Though Western PA was always heavily Democratic (union labor, etc.), it seems that Christianity there has gone off the conservative deep-end, and all my relatives have become anti-science Republican gun-nuts. Is this a widespread trend for that area?
Don’t know if anyone truly understands Central PA, but I remember the Philly area seeming politically divided due to racial division…
Pennsylvania is Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Alabama in between. It’s been red outside of the two big cities as long as I can remember. The Philadelphia suburbs are a Republican stronghold, not Christian Conservative types so much as long standing traditional Republicans. As you move to the center of the state it’s really like southern conservative areas.
There’s not much evidence of any major shift:
In presidential elections:
1988: R +2 (that is, the Republican candidate won by two percentage points)
1992: D +9 (though Perot was in there too)
1996: D +9
2000: D +4
2004: D +3
2008: D +10
2012: D +5
In general, more Democratic than the population at large, though not by much. When the Democratic candidate is particularly popular, it’s not close in PA; when the Dem has a little more trouble, it’s…still not awfully close, when you come right down to it. Doesn’t look like much change over the years.
Nate Silver, I believe, describes PA as an “inelastic” state in which there are not many independents…so changes are difficult.
–Ulf, who has campaigned for various candidates in PA over the last few elections.
I don’t mean to hijack the thread too much, but I’ve been wondering the same thing about Wisconsin. How did Scott Walker manage to get elected and reelected their?
In 2004 Kerry only won the state by 0.4% of the vote, 12000 votes. 2000 was only won by 0.2% of the vote and 5000 votes. However the state jumped left in the 2008 and 2012 elections.
Maybe as a guess the state is moving back to the center.
I don’t know enough about “internal” Wisconsin politics to address the question in detail, but it should be noted that governors’ races are different animals from presidential contests. Even in states that show a pronounced lean to one party or the other, it is pretty common for gubernatorial races to be won by the party that typically loses the state’s electoral votes.
Among Republicans in blue states, besides Walker, you have Rauner (and several folks before him) in Illinois, along with Hogan in Maryland. There have been some famous ones in Massachusetts (eg Mitt Romney), New York (George Pataki), and California (Gov. Terminator).
[Since the OP had to do with PA, it’s probably worth noting that PA elected a Republican governor, Tom Corbett, in 2010–and unlike WI with Walker, kicked him out of office again in 2014, though that was a generally good year for Republicans.]
What is noteworthy about Walker is not so much that he was elected, but how very conservative he has been, compared to most of these other folks, and how successful he has been at pushing his agenda through. It could be the case that the Republicans in Wisconsin, as a group, are significantly more to the right than the Republicans in NY or MA–so when the stars align their way, they can elect a very conservative candidate.
But I don’t know that Walker’s success presages some kind of a trend regarding the way WI will vote for president in 2016. It’s possible it will. It’s also possible that the Democrats didn’t run strong candidates against Walker, or that the Dems were on the defensive because of some important state issues I don’t know anything about, or that Walker was able to tap into some buried resentments that previous GOP candidates hadn’t been able to mine. In my experience, governor races tend to pivot on those sorts of things more than on the kinds of things that drive national elections.
they also voted Dukakis. Wisconsin is one of those states that will always look close, but only in a GOP landslide is a Republican gonna win it.
Walker is the center?
Attitudes like yours have certainly contributed to it.
PA also currently suffers from GOP-favored gerrymandering, such that the GOP gets a higher proportion of the House seats than is warranted by the percentage of votes for each side. Note however that it currently has a Democratic governor who is making some inroads against the rightward pushing by the “Alabama” areas of the state.
I’d be very surprised if PA went hard red any time soon; it’s tended to favor Arlen Specter-type Republicans and corporate Democrats outside the two big urban centers. If the red portions of the state are drifting rightwards it’s merely indicative of the current state of the GOP and the increasing polarization of the country. It will still all average out to slightly left or right of center.
Republicans can get elected in Democratic states by having the gubernatorial elections in non-presidential years and taking advantage of the fact that Democrats are less likely to turn out in those years.
I haven’t lived in PA in decades.
Quite certain that my attitudes haven’t influenced any of my fellow fiscally-conservative Democrats to leave the Party, but liberals continually dismissing us as racists probably has.
Pennsylvania was,–and I’m sure I’ll be corrected if wrong–the most staunchly Republican of the Big East (i.e. northeast) states from roughly the end of the Civil War till the 1930s. It went for Hoover in 1932! Philadelphia elected Republicans mayor till Joe Clark in 1951. Unlike, say, New England, where I come from, the Penn G.O.P. was “inclusive”: when immigrants from Europe arrived: they were given American citizenship first, then signed on as Republicans! This is what I’ve read.
In New England, and especially Massachusetts, immigrants were unwelcome, became Democrats by default. The G.O.P. was for all intents and purposes the “Nativist” party, remained so till well into the 20th century, which is why even today people from the region who are non-WASPs are “shocked” to be called Yankees when they go to the Southern states. Yankee in New England means White Anglo-Saxons Protestant, period, or did till recently. It was pretty much the same for the Republican party, a “code” term for Yankee .
This is not OT but rather a means of addressing the OP: I can see Penn turning if not Red, certainly less Blue easily, as Pennsylvanians are Americans first, ethnic second. From what I know of the state the Democratic party was built more from west to east, from the pro-Dem and pro-union steel and mining towns forward, finally reaching Phillie after two decades of struggle. There seems to be a good deal of “ideological diffusion” in the state these days, with smaller towns and cities between Phillie and Pittsburgh all over the place.
One final thought: my sense is that Red in Penn is, as in much of the rest of the northeast. virtually a synonym for (excuse me) poor whites: the uneducated, the unemployed, the non-pc. As things tend to be more overtly class-driven more in the northeast than elsewhere,–with politics very much in the mix–this is going to work against conservatives in Penn, or so I imagine, as the middle and upper middle class suburbanites shall NOT (my guess) want to be identified with poor white underpaid, unemployed and just plain up against the wall working class people.
I suspect that in most states, regardless of how they break for President, the governorship tends to be split close to 50-50. Whatever the center is for any given state, that’s where the line between the parties will tend to fall. Consider Montana and California, for example: One of the issues that tends to keep Montana red is guns, since most Montanans are pro-gun. But in the governor’s race, both candidates (including a Democrat like Schweitzer) are going to be pro-gun, so it’s not going to make any difference. On the other hand, California is largely anti-gun, and so can elect anti-gun Republicans like Schwartzenegger.