Pa used to be great, 65% plus for Harding, Coolidge, and Loosver . It even voted for Hoover in '32.
Greene county in the SW corner had been nasty though, all data according to according to ourcampaigns.com. McCain won it by plurality, Bush won it '04 with a bare majority. Before that Nixon in '72 was the last to carry it. Before that Hoover in '28 which was the first time in 20th Century (or ever possibly) it voted Republican for President . For Governor it voted for Ridge in '98 by plurality the ONLY times before that were 1930 and 1926 (date for Governor goes back to 1796). For Senate it voted for Specter 3 times and once for Heinz in '88. I wonder what made it such an outlier back when SW PA was solidly Republican. The counties in West VA it borders are also more Republican than it. (if the data is right it looks like Marshall County West VA had some vote fraud going on, zero votes for Hughes in 1916 in very low turnout)
I remember Bush carrying Greene was reason enough for someone to write a newspaper article about it. Just like in 2000 when he was the first Republican President ever to carry Greenlee county Arizona, another nasty little bugger.
Probably some reasons why some of those counties are moving towards us is the population is declining, is much older, and the influence of the unions is waning. Greenlee Co. in AZ has lost 2/3rds of its population from its peak. It was a heavily mining area. At least one cluster of towns that used to be there (which would be a tourist attraction now) was wiped off the map because it sat on top of a massive mining area. I know, because I used Google Earth to look at the area and it’s gone now, replaced by a smaller, all-modern town that just looks like an average SW suburb. Look up Morenci on Google and they have a picture of the original town, and its totally gone. Because the entire county just has 6,000 (half of what it was in 1980), most of the political influence is negligable.