In Rabbit, Run, John Updike describes Brewer — the fictional stand-in for Reading, Pennsylvania — as “a red city, where they paint wood, tin, even red bricks red, an orange-rose flowerpot red that is unlike the color of any other city in the world yet to the children of the county is the only color of cities, the color all cities are.”

Last year, Reading revealed a MAGA palette, with Hispanic voters embracing Trump in droves. But in this month’s off-year election, even some of the reddest Republican locales swung blue — including Harrisburg’s GOP-leaning West Shore, Luzerne County (which helped power Trump’s 2024 victory), and even Hershey, the company town named after the famously Republican confectionery magnate.

Coupled with Democrats’ recent gains in voter registration, the message from Pennsylvania is unmistakable. Many voters who fled the party last year over economic concerns have swung back for the very same reason. The Obama-to-Trump-to-Biden-to-Trump Pennsylvanian lives on as a mercurial force.

Their discontent, triggered by the elusive promises of globalisation, has intensified amid relentless post-Covid living costs and now the chilling prospects of AI. Neither party offers a treatment plan for the gloom. In MAGA regions, including parts of Cumberland and Luzerne counties, locals have raised issues, if not outright opposition, to the proposed proliferation of massive data centres in their municipalities. These centres, now the favoured form of economic development among Democrats and Republicans following two decades of Amazon-fuelled warehousing and logistics growth, will transform the natural character of places like Cumberland’s Middlesex Township and Luzerne’s Hazleton area.

Amid this unhappiness, the state is greying while experiencing demographic changes unseen since before the First World War. In Harrisburg suburbs, South Asians are transforming neighbourhoods sprawling below the Blue Mountain. Meanwhile, in eastern Pennsylvania’s old industrial cities, Hispanics have entered their third generation living in 19th-century homes built by European labourers. The corn fields once cultivated by Pennsylvania Dutch families are now mixed-use developments occupied by transient professionals working for healthcare systems. All have scrambled the state’s politics. They share a cynical disregard for both political parties.

Meanwhile, in the suburbs, including around Philadelphia, the life sciences industry has taken a hit, with nearly 1,000 life sciences jobs evaporating in the region. A federal shift to reduce National Institutes of Health funding, in addition to cuts for mRNA vaccine development, are among the factors for a turbulent market. Workers and patients alike won’t reward the party in power in Washington. This is especially true in a region of independent-minded suburbanites, who in Bucks County favoured Trump last year but voted straight Democrat in countywide races this month.

Next November, Pennsylvania will have the nation’s most competitive toss-up congressional seats, in addition to heated state legislative races and a gubernatorial race involving presidential aspirant Josh Shapiro. But this off-year election is a reminder that the Trump phenomenon is rapidly fading from public memory. Voters, consumed with AI training at work and rising electricity bills at home, are looking ahead with fear. Neither party is viewed as an insurance policy. As a recent focus group showed, young Pennsylvanian voters “said unprompted that they are Republicans or don’t fit into either of the two main parties.”

“I don’t think about politics,” Harry Angstrom, known as Rabbit, said in Updike’s second novel in the tetralogy. “That’s one of my Goddam precious American rights.” Pennsylvania’s younger voters feel the same. It makes next year that much harder to predict during this national period of disorientation.