Finally,
we come to western Pennsylvania, the home of Pennsylvania’s second-largest
city, Pittsburgh, as well as a number of smaller cities (such as Erie, Johnstown,
and New Castle) and suburban and rural areas. Although it has steadily lost population since
the 1960s, its stark turn to the Republicans has been a defining feature of
Pennsylvania politics since the turn of the millennium.
Setting
aside Pittsburgh for now, the most defining feature of western Pennsylvania
might be its old industrial and coal mining towns and small cities. This area wraps and winds throughout the
area. Johnstown might be its most iconic
city and is the home of its namesake, longtime Congressman John Murtha. From there, Murthaland goes northward
throughout Cambria County into Elk County, a German Catholic stronghold, and
Clinton County, and west into Indiana, Armstrong, and northern Westmoreland
counties. It includes Fayette and Greene
counties in the state’s southwest corner and goes from there northward into the
Monongahela (or, as locals call it, the “Mon”) and Beaver valleys. Murthaland stretches as far north as the
cities of New Castle and Sharon, directly across the Ohio border from Youngstown.
While
Congressman Murtha first came to national attention in 2005 and 2006, when he
became one of the leading members of Congress opposing the war in Iraq (a
stance given more credibility because of his service as a Marine in Vietnam),
he had been a fixture in western Pennsylvania politics since being elected to
Congress in 1974. He had risen to
prominence in setting defense policy, a position he used to steer as much
spending as he could to his district, and had survived several rounds of
redistricting while the area’s chronic population loss meant its districts were
frequently chopped up. By 2001, the
Republican state legislature’s desire to preserve Murtha’s clout while making
surrounding districts friendlier to Republicans led them to pack his district
with as many Democratic-leaning industrial towns as they could, creating a
gerrymander that wrapped from the southwest corner and Mon Valley to Johnstown,
then doubled back, plucking the towns of Indiana and Latrobe from their
surroundings, before ending in the northeastern corner of Allegheny County.
By
this time, though, the fundamentals of Murthaland were changing. Although Murtha never had any trouble being
re-elected before his death in February 2010, and his chief of staff, Mark
Critz, held the district in the 2010 tea party wave, the Twelfth District was
the only district in the country that voted for both John Kerry in 2004 and
John McCain in 2008. (Perhaps it just
really likes Vietnam veterans named John.)
Even before the 2010 wave, Republicans began making inroads in the
area’s state legislative delegation.
The
more rural areas of northwestern Pennsylvania, as well as some of the suburbs
of Pittsburgh, were Republican strongholds even when western Pennsylvania was
heavily Democratic: you might call them Hipster Republicans. Northwestern Pennsylvania was America’s first
oil patch; it was here that the first modern oil well was dug around the time
of the Civil War, and that Standard Oil got its start. The area still produces some oil, but has
been eclipsed by the Great Plains, Gulf Coast, and Alaska. Politically, they’re joined by much of the
Allegheny County suburbs around Pittsburgh, as well as parts of neighboring Washington
and Westmoreland counties. Butler
County, where Rick Santorum grew up and where current Congressman Mike Kelly
has his base, acts as a bridge between the two areas. Suburban Pittsburgh has traditionally been a
strong base for statewide elected Republicans.
The last four Republicans elected governor were from western
Pennsylvania. Two of them (Richard
Thornburgh, who served from 1979-87, and Tom Corbett, who served from 2011-15) came
from Allegheny County, as did Senator John Heinz, who served from 1977 until
his death in plane crash in 1991. Heinz
won his 1988 re-election effort by a 66-32% margin, the biggest landslide for a
Pennsylvania Republican in modern times, and carried every county in western
Pennsylvania even as Michael Dukakis won the region.
