Republican officials fear Donald Trump’s problems will metastasize in Chester County, a suburban barometer in Pennsylvania. | Getty The county that's ground zero for Trump's suburban woes For a certain kind of GOP voter, Donald Trump is not an option.

PAOLI, Pa.— After years of national fascination with the Reagan Democrats of Macomb and the soccer moms of Loudoun, there’s a new election trope this year: The moderate Republican voters of Chester County, Pennsylvania.

This affluent, highly educated county — the only suburban Philadelphia county that Mitt Romney won — has emerged as ground zero of Donald Trump’s suburban struggle, and the media’s obsession with it.


When the question was how suburban women reacted to Trump’s debate performance, the dateline was naturally West Chester, the county seat. Same for a recent look at Trump’s struggles with college-educated white voters. Ivanka Trump kicked off her tour of Philadelphia’s collar counties on Thursday with a stop in Chester County, and the campaign chose Chester County as a marquee stop on its Women for Trump tour earlier this month, dispatching the GOP nominee’s daughter-in-law Lara here.

“You know why?” said Alan Novak, the former chair of both the Pennsylvania GOP and the Chester County GOP, when asked about Chester County’s star turn. “White, highly educated women, white, college-educated men—that’s Chester County. You could take that label off and put the county in its place, that’s what we are.”

In other words, the county of 516,000 is filled with the kinds of Republican voters who haven’t embraced Trump, in a state that’s close to essential to his hopes of winning.

“Moderate, highly educated Republican voters haven’t made their minds up,” said Val DiGiorgio, the current GOP chairman who said national interest in Chester County has spiked this year. “Every phone call I have, it’s the same conversation. The media will ask, ‘Why isn’t Donald Trump winning yet?’ It’s the same issue he’s having in other states—it’s that type of voter.”

And that was before the furor surrounding the surfacing of a tape that caught Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, as well as the subsequent allegations of assault from several different women. Now, Republican officials fear Trump’s problems will metastasize here in this suburban barometer.

“It takes the undecideds and probably makes them lean Clinton, it takes the lean Clintons and puts them in the Clinton camp, and it probably makes some Republicans reevaluate and go to undecided,” said a high-ranking Chester County GOP official of the controversy surrounding Trump’s remarks about women. “This is what happens when you deal with someone like this. There’s nothing additive, at this point, about that candidacy.”

While Chester County has backed nearly every Republican presidential candidate since 1860 — the exceptions are 1912, 1964 and 2008 — this year, local Republicans are expecting the worst.

At the Paoli Blues Fest in early October, a popular community event in this tony suburb, the local GOP was uncharacteristically without a tent and there were no Republican activists registering voters -- in contrast to their energetic Democratic counterparts.

“Mitt Romney did great in Chester County, our committee worked really hard for Romney,” said Kristen Mayock, who served for nearly a decade as an area Republican committee chair. But this year, she continued, “I see less people working as hard. I don’t think there is the same motivation.”

Asked whether she would be supporting Trump, she replied, “I’m going to refrain from answering that.”

“He has made some statements that have been concerning for those of us who call ourselves feminists,” she added.

Reached in the days after Trump’s coarse remarks surfaced, Mayock called the latest revelations “simply indefensible” in an email. She made clear her focus now is on helping down-ballot Republicans. “I am hopeful that our intelligent voters in the county recognize that we have some incredibly qualified and dedicated candidates running down ticket.”

As in other moderate suburbs across the country, some center-right voters are considering casting a reluctant vote for Hillary Clinton, who has been aggressively organizing here, and dispatching surrogates including Anne Holton, the wife of vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine, who visited last weekend. Actors Tony Goldwyn and Ted Danson have also recently hit Chester for Clinton.

Ryan Costello, the local Republican congressman, is emblematic of Chester County’s unease with Trump. He has nominally committed to voting for the real estate mogul, but does not talk about Trump on the trail. He condemned Trump’s remarks about groping women as “atrocious, disrespectful towards women, and…incredibly inappropriate for someone who wants to lead our country.” He has otherwise stayed quiet.

