Kent County, Michigan (Grand Rapids)
- Unemployment rate: 4.4%
- Housing index: 78.4 (very difficult)
- Median household income: $77,000
- Bachelor’s degree attainment: 24.9%
- 2020 presidential election margin: Biden +6.1
- 2016 presidential election margin: Trump +3
Home prices have nearly doubled in the largest metro in West Michigan since the onset of the pandemic. A county survey recently found 25% of local households now spend at least 30% of their income on housing.
Until recently, the Grand Rapids area enjoyed a booming job market with an unemployment rate as low as 2.6% in November. The region is known for manufacturing, especially auto parts plants and office furniture. Its population is also younger than average, helping to continue fueling the workforce, but also driving up home prices as local demand, especially for single-family homes, has outstripped supply, according to Paul Isely, professor and associate dean at Grand Valley State University’s Seidman College of Business.
More recently, the area has entered a manufacturing downturn, Isely said, with the unemployment rate climbing to 4%. The biggest problem is uncertainty about the future of electric vehicles, he said: Companies are unsure about whether to continue to invest in transitioning plants to EV-based parts. Further complicating matters is a reluctance by the heirs of larger family-owned businesses — a nominal strength of the area — to take over their parents’ firms, leading to fears that the businesses will get taken over by companies with less loyalty to the region.
“The housing [market] is slowing down now, and we’re seeing drops in young people,” Isely said. He continued: “It’s now about: Can we draw people into West Michigan.”
The county flipped for Biden after voting for Trump in 2016.
Erie County, Pennsylvania
- Unemployment rate: 4.0%
- Housing index: 71.9 (difficult)
- Median household income (2022): $56,000
- Bachelor’s degree attainment: 18.4%
- 2020 presidential election margin: Biden +1
- 2016 presidential election margin: Trump +2
When it comes to Western Pennsylvania, there’s Pittsburgh, and everyone else, according to Chris Briem, a regional economist with the program in Urban & Regional Analysis at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research.
Included in that Western Pennsylvania group is Erie County, a jurisdiction home to one of the poorest ZIP codes in the country: 16501, covering part of the city of Erie’s downtown.
Once boasting Griswold, which for nearly a century was America’s leader in cast-iron cookware, today Erie is among a group of areas in Western Pennsylvania that Briem says are in various stages of “managed decline.”
“Erie is caught up in the decline of old industry,” Briem said. While some new facilities, including ones for making plastics and biofuels, have sprung up, the region cannot compare with the “heads and meds” — knowledge and medical workers — that have turned parts of Pittsburgh, about 120 miles to the south, into a thriving postindustrial metropolis.
In general, there’s a stark divide in the Pennsylvania economy itself between the eastern and western parts of the state, Briem said, with the former tied largely to Philadelphia and the latter having more in common with Ohio: Briem quipped that there’s been a case to be made for calling the region “Cleve-burgh.”
It’s a phenomenon that could bolster Republicans in November, something the Trump campaign seems to have realized: A recent report suggested that Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, would spend much of the rest of the campaign in the Keystone State.
CORRECTION (Sept. 5, 2024, 12:18 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated the winning margin in Dane County, Wisconsin, for Joe Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. Biden won by 53 percentage points, not 7.4, and Clinton won by 47 points, not 53.
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