Drive 30 minutes east from Pittsburgh, and you’ll enter Westmoreland County – one of Pennsylvania’s most conservative areas. Over the course of two decades, Westmoreland has become ground zero for the Rust Belt’s GOP shift. For perspective, in 1998 the county’s 136,700 registered Democratic voters dwarfed the 70,600 registered Republicans, propelling their candidates to wins in nearly every local, state, and national election. But in 2020, Donald Trump took 64% of the vote.
In May’s state primary, the Republican trend continued when Westmoreland voted by similar margins in support of a constitutional amendment curtailing Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s emergency powers – a clear rebuke of his excessive pandemic restrictions. Then, in a special election, county voters favored Leslie Rossi, a GOP state House candidate who had painted her home like an American flag and erected a 14-foot Trump cutout.
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