As
with affluent suburban areas throughout the country, though, Democrats are
making inroads into suburban Pittsburgh, particularly in northern and
south-central Allegheny County, spilling into part of southern Butler County. This came to the nation’s attention, when,
after near-misses in Wichita, the entire state of Montana, rural South
Carolina, and the Atlanta suburbs, they won a special election for a
Republican-held house seat here in March 2018.
In honor of the winner, Conor Lamb, who won the general election last
year (in a reconfigured district due to a court order), I’m calling this area Lamb’s
Chop. It has only recently begun
trending toward the Democrats, but another special election here, in April
2019, put Democrats in striking distance of taking over the state Senate in
2020. Both the top Republican in the
state House, Speaker Mike Turzai (TER-zigh), and its biggest conservative
firebrand, Daryl Metcalf, have districts here, complicating their political
futures. (For what it’s worth, the top
Democrat in the state House, Frank Dermody, represents a Murthaland district in
northeastern Allegheny County that’s trending Republican.)
The
city of Pittsburgh itself, as well as several smaller, minority-dominated
communities to its east and northwest, are as liberal and Democratic as ever,
to the extent that democratic socialists have made inroads in local
politics. In honor of the most prominent
of them, John Fetterman, who parlayed media attention as the mayor of Braddock,
a small mill town, into the lieutenant governorship in 2018, I’m calling the
area the Yinz* Democratic Republic of Fettermania. During the 1970s and 1980s, it was not
unusual for a Republican candidate to carry Allegheny County while losing some
of the surrounding counties; since 2000, Allegheny has become clearly the most
Democratic county in this part of the state.
Pittsburgh, like Philadelphia, was strongly Republican between the Civil
War and the New Deal, began voting Democratic under Franklin Roosevelt, and saw
Democrats take over local government shortly afterward. Allegheny County Democrats have had less
success than their Republican neighbors in winning statewide; after David
Lawrence, a former mayor of Pittsburgh who served as governor from 1959-63,
none has been elected governor or U.S. senator.
The
most nationally known political figure from Allegheny County in recent years is
Pennsylvania’s former senator, Rick Santorum.
Santorum first ran for Congress in a district combining suburban and
industrial areas in 1990, upsetting Democratic incumbent Doug Walgren. The district was reconfigured to have a
three-to-one Democratic majority in 1991, but Santorum was still re-elected
handily, in part because a clown-car primary produced a weak Democratic
opponent. He was elected to the U.S.
Senate in the Republican wave of 1994, served two terms, and was voted out in
the Democratic wave of 2006. His policies
were a combination of staunch social conservatism and populist economic
policies, such as a lukewarm attitude toward free trade and staunch opposition
to illegal immigration. Santorum’s
career seemed to be over until 2012, when he ran as a populist alternative to
Mitt Romney and carried eleven states in the Republican presidential
primary. In both Pennsylvania and
presidential politics, Rick Santorum served as a forerunner to Donald
Trump.
Finally,
Erie County sits at the northwest corner of the state, giving it access
to the Great Lakes. Erie is Pennsylvania’s
fourth-largest city, behind only Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Allentown, and
like many other Pennsylvania cities, it thrived during the industrial era and
has struggled economically in recent decades.
Due to its isolation from other population centers- as the crow flies,
Toronto is closer to Erie than Pittsburgh, and Detroit is closer than
Philadelphia- it is best considered its own entity. Like Scranton at the opposite end of northern
Pennsylvania, Erie was Democratic-leaning, and didn’t show much sign of
changing, until Donald Trump ran in 2016 and became the first Republican
Presidential candidate since 1984 to carry Erie County. Only one Erie County resident has ever held a
major statewide office**: Tom Ridge, who served as governor from
1995-2001. (Outside Pennsylvania, he is
probably best known as the first Secretary of Homeland Security.) Ridge, a pro-choice, moderate Republican who
self-deprecatingly referred to himself as “the man nobody has heard of from the
place nobody has been”, won the 1994 primary for governor over the more
conservative Attorney General Ernie Preate, of Scranton, while Preate was
caught up in scandal and a third candidate, then-state Sen. Mike Fisher, was
splitting the conservative vote. Ridge
went on to win the general election amid that year’s Republican wave and a
split between outgoing governor Bob Casey Sr., a pro-life Democrat, and the
Democratic nominee, Lt. Gov. Mark Singel, over abortion.
