This county’s voters will play an outsized role in picking the next president

EASTON, Pennsylvania — The voters in Northampton County aren’t better than anyone else, they’re just better at picking presidents. Since 1920, the candidates who won the northeastern Pennsylvania county have gone on to win the Electoral College all but three times. The outliers, Northampton sympathizers claim, were flukes: in 1968, the county picked Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon; in both 2000 and 2004, they chose Al Gore (who won the popular vote) and John Kerry over George W. Bush.
Over the past two decades, the county has returned to its bellwethering roots. It chose Barack Obama twice, before flipping to Donald Trump in 2016 and back to Joe Biden in 2020. This cycle, the road to the White House goes directly through Pennsylvania, the battleground state with the most electoral votes. On its way, it stops in Northampton.
“It’s the battleground within the battleground,” said Christopher Borick, a professor of political science at nearby Muhlenberg College.
On Saturday morning, the battle was well underway. At the Northampton County Courthouse, where rows of voting booths were assembled in the basement, a steady stream of early voters filed in and out. Early voting in Pennsylvania began in September, and by last weekend over one million Pennsylvanians had already cast their ballots. In Northampton, a particularly large wave of people showed up on Saturday, causing long waits. “I don’t like waiting in line,” one man said as he hit the exit.
Outside, a young man in a baseball cap held a Trump sign. “Please stay!” the man shouted. “It’s worth it to save democracy!”
Brandon Matlack, the 34-year-old volunteer with the Trump-aligned Early Vote Action PAC, spent his weekend camped outside the courthouse, encouraging those who entered to vote Trump and thanking those who did as they exited. He and Julie Guth, another volunteer, both wore “Kennedy 2024″ caps; they both volunteered for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent campaign in Northampton County until Kennedy dropped out and endorsed Trump. “I know how hard it is to convince people to vote for a candidate,” Matlack told me. Luckily for him, he said, the focus is no longer persuading undecided Northampton County voters back to Trump, but to get Trump backers to the polls. “Getting people registered, who already want to vote, is the easiest thing ever,” he said.
In recent weeks, it’s a pivot both the Trump and Harris canvassing operations have made. On the Harris side, her campaign-led, volunteer-boosted canvassing operations across Pennsylvania spent weeks in the so-called “persuasion phase,” where they would target undecided voters and make the Harris pitch. Now, it’s the “get-out-the-vote” phase: they key in on registered Democrats who haven’t voted, and make sure they have plans to do so.
Trump’s canvassing operation is less centralized, but it maintains the same focus. While the Republican National Committee organizes volunteer operations through its “Trump Force 47″ initiative, much of the door-to-door canvassing is led by outside groups. Elon Musk’s “America PAC” is handing out yard signs and organizing volunteers across Pennsylvania. Early Vote Action, Matlack’s group, set up shop outside of early voting locations across the state. On Tuesday, when early voting ends, they’ll focus on chasing ballots — reaching out to voters who have a mail-in ballot and encouraging them to send it.
But in Northampton County, there still seem to be plenty of undecided voters. Lisa Boscola, the state senator who represents Northampton County, may be one of them. A moderate Democrat who also affiliates with the Forward Party, she would not reveal who she plans to support in this year’s presidential election. “I can tell you that most elected officials here in Northampton County are not overly Democrat or Republican,” she said.
In past elections, she said, she had a good sense of which way Northampton would go: in the buildup to the 2008 and 2012 races, she knew Obama would win; in 2016 and 2020, she knew it would go to Trump and Biden. “This election is such a toss-up,” she said. “I can’t call it.” Part of that may be the surging portion of the populace that identifies as independent — north of 20 percent of the electorate, she said. She introduced a bill in the state legislature to allow independents to participate in party primaries.
When she talks to her constituents, she said she finds a large chunk of them who still haven’t made up their minds. “I think they know Trump, right?” she said. “The problem is, with Harris, from what I understand from people I talk to, they don’t really know her, and they don’t feel she’s really addressing their issues.”
Those issues center around the economy, she said. “Everybody knows where these candidates stand on abortion,” she said. “Everybody knows where they stand on illegal immigration. … But this election issue on the economy is really why people are undecided.”
Brayan González, a 20-year-old from Easton, is one of them. “Prices of things is definitely the main thing,” the barber told me. “Rent is expensive. The price of everything is going up and up.”
That tracks with a survey conducted by Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion: a plurality (29%) of voters in Pennsylvania’s seventh district, which includes Northampton County, say the economy is the most important issue to them. The next highest selected issues were immigration and abortion, at seven percent each.
The same survey showed Harris and Trump neck-and-neck in the district: Harris led by three percentage points, well within the six-point margin of error.
Whoever wins the county will have to appeal to its diverse demographics. What makes the county such an effective bellwether may be the way it “captures some of the important demographic divides in the country,” said Borick, the professor. There are urban hubs (Easton and Bethlehem), with suburban and rural areas surrounding; there are several universities, as well as blue-collar jobs in manufacturing; and its location, centered between New York City and Philadelphia, makes it a transport hub.
Borick sees that diversity on his street: a construction worker lives next door, a cement factory worker down the street. “The county has what I would call ‘secret sauce’ of demographic balance that makes it very much a good bellwether of what happens in the state, and ultimately nationally,” Borick said.
Do these voters know why they’re as good a predictor of the presidential election as any poll? Most gave me a shrug. “I guess we’re just not extreme,” said Dean Wilson, 58, from Bethlehem. “We’re in the middle of the road. We get along very well.”
Kelly Guadagnino from Easton agreed. “It’s old-school here,” she said. “My neighbors have Harris-Walz signs. We have Trump signs. We can still be friends.”
But Northampton County is not entirely free of the skepticism in the electoral system that plagues the country. Amanda Butler, a resident of Bethlehem, came to vote in person because she claimed her mail-in ballot would be “changed.” Another person, Josh Khachadourian, stormed out the door after seeing the ballot booths. “I don’t like the setup in there,” he said. “It’s all paper ballots. Too much subjectivity. I don’t like it.”
Matlack, the pro-Trump canvasser, tried to talk him down. “The Trump campaign is encouraging everyone to vote early with paper.”
“That’s crazy!” Khachadourian said. The ballots could be lost or discarded, he claimed, and he was concerned about fraud. Matlack, acting as surrogate for a candidate who has criticized early voting for months, patiently prodded him to turn back. “Us and Trump would really appreciate it,” he said.
Khachadourian relented and walked back in. About an hour later, he returned, wearing an “I VOTED” sticker.