Pennsylvania Political Geography, VI: Further Down the Ballot

So far, this series has largely focused on Presidential elections, but Pennsylvania has played a crucial role in the 2016 Senate elections and the 2018 midterms. 

In 2016, Pennsylvania was crucial to Republican hopes in the Senate, as well as the White House.  Incumbent Sen. Pat Toomey fended off Democratic challenger Katie McGinty, a former official in the Rendell and Wolf administrations, doing slightly better than Donald Trump.  Toomey carried the state by about 86,000 votes, as opposed to Trump’s 44,000 votes.  Toomey had a more traditional path to victory for a Pennsylvania Republican, outdoing Trump in the Philadelphia suburbs, Reading, the Midstate, the Lehigh Valley, and Pittsburgh.  Four counties- Bucks, Centre, Chester, and Dauphin- voted for Toomey but not Trump.  However, he was unable to match Trump’s numbers across rural northern and western Pennsylvania, especially in traditionally Democratic parts of the anthracite coal region and Murthaland.  Toomey’s victory suggests an alternative path for Republicans: they don’t have to match Trump’s rock-star numbers in rural areas if they regain some of their support in the suburbs.

Governor Tom Wolf, whose defeat of incumbent governor Tom Corbett was one of Democrats’ few bright spots in 2014, was initially thought to be vulnerable in 2018- after all, he was the only Democratic governor running for re-election in a state Donald Trump carried.  However, he easily prevailed over then-state Sen. Scott Wagner, a fellow York County resident, for a second term.

Two patterns stand out from these maps.  The first is how much more polarized the 2018 election was than the 2014 election.  Even though state-level elections are usually less polarized than national ones- Kansas, Louisiana, and Montana have Democratic governors, while Maryland, Massachusetts, and Vermont have Republican ones- Wolf followed a pattern common to Democrats across the country, gaining ground in urban and suburban areas while losing ground in rural ones.  Wolf beat Wagner by a larger margin than Corbett (57-40% as opposed to 55-45%),  but he only flipped one Corbett county while Wagner took eight that voted for Wolf the first time.  The second is that Democrats improved in key areas of the state.  Wolf improved throughout the Midstate, in the Bidenland exurbs, and in the counties surrounding Pittsburgh, more than offsetting his declines in rural western Pennsylvania and the anthracite coal region.  It remains to be seen whether this is the result of Wolf’s personal popularity and the usual turn against the President’s party in midterms, or if it’s a permanent shift in voting patterns.  If the latter, Democrats have reason to be optimistic about Pennsylvania turning blue again with a new coalition.

Comparing Senator Casey’s 2018 victory with his initial election in 2006 shows even more drastic changes.  Although Casey won by only a slightly smaller margin last year (56-43%, as opposed to 59-41% in 2006), he went from carrying thirty-four counties to carrying fourteen.  When Casey was first elected to the Senate, he had a strong personal brand (inherited from his father) that played well in ancestrally Democratic areas in Bidenland and western Pennsylvania, but his coalition now looks much more like a generic Democrat’s.

I began this series by noting that Donald Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania broke a sixty-year-old pattern of Pennsylvania being slightly more Democratic in Presidential elections than the country as a whole.  I’ll end by noting an even longer, and more subtle, pattern in Pennsylvania politics that has only recently been broken.  In 1896, Boies Penrose, of Philadelphia, replaced J. Donald Cameron, of Harrisburg, as a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania.  This began 118 years of Pennsylvania’s governor and/or at least one of its senators coming from either Philadelphia, one of the four suburban counties, or Allegheny County, which ended when Tom Wolf, of York County, defeated Tom Corbett, of Allegheny County, for governor in 2014.  As recently as 2006, all three offices were held by someone from the Philadelphia or Pittsburgh areas: Gov. Ed Rendell and Sen. Arlen Specter were from Philadelphia, and Sen. Rick Santorum was from Allegheny County.  That year, Bob Casey Jr., of Scranton, replaced Santorum, and in 2010, Pat Toomey, of Allentown, replaced Specter. 

The urban areas could make a comeback in 2022, when Gov. Wolf will be term-limited and Sen. Toomey will be up for re-election.  (It’s unclear whether Toomey will seek a third term; he has supported limiting senators to two terms, and followed a similar pledge when he was in the House.)  Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, of Allegheny County, ran for the Senate in 2016, coming in third in the Democratic primary, and is believed to be interested in running again; Attorney General Josh Shapiro, also a Democrat, of Montgomery County, is believed to be interested in running for governor.  The 2018 elections gave the Democrats a bumper crop of new House members from suburban Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (Chrissy Houlahan, Madeleine Dean, Mary Gay Scanlon, and Conor Lamb, from Chester, Montgomery, Delaware, and Allegheny counties, respectively), who might seek higher office.

Of course, if a Democrat is elected President in 2020, the 2022 midterms could favor Republicans (repeating the pattern of 1994 and 2010).  GOP candidates to restore the big cities’ representation include state House Speaker Mike Turzai, of Allegheny County, who has been interested in running for governor before; U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, of Bucks County, who has held a swing congressional district, but who might be too moderate to win a statewide primary; and Jeff Bartos, a Montgomery County businessman who ran for lieutenant governor under Scott Wagner, and who is one of the few Pennsylvania Republicans whose reputation was strengthened after 2018.  The bench for Republicans in these areas is significantly thinner than the bench for Democrats.  As the partisan gap between rural and urban areas widens, in Pennsylvania as throughout the country, future elections will likely feature Republicans from rural areas and small cities trying to gain traction in the metropolitan areas, while Democrats from the cities and suburbs try to keep down Republican margins in rural areas.