Western
Pennsylvania Political and Demographic Trends
Moderate,
working-class Democrats who occasionally vote Republican are often called
“Reagan Democrats”. However accurate
that might be elsewhere, it’s not correct in western Pennsylvania, where Walter
Mondale won handily in 1984.
For
the purposes of these graphs, I consider Armstrong, Beaver, Cambria, Clinton,
Elk, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Lawrence, Mercer, Washington, and Westmoreland
counties to be Murthaland, and Butler, Clarion, Clearfield, Crawford, Forest,
Jefferson, Venango, and Warren counties to be the Hipster Republicans. The recession of the early 1980s coincided
with the collapse of the region’s steel industry, hurting Ronald Reagan’s
re-election campaign in the area. In
Western Pennsylvania as a whole, Walter Mondale received about 860,000 votes to
Reagan’s 750,000. Even in the
traditionally Republican counties, Reagan barely performed better than in the
nationwide vote. Since then, Republicans
have surged in the area. In 2004,
Murthaland flipped from Al Gore to George W. Bush, and in 2012, Western
Pennsylvania as a whole flipped from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney; neither has
looked back. The great irony of John
Murtha’s career is that, just as he was becoming nationally known as an
opponent of George W. Bush, his constituents were flocking to Bush’s party.
Allegheny
County closely tracked Murthaland from the 1950s to the 1990s, but after 2000,
as the partisan divide between urban and rural America deepened, the two areas
diverged. The graph also shows why Erie
County’s vote for Donald Trump came as a surprise; before 2016, it had been
reliably Democratic, with Barack Obama doing better there than he did in
Allegheny County. Elsewhere in western
Pennsylvania, Trump merely accelerated existing trends.
To
see how far the Democratic trend is spreading in the Pittsburgh suburbs, let’s
look at Allegheny County and its neighbors.
In Butler County, traditionally the most Republican of the five, the
Republicans appear to be leveling off as the other counties catch up to it. Beaver, Washington, and Westmoreland
counties, though, continue to move to the right of the national
electorate. It may be that, as these
areas become less industrial and rural and more suburban, Democrats will have a
revival here, but there’s no evidence of it in Presidential elections yet.
The
most important demographic trend in western Pennsylvania is its steadily
declining population. Allegheny County
peaked at about 1.6 million people in 1960 and is now just above 1.2
million. Murthaland peaked later, in
1980, but has been falling since. Erie
County grew from 1950 to 1980, but has stagnated since then. The only consistent demographic bright spot is
Butler County, which almost doubled in population between 1950 and 2010,
growing from about 97,000 people to 184,000.
In the mid-twentieth century, Western Pennsylvania was the most populous
of Pennsylvania’s regions. During the
1980s, Southeastern Pennsylvania passed it, and if current trends continue
(with Central Pennsylvania gaining about 200,000 people per decade and Western
Pennsylvania losing about 100,000), Central Pennsylvania will pass it sometime
around 2040.
The
city of Pittsburgh has lost over half its population since 1950. The remainder of Allegheny County grew in the
1950s and 1960s due to the expansion of suburbs, but it has also declined since
then, though not as rapidly as Pittsburgh.
Because of this, as a proportion of the county’s population, Pittsburgh
has declined from forty-five percent in 1950 to about a quarter today. The fact that Allegheny County is trending to
the Democrats while Pittsburgh is shrinking suggests that the trend is mostly
in the suburbs.
*The
Pittsburgh colloquial plural of “you”.
**Raymond
Shafer, from neighboring Crawford County, served as governor from 1967-71.
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