U.S. ideological, demographic divide clearly evident in Pennsylvania

The journey from Philadelphia to rural Pennsylvania is a trip across a clearly drawn electoral battle line and an ideological divide that is replicated throughout the United States.

Philadelphia, the site of this year’s Democratic National Convention, is a stronghold of the party of President Obama, who was enthusiastically received when he campaigned there on Hillary Clinton’s behalf on Tuesday.

That metropolis and other large cities of Pennsylvania have been sufficient to hand victory to the Democrats in the past six presidential elections.

Obama, who was interrupted by constant applause by the largely AfricanAmerican crowd outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said Clinton would continue policies that, according to a Census Bureau report on Tuesday, lifted 3.5 million people out of poverty and raised the typical U.S. household’s income by 5.2 percent to $56,516 last year.

Despite being a racially diverse and “hypersegregated” city, according to a Princeton University report, backing for the Democrats is strong both among the large numbers of poor who make up more than a quarter of the population and residents of its affluent suburbs.

The vast majority of Trump supporters in Pennsylvania, judging by his campaign events in the state, are not only poor or lower middle class but also white.

That demographic is found just west of Philadelphia in Aston, a township of roughly 16,000 inhabitants (90 percent of them white) whose former manufacturingbased economy has been replaced by a service industry dominated by fastfood and retail giants offering mostly lowpaid work.

The New York realestate magnate on Tuesday organized an event reserved for around 200 local politicians and small business leaders in a community gymnasium, but several hundred people many holding U.S. flags and shouting “We Want Trump” showed up to see their new political hero.

Delaware County, where Aston is located, was one of only two in Pennsylvania where the Democrats posted a stronger showing in 2012 than four years earlier.

Trump, who has railed against freetrade deals during his campaign, is targeting counties like Delaware as part of a larger strategy aimed at upsetting Clinton in Pennsylvania and by extension winning West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and the rest of the former U.S. industrial heartland, which has been in decline for decades due to technological change, automation and globalization.