Voters are dissatisfied and bearish on the economy in a place where the Republican legislature and Democratic executive just can’t seem to get along. In that respect, to describe the United States is to describe the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
The Keystone State, worth 20 electoral college votes in the presidential election, is nominally a battleground that favors Democratic nominees. The last Republican to win it in a general election was Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush was the only one to capture more than 47 percent there since 1988. But Pennsylvania has a few characteristics that distinguish it from other swing states this year, and they make the commonwealth resemble a microcosm of the nationwide populist phenomenon.
Start with its voters’ economic outlook. A Quinnipiac poll from last week found that 38 percent of Pennsylvania voters rated the commonwealth’s economy as good and only 1 percent as excellent, compared to 58 percent who said it was “not so good” or poor. In Florida and Ohio, on the other hand, majorities say their state’s economy is good or excellent; in Ohio, Pennsylvania’s Rust Belt neighbor, the split between positive and negative opinions of the state economy is 61 to 38 percent, respectively.
That’s a stark difference for two states that have commonalities, including demographics, as Jay Cost has observed. Amid this discontent, Pennsylvania’s energy sector has tumbled as the price of natural gas has dropped. One measure of economic activity, the number of drill rigs in operation, has decreased there 65 percent in the last year, according to the oil and gas company Baker Hughes. As Ronald Tanski, CEO of National Fuel Gas Co., told the Philadelphia Daily News, “[W]e just happen to be at the down point right now.”
Though it comprises a tiny portion of the commonwealth’s overall jobs, the gas industry has a ripple effect on other sectors of the economy, including construction and manufacturing. If drilling activity slows, there’s less business for the steel-makers that supply the industry, for example. In the last year, employment in mining and logging is down 24 percent, and the construction and manufacturing industries have seen employment decline by about a percentage point. In total, nonfarm employment has grown just 0.9 percent in Pennsylvania, which is half the national rate of 2 percent.
There’s political discontent on top of the economic sluggishness. The approval rating of Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat, is mired in the 30s. He has battled the Republican-controlled state House and Senate on fiscal matters, ending a nine-month budget standoff in March while still proposing a $2.7 billion tax increase for the next fiscal year’s proposal.
That sounds like a familiar tale of gridlock to anyone who watches the news out of Washington, D.C. And Pennsylvanians get two doses of it.
“A lot of it is perception. If every headline you see is about the governor vetoing something, the budget not being passed, it’s unsettling,” Jake Haulk, President of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy, says.
We’ve seen where unsettled voters have turned this year. Bernie Sanders has challenged Hillary Clinton more than conventional wisdom and even common sense would have suggested, and though he didn’t win the Democrats’ Keystone State primary, his populist relative from the other party, Donald Trump, took every Pennsylvania county in the GOP contest.
The conditions in the commonwealth seem ripe for that sort of populist drive to translate to the general election.
“People want to hear a message about jobs. They don’t want to hear any more stuff about Obama and the Democrat-speak: ‘We’re going to have clean energy. We’re going to replace all these jobs in the coal industry with clean energy jobs,'” Haulk says, speaking particularly about Pennsylvania voters. “People are not stupid. They might not always vote in the best interest for themselves long-term, but they’re not stupid.”
If they do turn from the Democratic brand in Pennsylvania this time, it will be in no small part due to Hillary Clinton’s own negatives as a candidate. The white working class is key to Trump’s coalition, no doubt, but he also needs to reclaim the suburban Romney supporter—the exact type of soft Republican voter who may be on the fence about who to support.
“Clearly with a more attractive Democrat than Clinton, Trump would have a hard time hanging on to that voter,” Henry Olsen of the Ethics & Public Policy Center says. Now, the public has a choice between two highly exposed and flawed candidates.
“Voters have to deal with the devil they know versus the devil they know,” Olsen says.
Pennsylvania still favors Clinton in the view of election observers and experts. The Cook Political Report, Rothenberg & Gonzalez Political Report and Larry Sabato all have installed Clinton as the favorite, with Sabato placing it in the “likely” Democrat column. But if Trump is to compete in the general election, it’s the exact type of state where he has to surprise. It has an ample supply of disaffected voters who have had front-row seats to the very political dysfunction that has driven people to Trump’s side. And victory there would be an apt metaphor for his entire campaign: a shocker.
