Here's how Donald Trump flipped Erie County and won in 2016. Can he do it again in 2020?

It was Nov. 8, 2016, and Democrat Cindy Purvis had just finished her shift as a poll watcher at St. Joseph's Apartments in Erie.

Before heading home for the night, Purvis, a longtime volunteer for the party, drove to her own polling station in the city to check the unofficial results that poll workers had posted to the door.

The Erie County Board of Elections had reported only a few results at that point and news networks had yet to declare a victor in any of the battleground states.

Polling ahead of the election seemed to indicate that Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, senator and first lady, would defeat the brash businessman from New York, Donald Trump. 

Purvis knew that not all registered Democrats in her precinct tended to vote for the party's presidential nominee — their affiliation being more indicative of their desire to vote in local primaries, in which Republican candidates are often scarce. She was alarmed, though, when she looked at the results.

"It was really skewed and people (were) voting for third-party candidates," Purvis recalled Friday, just four days before the 2020 presidential election. "It was just like, 'wow, well, this is not a normal election.'"

She got home that evening, turned on the television and then began to cry. It was about 10 or 11 p.m. — the Associated Press didn't call the race for Trump until 2:29 a.m.

As with most Democrats, Trump's victory came as a shock to Purvis.

"I never thought it would be easy, but I thought for sure she would win," Purvis, who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary that year, said. "Then again, we all get in our bubbles and we thought, 'how could a clown get elected? How would that be possible?' So the possibility never crossed my mind."

But Trump's win wasn't a shock to the volunteers in his Erie campaign office.

Shirley Brozell, 77, of Fairview Township, had a "premonition" Trump would win. Brozell was working as the Erie County Republican Party's volunteer coordinator and office manager at the time. 

"We just could not keep up with the people coming in, swarming into the headquarters," she said. "We couldn't keep up with the signs. I had waiting lists of people that wanted signs that I had to call back to get their signs. People came out of the woodwork to volunteer. A lot of people that I hadn't heard from in years stopped in. We could feel the excitement at the time. We just knew he was going to win."

Erie goes red

In 2016, Erie County was one of 206 counties nationwide that pivoted.

After supporting President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Erie voters narrowly backed Trump by a margin of 1.56 points, or 1,957 votes. Trump's victory was built on the backs of traditionally reliable Democratic Great Lakes states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania voters hadn't supported a Republican presidential candidate since George H.W. Bush in 1988. Even that year, Erie County voters stayed true to their blue stripes by giving Michael Dukakis more votes than Bush. Until Trump, Erie County hadn't picked a Republican since 1984, when President Ronald Reagan was reelected to a second term.

Trump did it by winning suburban and rural areas while his then-rival Clinton swept the city of Erie, a Democratic stronghold. But Clinton won only eight precincts outside of the city and tied Trump in four others.

It wasn't just where Trump won that mattered.

Consider this: Trump, a Republican, received 60,069 votes in Erie County. There were 49,326 registered Republicans who turned out on Election Day, which means that at least 10,743 other voters — Democrats and independents — pulled the proverbial lever for him. 

Conversely, Clinton received 58,112 votes. Even if all of her votes were from registered Democrats, that means at least 6,382 Democrats abandoned the party's nominee on Election Day, or at least one in every 10.

Compared with four years earlier, Republican turnout as a percentage of GOP registration was at the same level, 73%. Democratic turnout was down from 68% in 2012 to 66% in 2016. And it was Obama in 2012 who received more votes (68,036) than there were Democrats who turned out (64,090).

2016 revisited:Final Erie County vote totals shed light on Trump’s win

'Missed opportunities'

Trump delivered a message to working-class voters that transcended party lines, said Joseph Morris, who is the chairman of Mercyhurst University’s political science department and the director of Mercyhurst’s Center for Applied Politics, which conducts political polling and other public opinion research.

"The critical differences were that Donald Trump was communicating a message that really resonated with voters in Erie County and he was doing so in a language that they could easily understand," Morris said. "He was using their vernacular."

That message, Morris said, paraphrasing, was that, "You have suffered a great deal under this economic transformation that has been occurring for the past several decades and I'm here to help."

