Whether you know it or not, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are fighting over you – that is, if you are a voter living in the suburbs around Philadelphia.
They want your support because you are more likely to be a swing voter, more likely to split your ticket – even though that is a declining trend – and because your vote, taken together with your neighbors,’ represent one-quarter of all the votes in Pennsylvania.
Combine those votes with Philadelphia, and those five counties represent fully one-third of Pennsylvania’s electorate. Add Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County and you have 40 percent of all voters in Pennsylvania.
“In 2012, President Obama won Pennsylvania by winning just 13 out of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties,” points out G. Terry Madonna.
Madonna is the director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College and he oversees the statewide Franklin and Marshall College Poll.
“The election is like a chessboard, some counties are rooks, some are knights, but the suburbs around Philadelphia are the queen,” he said.
Bank robber “Willie Sutton said he robs banks because ‘that’s where the money is,’ and it’s the same here. Candidates spend time and money and the suburbs around Philadelphia because that’s where the votes are,” said Madonna. “It’s impossible to win the state if you get clobbered in the Southeast. There are just not enough votes to win without it.
“Now, if you add Northampton and Lehigh counties, and Monroe County in the Poconos, all of which are swing counties, and 99 times out of 100, you’re going to win the whole race in the aggregate,” he said.
Madonna is not alone in his views of the electoral importance of Southeastern Pennsylvania.
On Aug. 12, CNN aired a report concluding that the key to winning Pennsylvania for the presidential counties, is winning Bucks County for many of the same reasons – because of the even divide of Republicans and Democrats, and because so many more voters there have shown a tendency to split their vote between the parties.
In May, the influential election blog FiveThirtyEight (named after the number of electors in the Electoral College) took a look at Pennsylvania and observed that its western counties – once strong steel plant union voters who favored Democrats – are trending more Republican in recent elections; this despite the fact that the state has voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election since 1992.
However, despite the right-leaning trend, blog writer David Wasserman acknowledged, “The challenge for Trump here is still considerable. As Cook Political Report National Editor Amy Walter pointed out, ‘For every blue collar and disaffected voter Trump may pick up in Western Pennsylvania, he could lose two or more women in the Philadelphia suburbs.’ Furthermore, in addition to Philadelphia’s large African-American population, there has been modest Latino growth, particularly in Lancaster, Reading and the Lehigh Valley.”
Of course, Trump’s string of self-inflicted campaign wounds have altered the chessboard significantly since May. It is no longer the same race.
On Wednesday, the FiveThirtyEight blog had Clinton’s chance of winning the presidency at 88.3 percent to Trump’s 11.7 percent. It forecast her chances of winning Pennsylvania at 88.1 percent and ranks us second, after Florida, as being the state that “tips” the election.
Madonna’s view of the current election map in Pennsylvania is based on a close look at the numbers over the years and at his polling, the most recent example of which was released Aug. 4.
Among likely voters, Madonna’s Franklin and Marshall College Poll shows Clinton, 9 points ahead of Trump.
Clinton’s lead is slightly larger – 48 percent to 35 percent – among registered voters.
Election results over the past decades – particularly presidential election results – not only illustrate the near impossibility of winning Pennsylvania without a strong showing in Philadelphia and the suburban counties which surround it, but also the consequences for the down-ballot candidates.
There’s good news there for Democratic challenger Katie McGinty, who is trying to prevent incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey from winning a second term.
The Franklin and Marshall poll shows a statistical dead heat between Toomey and McGinty, but Southeastern Pennsylvania could tip the balance in her favor.
Dig deeper into the Franklin and Marshall poll numbers and you find that among voters in Southeastern Pennsylvania, McGinty has the support of 49 percent of those polled, while Toomey only has 27 percent. Another 23 percent of Southeastern Pennsylvania voters polled are undecided.
As Americans become less and less likely to split their ticket – voting for candidates from both parties – a strong showing by their party’s presidential candidate can only help the candidates at the ballot box, said Madonna.
Consider the case of Montgomery County’s 146th state House district.
In 2010, a non-presidential election year, incumbent Republican state Rep. Tom Quigley faced off against first-time candidate, Democrat Mark Painter. Quigley won reelection by a comfortable margin of 2,435 out of more than 18,000 votes cast, according to Montgomery County voting records.
However in 2012, Obama won Montgomery County by nearly 59,000 votes out of 5813,196 cast – about 56.6 percent.
And Painter rode those coattails eking out a 208-vote victory over Quigley out of 29,568 votes cast. Nearly 10,000 more voters went to the polls in the 146th District than two years earlier.
But two years later, in 2014, voter apathy had returned with a vengeance and the 146th District turned out only 16,951 voters, and Quigley easily won his seat back by a margin of about 730 votes.
Of course, the impact of presidential politics on races involving geographic districts can be harder to predict; one, because a smaller pool of voters are more likely to feel connected to a local candidate; and two, because a smaller sample of voters in carefully-crafted district is harder to match to broader statewide or national trends.
Thus, in 2012, Republicans Jim Gerlach in the 6th Congressional District; Patrick Meehan in the 7th District and Mike Fitzpatrick in the 8th District all easily won their races despite Obama’s strong showing in the region.
That said, the fact that in the latest poll, Clinton leads Trump 60 percent to 21 percent in Southeastern Pennsylvania – and that does not include Philadelphia, where Clinton’s margin is 77 percent to Trump’s 9 percent – can’t hurt other Democrats on the ballot this year.
That is particularly true in statewide races like Senate and also, for Pennsylvania attorney general.
Madonna said his poll did not examine the attorney general race, which carries some interesting characteristics given that both candidates – state Sen. John Rafferty, R-44, of Collegeville, and Montgomery County Commissioners’ Chairman Josh Shapiro, the Democrat, are both homegrown Southeastern Pennsylvania candidates.
Given that recently resigned Attorney General Kathleen Kane also seems to have benefited with a boost from Obama’s win in 2012 – she won almost 58 percent of Montgomery County’s votes – and the high profile her trial and conviction have given to the office, Southeastern Pennsylvania votes loom even larger for the candidates looking to replace her.
“I haven’t seen any independent polling in the attorney general race,” said Madonna. “We used to poll that race but all too often we found that no one knew who the candidates were.”
He said there has not been much advertising from either candidate, “but I follow both of them on social media and my sense of the race so far is that Shapiro seems to have more momentum there and is being more aggressive.”
“And given the environment that race is occurring in, I would note that in 2012, when Obama won Pennsylvania, Democrats won every statewide race. Kane won by 13 points; (U.S. Sen. Robert) Casey by 9 points and Obama by 5.2 points,” Madonna said.
“If Hillary continues to lead by 9 or 10 points, the down-ballot Republican candidates would need a huge amount of ticket-splitting to win their races, and that is the biggest fear for candidates like Toomey or Rafferty,” said Madonna.
