What Montgomery Co. Election Results Mean For Biden, Trump In 2024

NORRISTOWN, PA — Strong voter turnout in Montgomery County led to big wins for Democrats at both the county and local level, strengthening the left's position in one of the nation's most crucial swing states a year ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

While Montgomery County is one of the strongest blue counties in the state and victories for Democrats were expected here, the margin of their wins and the gains made in battleground municipalities indicates flagging support for the mainstream Republican Party.

Voter turnout was 41 percent of all registered voters, marking about a 4 percent increase over both 2019 and 2021, the last two "off-year" elections, which both had 37 percent turnout.

In the county commissioner's race, incumbent Democrat Jamila Winder and newcomer Neil Makhija earned 152,306 and 143,386 votes respectively. Together that accounted for roughly 63 percent of the vote going to Democrats. Tom DiBello nabbed the Republican seat on the three-person board with 85,934 votes.

That means that about 63.4 percent of all votes went to Democrats. That's more than Val Arkoosh and Ken Lawrence's net victory in 2019 (60.3 percent), and it's a small increase even over U.S. Sen. John Fetterman's win in the county over Mehmet Oz during last year's midterms (62.8).

Notably, former longtime Commissioner Joe Gale, the pro-Trump MAGA wing envoy rejected by the county's establishment GOP, did not earn more support in the past than his establishment foes did in 2023. Gale's 74,023 votes in 2019 (18.8 percent) and 65,740 in 2015 (20 percent) did give him comfortable distance from his GOP competition in those past years, but DiBello and Ferry saw about the exact same result in 2023 (18 and 17 percent, respectively).

While of course it's a very small sample size with other variables, it indicates, along with Gale's loss in the primary last April, that Trump's hold on the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, and at least in Montgomery County, is not unshakeable. 2023's mainstream candidates performed just as well as the iconoclasts of the past.

President Joe Biden beat former President Donald Trump with about 62.4 percent of the vote in 2020, and Trump-endorsed or Trump-type candidates lost by the same large margins in 2023 that they did in 2022. While it's difficult to say exactly how impactful these trends will impact the 2024 presidential election, but overall, it's hard to argue it's not good news for Democrats, who have to feel confident they aren't losing votes in the collar counties despite what national polling may indicate.