Trump delivered that message to smaller cities, like Erie, and rural areas in Pennsylvania, Morris said, while Clinton focused on the suburbs and large urban areas. Trump campaigned in Erie that August. Clinton never showed.

A majority of voters also had a negative perception of Clinton, he said.

"Even if we gave her another decade to remake her image, she would still carry a lot of that baggage," Morris said.

Jim Wertz, the current Erie County Democratic Party chairman, was not in that role four years ago, but was an observer. 

"There were some traditional (Democratic) alliances that I think were not as enthusiastic, whether that was because of the legacy of NAFTA or other issues, and cultural issues were making a more significant impact in the local reactions to national politics," he said. "All of those factors contributed to the narrative that there were a couple of major missed opportunities."

Wertz also felt that for Democrats in Erie County, "things were quiet."

"People who were eager to support Hillary Clinton and had tried to get yard signs had difficulty doing so," he said. "So even the people that were super supportive had trouble showing their support for the campaign and I think that was a major impediment."

There was also a lot of internal strife among Democrats nationwide — not only over the super delegates that helped Clinton clinch the nomination over Sanders, but in the direction of the party a whole.

"I'd realized and had been feeling for a while that — and I don't want to diss my party, I really don't — but that there were segments of the population that felt left behind. I knew that, and that's why I was a Bernie supporter, because I believed his message was addressing that," Purvis said of 2016.

Trump benefited from free earned media from the national press, Wertz noted, and Clinton was hampered by a disinformation campaign carried out on social media and largely driven by Russia, Purvis added.

A different campaign

This time around, Democrats feel more confident than they did following the 2016 presidential election. Wertz said the local party has spent "six figures" this cycle to try to elect Biden and down-ballot Democrats. It's distributed thousands of Biden signs. It opened field offices in Union City and North East in September. And volunteers knocked on thousands of doors.

Biden also made a stop in Erie on Oct. 10, albeit with a very limited crowd because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

More:Biden delivers pro-labor speech, blasts Trump in visit to Erie

Biden is a better retail politician than Clinton, too, Wertz said.

"People look at Joe Biden as being perhaps a bit more authentic, a bit more personable than Hillary," he said. "And while the Trump campaign continues to try to attach some baggage to Joe Biden, the fact of the matter is that for a guy who's spent a career in politics, he doesn't have that much political baggage to bring into this race. I think that America generally was more comfortable with him heading into 2020."

Much of the internal party strife has also dissipated, Purvis said.

"It's extremely different," she said of 2020. "I don't think we're polarized anymore. The party is together. But the message is 'dump Trump,' get rid of him so we can recover what we've lost and move forward. There are still some people on the far left that are disappointed, and I get that, but we've been doing our best to say, you know, this is politics, you get the person elected, and then it's your job to stay involved, not run away, but stay involved and keep pushing for the things that you want."

But Erie County Republican Party Chairman Verel Salmon feels more confident, too, than he did in 2016. Salmon has said throughout the general election campaign that Trump, compared with 2016, has a much larger and more organized campaign machine in 2020.

The party has seen an uptick in voter registration both statewide and in Erie County, where Republicans ballooned their ranks by a staggering 7,057 voters, an increase of 10.5%, in four years, compared with a Democratic registration increase of 1,351 voters, or 1.5% in that span. 

The campaign has also been extremely visible here. Trump held a rally at the Erie International Airport on Oct. 20 and there have been stops by his son Eric and second lady Karen Pence.  

Nov. 2:Vice President Mike Pence will campaign in Erie day before presidential election

Salmon has also described several efforts, independent of party coordination, among local Trump supporters to rally support for the president, from opening their own office in Union City to counter Democrats' field office opening, to writing postcards to send to other voters.

"There's been so much spontaneity, so many spontaneous actions taking place, and that's unusual," he said recently. "There hasn't been this level of citizen activity for a candidate in my 10, 11 years as chairman."

More:Trump boat parade sails into Erie, met ashore by protesters

Contact Matthew Rink at mrink@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ETNrink.