” about the vote.
While everything in the city isn’t great – she blamed the city for treating homeless people “unfairly” by trying to keep them off the streets – she said Philly residents “have no choice” regarding the election: “It’s scary.”
We ran into one of those homeless people less than a block away.
“Fuck Philadelphia,” he said. “It is a bunch of faggots.”
On nearby South Street – a hipster area lined with restaurants, dive bars, record stores, and sex shops – we interviewed a native of inner-city Philly who had worked at one of these places. He had just moved back to Philly after spending four years in Delaware.
“I left for my daughter,” he said, naming a few problems: Violence, schools, “everything.”
“Philly is a slippery slope,” he said, adding that it’s gotten worse: “Just the crime, just the dumb stuff that happens. You can't really be as comfortable or have as much fun no more.”
Philly has seen a rise in gun violence, which he blamed on kids and parents: “You don't see many 25, 26-year-olds really being in trouble. It's the 16, 15-year-olds and their parents who don't know where they at, don't care where they at.”
The solution, he said, was “Parents actually taking care of their kids.”
But, he added, it “isn’t as bad as people try to put it out to be. In my opinion, and I tell people this all the time, I'm 28 and I've never had a bad run-in with cops, bad run-in with people”
He didn’t care who won the election – as long as it wasn’t Trump.
That man told us that to understand Philly, we needed to interview people in the West and North. The south was mostly white-collar people; north and northeast Philadelphia are “poorer…most dangerous,” he said, while West Philly is “a mix.”
So we headed there to see how inner-city voters felt about the upcoming election.
The first man we met – a security guard at one of Philly’s universities – had a strong opinion. He said…
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