1. Pennsylvania poised to go for the GOP? My goodness, are the polls for Democrats in Pennsylvania just terrible, or what? It’s as if Pennsylvania and Ohio are in a pitched battle to see which one will swing the farthest away from the Democrats this November.
The latest Rasmussen Reports poll shows Republican nominee Tom Corbett up 10 points over Democrat Dan Onorato in the race for governor, with the latter pulling in just 39 percent. In the last four months, there has only been one poll that showed Onorato within single digits. On the Senate side, Democratic nominee Joe Sestak does a little bit better, but not much. The RealClearPolitics average has him down 9 points to Republican Pat Toomey.
Meanwhile, Charlie Cook lists five Democratic House seats in Pennsylvania as toss-ups, with another 3 potentially in play. That makes 8 of the 12 Pennsylvania Democratic seats on the table.
I think the story in Pennsylvania goes something like this. Those of us in Western Pennsylvania – the “bitter clingers,” as I like to call us – never really hopped aboard the Obama bandwagon. The region heavily backed Clinton in the primaries then actually moved a little bit toward McCain relative to Bush in the general.
Obama more than made up for that in the eastern suburban counties of Philadelphia. However, he sold himself as a moderate who would reduce health care premiums, deliver a net spending cut, and reduce taxes for everybody making less than $250,000/year. In other words: Clintonomics. The Philly suburbs did very well under Clinton, and they backed Obama heavily over McCain. Obama actually won about 3/5ths of the vote among Pennsylvanians making more than $150,000/year, roughly the same haul he pulled in the Philadelphia suburbs. But the economy has continued to sputter, the health care bill is terribly unpopular, spending is out of control, and taxes are going to have to go up. The candidate who promised to be a Bill Clinton has governed more like a Walter Mondale, and that’s not what the Philly suburbs signed up for.
2. Conflicting generic ballot numbers. Yesterday, the Associated Press poll gave Republicans a 10-point lead in the generic ballot while the Politico/George Washington University/Battleground poll called it a tie. What gives?
My guess is independents. The AP doesn’t list the cross-tabs on generic ballot by party identification, but it does have the Democrats with a 4-point identification edge. For it to get a 10-point Republican lead in the generic ballot strongly suggests an enormous GOP advantage among independents.
The GWU/Battleground Poll shows nothing like that. It finds Republicans going heavily for Republicans, Democrats heavily for Democrats, and nearly half of independents as currently undecided.
3. A narrow Republican party? E.J. Dionne mourns the death of moderate Republicanism:
After two decades in which moderates fled a party increasingly dominated by its right wing, the Republican primary electorate has been reduced to nothing but its right wing.
The same pattern is visible in the nearby Philadelphia suburbs in Montgomery, Delaware and Bucks counties. The forces that drove Sen. Arlen Specter out of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania defeated Castle in Delaware.
Columns like this passed their expiration date about a year ago when the supposedly broad, inclusive Democratic party decided to keep pushing a health care bill that middle America obviously did not want. And it’s a tad hyperbolic to suggest that a 3,500 vote margin in Delaware marked the death of anything that has to do with the Republican party, especially given that Republicans Scott Brown and Chris Christie have won statewide office in the last year.
At any rate, I offer two points in response:
(a) Tom Dewey was a two-time losing Republican nominee, falling to both FDR and Harry Truman. He is a much better Republican nominee than a conservative like Ronald Reagan if you are rooting for Democrats to win. Indeed, what Dionne seems to me to be bemoaning is the demise of a Republican faction whose moderation was somewhat attributable to the fact that it was playing second fiddle to the dominant Democrats.
Republicans in the Northeast were once the most conservative in the country, but after the debacle of 1936, Northeastern Republicans realized they would have to play to a mobilized, liberal, urban electorate. This was a factor in their move to the center.
In other words, the principled moderation Dionne praises is partially a consequence of strategic politicians calculating their own best paths to victory after FDR turned them into a minority faction. With the postwar economic boom in the South, the party found a new home and a nationwide political majority with a conservatism that has much in common with the economic pitch of William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge (both of whom were…ahem…quite popular in their day). Dionne may call it “extremism,” but he’s talking about an ideology that has been around for well over 100 years, has delivered plenty of nationwide electoral victories, and with which better than 3/5ths of all Americans currently affiliate themselves. That seems a little…extreme to me.
(b) Let’s talk a bit about Montgomery, Delaware, and Bucks counties. They are included in the PA-6, PA-7, and PA-8 congressional districts. The GOP already controls PA-6 and is in a strong position to take back PA-7 and PA-8. In item (1), I gave my two cents as to why.
This is not just the trend in the Philly suburbs, either. A cursory examination of the 105 Democratic-controlled districts that Charlie Cook has listed as in play indicates quite clearly that the overwhelming majority are swing districts in the North and West. In other words, the very same people who put the supposedly moderate Democratic party in power just 22 months ago are set to revoke its exclusive license to govern, instead swinging to the supposedly too-narrow-for-its-own-good Republican party. Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts were the prelude. November will be the main act.
Maybe this has something to do with the “extremism” of the Democratic party. Dionne’s suggestion that polarization has not affected congressional Democrats is empirically incorrect. In fact, House liberals now have more power in the congressional Democratic party than they’ve enjoyed for decades. And what of the moderate congressional Democrats? Dozens of them could regularly be found voting with those “extreme” Republicans on the big issues in the 111th House, as Democratic leaders were persistently more concerned with passing the most liberal bills possible then with governing from the center, a place they probably only know of from what they’ve read in books. And I hasten to add that the president’s home district, IL-1, is one of the most Democratic in the country, and his wholly one-sided view of bipartisanship seems to reflect that.
Is it any surprise that a near record of Americans say the Democratic party is now “too liberal?” So, maybe we can be spared the lectures about how the GOP is too conservative, eh?
4. Any questions? I’d like to try a new feature here on Morning Jay. If you have an elections-related question you’d like to ask me, drop me a line. I’ll try to take the best one every other day or so and give you my two cents.
Try to keep it elections related, and not so broad that it would take me longer than 200 words to answer.
