What Taylor Swift’s home county in Pennsylvania explains about the 2024 election

Few people generate as many headlines as Taylor Swift. Her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and subsequent appearances at his games, including the Super Bowl, created bad blood among many right-wingers. Meanwhile, Democrats hope that an endorsement of Joe Biden would make him untouchable.

But while the lavender haze of the primaries wears off, only a handful of states remain, including Swift’s home state of Pennsylvania. Particularly, her home county of Berks County explains plenty about the 2024 election. Here’s how Berks County will drop everything now for Trump or speak now for Biden (and bonus points for anyone who finds all the hidden references).

Swift was born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, similar to Pennsylvania’s junior Senator John Fetterman, who like the subject of Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” is “so tall,” though we’ll leave whether he’s “handsome as hell” to the reader. But Swift spent the majority of her childhood in nearby Wyomissing. This is likely the area that inspired her song “Christmas Tree Farm.”

In 2008, West Reading voted for Barack Obama, along with the rest of Berks County, making him the first Democrat to win Berks since Lyndon Johnson. Similarly, all but one of the precincts in Wyomissing broke for Obama that same year.

But by 2012, driven by the Great Recession, everything had changed. Berks voted for Romney and it broke Hillary Clinton like a promise when it voted for Trump by roughly the same margin it voted for Obama in 2008, as did Wyomissing. It did so again in 2020 by a slightly larger margin, despite Biden’s Pennsylvania roots.

Like much of the regions where Trump performed his best, Berks has a low college-degree attainment. According to the US Census