Yesterday on the floor of the Democratic convention, Ed Rendell, former Philadelphia mayor, Pennsylvania governor and DNC chairman, told me that Hillary Clinton would carry Pennsylvania because “for every vote we lose in western Pennsylvania, we’ll gain a vote in the Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh suburbs.”
Those votes would come, he suggested, from college-educated suburban women opposed to Republican stands on cultural issues and repelled, this year, by Donald Trump. That first explanation has been the standard one for some time, since Bill Clinton carried suburban Bucks, Delaware and Montgomery Counties outside Philadelphia in 1992 after George H. W. Bush had won them by double digit margins in 1988. The abortion issue (“choice”) did it.
