Hershey, Pa., was once a one-party town. Like other communities in the country, the leftward change to its voter composition has coincided with the growth of the health system headquartered there, according to Politico.
Penn State Health is the top private employer in Dauphin County, which includes Hershey, with nearly 17,000 employees. As the health system has grown, Hershey — once a Republican stronghold — now has nearly an equal presence of Democrats. From 2010 through 2022, as Penn State Health expanded, Democratic voter registration increased more than 19 percent in Hershey.
"The growth of the healthcare employees in the area is affecting the outcome of Election Day," David Feidt, Republican Party chair for Dauphin County, told Politico. "You can see the shifts in the numbers."
Politico points to Hershey as a microcosm for a trend playing out in Pennsylvania suburbs and across the country, in which physicians are increasingly a reliable Democratic constituency.
The profession skewed Republican in the 1990s and 2000s, when many still worked in small and private practices and shared GOP-aligned business interests. The majority of physicians now work outside of private practices and for integrated health systems, contributing to changing politics along with medical schools' increased attention to social issues and younger physicians' progressivism.
"It used to be that doctors were sort of entrepreneurs [who] had their own businesses," one Hershey physician told Politico. "So we are well-paid, blue-collar workers, but we are more cogs in the machine and cogs in the machine prefer Democrats."
Physicians' leftward shift has coincided with their increased turnout as voters, as quantified in JAMA. Historically, physicians voted at a lower rate than the general population.
Read Politico's full-length article about physicians' political affiliations and healthcare's role in changing voter composition here.