History will look upon last year's presidential election as one of the most unusual and volatile the nation has ever seen. Republican Donald Trump won the presidency by earning the most electoral votes while Democrat Hillary Clinton received 2.9 million more votes at the ballot box, but didn't win the states she needed to to become president.

Trump was a surprise winner in Pennsylvania -- a state that had voted for Democrats in presidential contests for six straight elections. George H.W. Bush was the last Republican to win the state in 1988.

Incumbent U.S. Senator Pat Toomey was also thought to be vulnerable last year but won re-election.

Almost a year later, the question still arises as to how Trump won Pennsylvania, even though there are more registered Democrats than Republicans in the state. Maybe the bigger question is did last year's election signal a political change in Pennsylvania?

Berwood Yost is the director of the Center for Opinion Research and the Floyd Institute for Public Policy at Franklin and Marshall College and the co-author of The 2016 Pennsylvania Presidential and U.S. Senate Elections: Breaking Pennsylvania's Electoral Habits. The article appears in the most recent issue of Commonwealth - A Journal of Pennsylvania Politics and Policy and it uses survey data from before and after the election to evaluate the outcomes and correlate them to voter trends in geographic, socio-economic and educational terms.

The report determined "those with a high school degree or less and those who attended some college were more likely to vote for Trump than were college graduates" and that Clinton lost 82,000 votes that Barack Obama had earned in rural districts in previous elections.

Ultimately, the report concluded "counties with more working-class voters turned out in greater numbers and gave less support to Democratic candidates than in previous elections, while areas that should have been supportive of Democrats had lower turnout and offered little change in their support for Democratic candidates."

Yost joins Smart Talk to parse out the findings of the study and help us understand how and why the election went the way it did and what we can take away as learning experiences for elections in the future.