Costello’s internal polling from earlier this month, according to a source familiar with the numbers, explains why. In a district that includes the most populous parts of Chester County and parts of several other suburban Philadelphia counties, the congressman was running 10 points ahead of the top of the ticket, where Trump trails Clinton 46 percent to 39 percent—before Trump’s remarks about sexual assault blew up the race.

Even before the release of the Trump tape, 51 percent of voters were backing Clinton in the Chester County portion of Costello’s seat, and just 34 percent were supporting Trump. While Clinton has the support of around 85 percent of members of her party, Trump is at only 70 percent support from Chester County Republicans.

More recent public polling shows that Trump’s challenge has only grown in the region following that controversy. A Bloomberg poll released Thursday found that in the four suburban counties surrounding Philadelphia, Clinton was leading Trump by 28 percentage points. And in those counties, 68 percent of likely voters were bothered a lot by the Trump tape — including 76 percent of women.

It’s possible his numbers have slipped even further in Chester. Republicans have won the white college-educated vote in every presidential election since 1956, but this year that measure often correlates with opposition to Trump. Of the four collar counties, Chester County has the highest percentage of citizens with college degrees. (Montgomery County has the second-highest percentage, though it tilts more heavily Democratic). Bucks and Delaware counties are considered to be better demographic fits for Trump.

“Chester used to be the firewall,” said the prominent Republican county official. “That’s where we started picking up votes and we kept picking them up until we hit [Pittsburgh’s] Allegheny [County]. If you lose those voters in Chester, you lose the same types of voters, if less of them, in [neighboring] Delaware County, Bucks, and also then you see, as you head into Lancaster and York [counties], some of the same voters there…they’ve got graduate degrees, they’re going to be voting against Trump for the same reasons Republicans in Chester are.”

The Trump campaign doesn't concede any of this.

"The momentum in Chester County is entirely in Donald Trump's favor. Thousands of southeastern voters attended our 'Coffee With Ivanka' events — hundreds at the Chester County stop alone," said Greg Manz, the campaign's Pennsylvania communications director. "The energy here is something Hillary Clinton and her surrogates have consistently failed to achieve during their visits to southeastern Pennsylvania."

But the fear among many local Republicans is that some otherwise reliably GOP voters will be so turned off by their presidential choices that they skip voting and stay home altogether, damaging down-ballot candidates. National Republicans are clearly keeping an eye on Costello, a rising GOP star serving in his first term in Congress: Earlier this month, House Speaker Paul Ryan traveled to the district to campaign with the congressman.

Even before Trump’s latest scandals, Costello said Trump hurt himself by tearing into Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe whom he has criticized over her weight—comments the Clinton campaign made a big effort to highlight in the last presidential debate.

“I think Republicans [were] starting to come home headed into the [first] debate, but I think this Miss [Universe] issue sort of reinforces the reluctance by some,” he said.

Trump already had a long way to go to win over Chester County’s women voters. On a swing through the district with Costello earlier this month, prior to Trump’s lewd comments captured on the tape, the congressman ran into the mother of a high school classmate on a walk from a Kiwanis Club event to a street festival in the revitalized former steel town of Phoenixville. She will vote for Costello, she told the congressman—but was still struggling with her choice for the top of the ticket.

“Because I’m a Republican, I would like to be [decided],” said the woman, who identified herself as Sandy. But while she is troubled by Clinton, she wasn’t comfortable with Trump, either. “Just when you think everything’s settling, then something else comes up. You think you can go along for a couple weeks and everything seems fine and then all of a sudden he makes a comment—and unfortunately Hillary knows it. She says something, she’ll get him, then he’ll respond, and it’s one of those, ‘Oh no, here we go again.’”

A week later, the Trump tape emerged.

As Costello left the Paoli Blues Fest, he passed a car that still bore a Marco Rubio bumper sticker.

“He would have done well here,” Costello said wistfully.