With Cumberland County’s last few remaining ballots counted, final results of the 2020 election indicate the county is becoming, or has already become, an epicenter for the much-discussed political battle for America’s suburbs.

While Donald Trump still carried the county, Cumberland’s shift to the left, at least at the top of the ticket, was one of the sharpest in Pennsylvania. Trump’s advantage this election over Joe Biden was 10.7 percentage points; in 2016, Trump led Hillary Clinton by 17.8 points.

The narrowing of that gap translates to Trump leading Biden by 7,000 fewer votes than he led Clinton, which contributed to Trump’s overall loss in Pennsylvania this year by a margin of just over 81,000 votes.

But further down the ballot, the shift toward Democrats petered out. State Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, whom Democrats had hoped would unseat incumbent GOP Rep. Scott Perry in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, lost to Perry by a larger margin than George Scott, the Democratic candidate who came close to unseating Perry in the 2018 midterms.

Perry’s 10th district includes all of Dauphin County, part of York County, and the eastern half of Cumberland County.

Although national media often conceptualizes the urban-suburban-rural divide by county, a precinct-level analysis by The Sentinel reveals an unmistakable divide within Cumberland County itself. Some voting changes were even more pronounced than a bird’s eye view of the whole county would suggest.

Biden made little progress in Cumberland County’s rural western townships, some of which voted even more strongly in favor of Trump this year than in 2016. But, the leftward shift in eastern Cumberland County was even sharper.

The number of votes cast this year increased throughout the county (with the exception of one precinct in Shippensburg and one in Carlisle, due to college students studying remotely), with some of the largest increases taking place in the West Shore suburbs.

Those rapidly-growing and relatively affluent communities are also where Trump lost the most ground, with Biden flipping several precincts in Hampden, Silver Spring, and Lower Allen townships.

But those areas were also where DePasquale and other down-ballot Democrats lagged Biden the most. That data is consistent with the national trend of suburban voters turning out to reject Trump, but not being as passionate about Democrats beyond the Presidential race.

The skew down-ballot also suggests that conservative voters who turned out for Trump were more motivated to vote Republican down the ticket, observed Terry Madonna, a professor and Pennsylvnai pollster with Franklin & Marshall College

“Biden didn’t have any coattails,” Madonna observed. “Even though he may not have done as well as he did four years ago, Trump did have coattails.”

The leftward shift in the suburbs is taking place at different paces in different parts of the state, Madonna observed. In the Philadelphia suburbs, Democrats have made down-ballot inroads, effectively purging the GOP from the collar counites.

That clearly isn’t the case in Cumberland.

“It’s an evolution that takes place over time, and it’s not taking place everywhere to the same degree,” Madonna said, with clear indications that a new crop of voters who supported Biden in Cumberland County “either didn’t vote at all down-ballot, or they voted for Perry and other Republicans.”