Bucks County may decide the White House. We look at these swing voters in Levittown
Driving through Levittown, which has always been dominated by Democrats, you might think it’s gone Trump-y.
As the 2024 presidential contest entered its last weeks, hundreds of "Trump-Vance" signs sprouted on lawns like late-season corn stalks on a Bucks County farm. The placards are often accompanied by Trump flags flying right below the stars and stripes from front yard poles. Large Trump banners are affixed directly to homes, and displayed on backyard fences along both the Levittown and Mill Creek parkways, Levittown’s cross-town arteries.
One house in deep-blue Tullytown has a life-sized cardboard cutout of Donald Trump.
“I’ve never seen so many Trump signs, they’re all over the place,” said Andrea Pendle, whose lawn along Inkberry Road in the Indian Creek section has a single Kamala Harris sign, displayed next to a small red wagon of fall pumpkins.
She was asked: You think Levittown’s going to Trump?
“I hope not,” she said. “But I just don’t know.”
Levittown, with 17,311 houses and 34,000 registered voters across Bristol, Falls and Middletown townships, plus Tullytown Borough, has always been a lock for Democrats in presidential contests. Some 47% of voters here are Democrats, with registered Republicans 11 ticks lower at 36%, according state voter rolls from Oct. 7.
Is this what explains the burst of Trump signs? Are “shy Trump voters” coming out? Are far fewer lawn signs for Vice President Kamala Harris an indication of a lack of enthusiasm?
Asking "How Trump-y is Levittown" may not be a trivial question, considering the stakes of winning the Keystone State and polling that shows a neck-and-neck contest for the White House.
With Pennsylvania considered critical to determining who becomes the next president, the road to Washington, D.C. goes through the swing district of Bucks County. That road begins in Lower Bucks in the middle-class, blue-collar suburban heartland of Levittown.
Here, in this classic American suburb, 41% of adults are largely white, non-college voters — a key demographic to Trump's bid for a second term.
It may be too early to tell if lawn signs are connected to what some analysts see as a flip realignment among constituencies within both parties, as the Trump-era GOP picks up white working-class men and some minority voters, while Harris Democrats draw more women and the college-educated managerial class.
To get a sense, we looked at how each of Levittown’s 36 voting precincts spread over 40 sections has voted in the last two presidential races, 2016 and 2020. Both went for the Democrat.
In ’16, Hillary Clinton took Levittown 51-45% against Trump, according to numbers from the county Board of Elections.
Four years later, President Joe Biden took Levittown 52-46%.
Fries with that? Donald Trump visits Bucks County McDonald's, claims Harris 'lied' about college work
Levittown has a sizable block of independent voters
But from Appletree Hill to Whitewood, from The Gates to Thornridge, there's also a sizeable block of independents who have ditched both parties.
Almost 1 in 5 Levittown voters in the Trump era — 17% — either has no political affiliation or is registered with an off-brand party.
Those swinging independents, in Bucks County’s 1st Congressional district as well as the rest of the country, will likely elect the next president.
And while the 2016 and 2020 numbers are comfortably blue for Levittown, they don’t reflect the churning volatility not only among Levittown’s indie voters, but among Rs and Ds, too. In doorstep interviews conducted last week with about 30 Levittowners, the independent streak defies even party affiliation, with Democrats telling us they will vote for Trump, Republicans telling us it’s Harris for them and still others undecided.
How it ends is anyone’s guess, and John Campbell’s independent vote will matter more than any vote of the party faithful.
“I am still undecided,” said Campbell, a self-employed carpenter who lives along Tall Pine Lane in Thornridge.
Thornridge is a longtime bellwether for how Bucks Countians vote. It's where the independent muscle is most evident.
Though Dems have an 8-point edge on Republicans, it's one of a handful of sections that split half Trump, half Biden.
Campbell lives in the Biden half. He’s not a Trumper, but he’s not a Never Trumper, either. He has voted for U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, Bucks County’s Republican congressman.
“I vote for the best person,” he said. “Trump is an (expletive), but these two, Biden and Harris, they’ve let things get way outta control, cost-wise. Inflation is crushing me. The only positive thing that I can see with (Trump) is that he promises you’ll make more money if you put in him charge. But he’s a bully, and I just don’t know if I can vote for him.
"He may be the lesser of two evils.”
Kamala Harris in Bucks County Kamala Harris calls Trump 'unstable' while appealing to GOP voters in Washington Crossing
The Thornridge split: Trump's grittiness vs. Harris's tax plan
On the other side of Thornridge, down along Timber Lane, is Robert Bruce, a diesel mechanic and 2013 graduate of the Bucks County Technical High School. He has a "Trump-Vance" sign in his yard.
What appeals to him about Trump? Grittiness.
“He’s blunt. It’s the way we talk at work, no-nonsense, no word salads,” he said.
Bruce is big on gun rights and also on free speech. He sees both freedoms under threat by Harris and her party, “no matter what she says about it now.”
Robust, wide-open debates on thorny social issues such as abortion, climate change and guns are necessary, he said. He sees progressives as hostile to free speech, shutting down discussion, canceling and censoring people whose opinions they dislike.
“If you can’t have those hard discussions, then you can’t reach common ground,” he said.
“There’s no compromise. Relationships and friendships break down. There’s no way forward. How do you live together in a country like that? And I’ll tell you, the TV media really widens the divide between us, making it seem like our disagreements are worse than they are.”
