2 weeks Ago
Ryan Mackenzie will be the Lehigh Valley’s congressman next year, narrowly beating three-term incumbent Democrat Susan Wild and flipping the district red for the first time since 2018. According to unofficial election results, Mackenzie improved upon the margins of Wild’s 2022 opponent, Lisa Scheller, in every single county in the district, but the most significant gains came from Lehigh County. The most populated, diverse and urban out of the four counties that comprise the district shifted two points toward the Republican candidate.
The race was very close — Mackenzie earned 50.7% of the vote throughout the whole district compared to Wild’s 49.3%, a 1.
4-percent margin. A Morning Call analysis of voter data found that the most decisive shifts toward the Republican candidate came from traditionally deep blue Allentown. Even though the majority of Lehigh County chose Wild — 52% compared to 48% for Mackenzie — that was not enough to overcome Mackenzie’s overwhelming advantage in rural areas like Carbon County and the district’s parts of Monroe County, where he received more than two thirds of the vote.
He also improved on Scheller’s margins in both of those counties by around half a percentage point, and in Northampton County by one point. Wild outperformed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in Lehigh, Northampton and Carbon counties by between one and two percentage points, but that was not enough to shirk off a narrow Mackenzie victory. In Northampton County for example, Wild narrowly won by around a 0.
15 margin — less than 300 votes — even though Harris lost that bellwether county, receiving just 48.4% of the vote to Trump’s 50.6%.
But it was Lehigh County’s large, rightward shift that undoubtedly was one of the deciding factors in Mackenzie’s victory. It follows the nationwide trend of traditionally Democratic areas moving toward the GOP. For example, even in deep blue New York state, Donald Trump received 44% of the vote, a more than 12-point improvement from 2020.
The last time the Lehigh Valley elected a Republican to Congress was in 2016, when Charlie Dent won his seventh term. He resigned in 2018 and Wild won the election to replace him. Dent represented the 15th District, which included parts of Lebanon, Berks, Lehigh and Northampton counties.
The districts were redrawn for the 2018 election, following a state Supreme Court ruling that struck down the congressional map because they found it was unfairly drawn to favor Republicans. Lehigh, Northampton and part of Monroe counties became part of the new 7th District. Most of the Monroe County portion of the district was exchanged for Carbon County after redistricting in 2020, reducing the Democrats’ voter registration advantage in the district.
The most pronounced shifts in Mackenzie’s favor came from traditionally deep blue Allentown, where more than half the population is Latino. Arnaud Armstrong, Mackenzie’s deputy campaign manager, said that nationwide swing of Latino voters toward Trump and the Republican Party worked in Mackenzie’s favor. According to exit polling compiled by CNN, Latino men shifted nearly 30 points in favor of Trump from 2020 to 2024.
“These are all heavily majority Latino precincts, and that is where we saw the biggest swings towards us,” Armstrong said. “We always knew the top issues for the Latino community were really similar to the top issues for all of these working class communities, where you have a lot of young families, where you have parents working 60-hour weeks struggling with high prices, along with those price increases they’re falling behind, and so they were always going to get a lot of our economic messaging.” Some areas of Allentown saw Wild’s share of the vote drop 10 to 15 points from 2022 to 2024.
For example, in the second district of Allentown’s 8th Ward — a majority Latino neighborhood near the city’s downtown — 15% of voters chose Scheller in 2022, but nearly 30% of voters chose Mackenzie in 2024. Even though the GOP voters in these areas are still a minority, the size of that shift was enough to help push the race in Mackenzie’s favor when tacked onto his advantage in rural areas. Armstrong said that even though the campaign was not flush with cash — raising around $1.
5 million throughout the entire election cycle compared to Wild’s $8 million — they pushed out an ad in both English and Spanish in the last week of the campaign that aimed to tie Wild to the high prices of rent in Allentown and Bethlehem specifically. “We heard over and over again, especially swing voters, ‘I just know that my finances were better when [Trump] was in office, our country seemed more secure when he was in office, we were making progress and now it feels like were going backward,'” he said. The Lehigh Valley has a well-documented affordable housing shortage — exacerbated by issues like a lack of housing supply and growth of the region’s population — that has, in particular, squeezed Latino residents of cities like Allentown and Bethlehem, where rents and home prices have soared.
Even though inflation has cooled since it hit a peak of 9.1% in June 2022, the cost of renting and buying a home is still far higher than it was pre-pandemic. People still feel squeezed by those higher prices, even though many indicators of the economy, like low unemployment and a robust stock market, are strong.
Democrats locally aimed to seize on backlash to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” during his set at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally just two weeks before the election. Allentown has around 33,000 residents of Puerto Rican descent. But ultimately, many voters’ concerns about the economy outweighed any ill feelings they had about Trump, his allies and their history of making derogatory remarks about some ethnic groups.
“Donald Trump is not only the right choice for the Puerto Rican people, he’s the right choice for all of America,” said Tim Ramos, an Allentown resident and former Republican candidate for mayor, at Trump’s rally in Allentown Oct. 29. “We are here today because we are tired of the broken promises, we are tired of being told how to think, who to vote for, as we have this broken border, this broken economy under weak [Democratic] leaders.
” “People really believe that, you know, if they go with Trump the economy is gonna get better,” said Cynthia Mota, Allentown City Council president and a Dominican-American who supported Wild’s and Harris’ campaigns. “I think people concentrated on that instead of thinking about immigration, human rights and women’s rights.” Wild’s campaign declined to comment for this story.
In her concession message, Wild said she would be available to assist Mackenzie “as he prepares himself to represent this wonderful, complex district.” “I encourage him to take to heart the advice that those before me bestowed: that no matter who is in the White House, his job is to deliver results for this community.” The Lehigh Valley’s House race was also marked by a huge amount of spending on negative attack ads.
In a speech addressing supporters at an election night watch party, Wild acknowledged that the race, at times, was “ugly.” Pro-Mackenzie groups spent nearly $11 million on ads and mailers critical of Wild, and pro-Wild groups spend around $5.9 million on attacks against Mackenzie.
Anti-Wild ads largely tried to tie her to rising levels of migration and inflation, and anti-Mackenzie messaging attacked him for his stance on abortion and reproductive issues. The proliferation of negative attack ads is part of a national trend, according to Penn State political science professor Marie Hojnacki. It speaks to a deeply polarized U.
S. electorate, and one where more negative sentiments are taking hold and where many people feel a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo. “I think in this atmosphere of, ‘I’m angry,’ those kinds of messages resonated,” Hojnacki said.
It will take some digging on the Democrats’ part to understand what went wrong for their campaigns, despite very successful fundraising and a robust ground game where thousands of campaign volunteers knocked on doors for Harris and down-ballot Democrats across the Lehigh Valley and Pennsylvania. For Republicans, the wins are a sign that their message is resonating, even among populations that have long leaned Democratic. “The public is looking for change and the results show that,” said Chris Borick, political science professor at Muhlenberg College.
“They don’t like the direction of the country. The issues they are worried about, they lay blame on the current administration, be it inflation or border security.” Reporter Lindsay Weber can be reached at Liweber@mcall.
com..
