Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

BRYN MAWR, PA.—For a quarter of a century, Pennsylvania has been to the Republican Party what Lucy and her football have been to Charlie Brown. Every four years, the GOP has looked to the state’s legion of culturally conservative white working class voters and thought: “Yes! This time for sure! This time we will pull the Keystone State out of the Democratic ‘Blue Wall’ and send it tumbling to the ground!” Ten days ago, that seemed more possible than ever, with Donald Trump enjoying a 59-point lead among white men without college degrees, and with Clinton’s lead in Pennsylvania shrinking to a small single-digit margins.

Those hopes were centered in the vast area between Pennsylvania’s eastern and western poles of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh that James Carville once called “Alabama.” From the coal country of Cambria County, east of Pittsburgh, to the once-thriving, now faded blue-collar towns of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre and Allentown, legions of less-educated white voters seemed ripe for Republican plucking, During the primary, one of Ted Cruz’s staffers explained to me how Cruz would carry Pennsylvania in November, using the most modern techniques of data-analytics to ferret out such voters. Until recently, it appeared possible that Donald Trump would rally them to the polls with rallies and Tweets. (For an exhaustive account of GOP hopes in Pennsylvania see this piece from last summer’s National Review.)


But it doesn’t seem to be working. After Trump’s brief moment of near-parity in Pennsylvania, Clinton appears to be pulling away again, according to the latest polls. Why? Well, as John Kennedy might have put it, “Let them come to Delaware County.”

It’s one of four “collar counties” surrounding the city of Philadelphia, and it is emblematic of what has happened to a party that once could count on Pennsylvania as a target of opportunity. From 1968 to 1988, Republicans carried the state in four of six elections; and the white-collar counties of Delaware, Bucks, Chester and Montgomery voted for GOP candidates all six times. These were educated, relatively well-off voters who had a special affinity for the brand of moderate-liberal Republicanism embodied by Senators Richard Schweiker, John Heinz, and Arlen Specter and Governors Richard Thornburgh and Tom Ridge.

But as the GOP moved away from moderate-liberal Republicanism, so did Pennsylvania begin moving away from the GOP, especially as the party developed more culturally conservative views. In 2012, Barack Obama came out of the four collar counties with a plurality of some 120,000 votes; in Delaware County, his margin was sixty percent.

If the people I met and surveyed during two speaking appearances are any guide, Hillary Clinton can expect at least as robust a showing. How many of you, I asked two audiences amounting to several hundred, have voted for a Republican presidential candidate in the recent past? A significant minority, maybe 40 percent, raised their hands.

How many of you are considering voting for Donald Trump? The hands raised totaled in single digits.

The reason why appeared to echo what a lot of traditional Republicans especially in eastern states are saying: Their party has left them behind. Craig Standen, a recent arrival from Chicago, who had begun voting Democratic about the time Philadelphia’s suburbs did in 1992, seemed to channel what many of his neighbors said: “I see myself as fiscally conservative and culturally liberal; but the Republican Party left no place for me then and certainly has no place for me now.”

Paulette Moreland, who has split her vote between the two parties in the past, explained bluntly: “From the start—even with the ‘birther’ movement—I have thought Trump was dangerous and crazy.”

The support for Clinton was not unanimous. John Gallo, once a registered Democrat, told me: “I am voting for Trump. I will do so with some trepidation, but I don't trust Hillary and am appalled with the thought of Bill being back in the White House.”

And more than one Clinton supporter expressed fear that a “hidden Trump vote” was lurking in the leafy suburbs. As Connie Carino put it: “You asked Republicans who are voting for Trump to raise their hands. That was like asking those who oppose Putin in Russia to identify themselves. Didn't you know the crowd you were speaking to?”

Perhaps on Election Day armies of the white working class will flood the polls in other, non-urban parts of Pennsylvania. Perhaps they will validate the long-held theory on the right that “missing millions” of voters, who shunned the polls because of the insufficient conservatism of John McCain and Mitt Romney, will now come out to cast their votes, thus rendering all the turnout models of the pre-election polls inoperative. Perhaps the move last spring of some 128,000 Democrats and Independents to the GOP before the primary is evidence of such a surge.

Or perhaps not. The more likely explanation is that these voters, like millions throughout Red State America, have been “DINOs”—registered with the Democratic Party they had long since abandoned on Election Day, and thus not “missing” at all.

The better way to bet on Election Day is that Clinton’s post-debate surge to a double-digit lead in Pennsylvania is real. Her lead may well not stay that big—Obama’s margin in 2012 was five and a half points—but it seems very likely that the voters of Delaware County and the other suburbs are fully prepared to turn Donald trump into the latest iteration of Charlie Brown, and pull that football away again.