He knows firsthand. He said he lives peacefully with his mother and brother, who hold opposite political views.
“They’re very liberal and they’re not too happy about the (yard) sign,” he said. “But you can’t forget what’s important. We’re still a family, and we still get along.”
Back on the Biden side of Thornridge, near what residents call the “top drive” not far from New Falls Road, Stefanie Barron’s yard has an array of Harris and pro-blue signs.
She’ll vote for Harris, no question. Asked what she finds unappealing about Trump, she said, “Everything.”
She dislikes what Robert Bruce admires: Trump talk. The name-calling, especially.
“Morally, I could not vote for him, ever,” said Barron, a pediatric physical therapist with a PhD.
Harris’s economic plan to raise taxes on people earning $400,000 a year or more, along with taxing billionaires, is fine with her.
“We can fund education and social programs,” she said.
Abortion is another issue, though she said she does not like to be labeled “pro-choice.”
“It’s a private medical decision," she said, "and it’s not always a ‘choice.’”
In Tullytown, is deep blue turning purple?
Even in Tullytown, among Bucks County's deepest blue municipalities, Trump signs dot its Levittown sections. John Peterson’s yard along Stonybrook Drive has a full-sized cardboard cutout of the ex-president.
“People are always stopping to take selfies,” he said.
Peterson is a union bricklayer, a lifelong Levittowner and a former Democrat. Like most of the people interviewed for this story, he has an independent’s instincts about politicians.
“Do I believe in some of the Democratic Party’s beliefs? Absolutely. Do I believe in all of the Republicans’ beliefs? No, absolutely not,” he said.
“But I just wish we could all get along.”
Like Bruce in Thornridge, Peterson is deeply troubled by what he sees as progressive Dems' hostility to free speech, something that wasn’t so when he was a registered Democrat.
“Today’s Democrats don’t want you to have your own opinion," he said, "they want you to have their opinion."
“It used to be that the Democrat was for the working man, and this area in the ’60s, ’70s had a lot of manufacturing jobs, steel and things like that. I don’t think the (Democratic Party) cares about working people anymore. The parties switched at some point. And Trump? Honestly, sometimes I can’t stand the man, but I believe that he will do what’s in the interests of the country and working people."
What voters say in the Trumpiest sections in Levittown
There are only a handful of neighborhoods in Levittown where Republicans lead over Democrats, and they’re all in Middletown.
Lower Orchard, Upper Orchard and Juniper Hill are the Trumpiest. Quincy Hollow and Snowball Gate are about evenly matched — in fact, Snowball had just one more Republican than Democrat on voter rolls reviewed earlier this month. Quincy Hollow has six more. Tight.
Ground Zero for pro-Trump Levittown might be Lower Orchard Drive, but here we found Mike Mason, a Republican ticket-splitter who will never vote for Trump.
“I never liked him, even before politics. He ripped off a lot of little guys,” said Mason, a retired carpenter who has lived in his Jubilee-style Levitt house for 46 years.
Harris gets his vote.
“I think she’ll do a good job for us," he said, "and it’s not bad being the first woman president."
Neighbor Susan Brown has an opposite view. Her fence is festooned with pro-Trump signs and banners. She and her husband moved from Northeast Philadelphia 13 years ago. She worked in a check-cashing joint, where she was once held up at gunpoint.
“Out here it’s like paradise,” she said, “and I won’t give it up. I saw what the Democrats did to Philadelphia.”
She doesn’t trust Harris.
“I just get the sense she’s not really running anything, that she’s being told what to do. I can’t vote for someone like that,” Brown said. “And don’t get me started on the (southern) border.”
Swing state stats What is the 'blue wall'? Latest polls from key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin
Juniper Hill and the southern border
Over in Trump-y Juniper Hill, Paul and Bonnie Compton have a personal reason for voting Trump. Their daughter fatally overdosed on fentanyl in 2019. She was 33.
“If I could just have her back,” Bonnie Compton said, “I’d yell at her, but then I’d hug her.”
The poison pours over the southern border and seeps into places like Levittown, she said.
“Harris has done nothing and she was supposed to do something, anything. That’s why we are very much in support of closing the border,” the registered Libertarian said.
Both she and her husband are also frustrated with the vice president’s infamous “word salad” answers to questions posed by journalists.
“It’s like she can’t answer simple questions,” she said.
Indian Creek — part red, part blue
It bothers Tim Dunn, too, who lives along Ice Pond Road in the Indian Creek section, a precinct that went for Hillary in ’16, but flipped to Trump in 2020.
“We need answers from (Harris)," he said, "we get word salads."
Dunn, who grew up in the Mill Creek Falls section, is 66 and a semi-retired, self-employed concrete contractor. He was a Democrat and voted that way for decades.
“I’m a boomer. Who wasn’t a Democrat in Levittown? We were all Catholic, we grew up on the Kennedys. I spent years voting with my heart instead of my brain,” he said.
Then came COVID, the lockdowns and the vaccine.
“That was tyranny,” he said. “They told us take the jab or your fired. They talk down to us.”
He’s not sure if that’s even close to turning Levittown Trump-y red, but he understands why so many people who’ve kept quiet are posting Trump signs, banners and flags in their yards.
“Levittown is saying it’s had enough,” he said.
JD Mullane can be reached at [email protected]. Chris Ullery can be reached at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Is Levittown, Bucks County Democratic? Harris-Trump race to test