Why McCain Continues to Lose in Pennsylvania (US News Columnist)

[JPZenger]

Why McCain Continues to Lose in Pennsylvania

By Michael Barone
Copyright © 2008 U.S.News & World Report, October 29, 2008

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/28/usnews/whispers/main4553935.shtml

Excerpts:

One of the mysteries of this campaign year has been why John McCain keeps campaigning in Pennsylvania when the polls show him far behind Barack Obama there--51 percent to 41 percent in the RealClearPolitics.com average of recent polls as I write. A clue comes from the most recent poll there by SurveyUSA, which helpfully provides a regional breakdown of results. SurveyUSA, as it has consistently done, shows McCain running within the margin of error in the southwest (metro Pittsburgh and surroundings) and in the Northeast (Scranton and the anthracite country), which historically are very Democratic areas. Joe Biden's Scranton roots and the support of Scranton-based Bob Casey don't seem to be doing Obama much good there. McCain carries the west-central and south-central areas, as most Republicans do. But he is incredibly weak--behind Obama 64 percent to 32 percent in the southeast, which includes about 40 percent of the state's voters. Most of this area is metropolitan Philadelphia, which George W. Bush lost in 2004 by a 62 percent to 37 percent margin; the remainder is presumably Lehigh, Northampton, Berks, and Lancaster counties, where Bush ran better. The regional breakdown in the most recent Quinnipiac poll tells exactly the same story.

In other words, McCain is running even with or better than Bush in most of Pennsylvania but is running far behind in metro Philly. My sense is that the McCain campaign just can't believe this is true. Metro Philly, after all, in 1988 split evenly between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis; the four suburban counties' Republican margins matched the Democratic margins in the city of Philadelphia (conveniently coterminous with Philadelphia County). As I've noted over the years, affluent suburban territory like the Philly suburbs trended Democratic in the 1990s on cultural issues and stayed there up through 2004. (Ethnic change played a minor role. There are more blacks in the suburban counties than in 1988, but metro Philadelphia has not had huge population change in the last 20 years.) Now, if SurveyUSA is to be trusted, the Philly suburbs are about to give Obama a significantly larger percentage than the 53 percent John Kerry won there in 2004.

Why? My hypothesis is that that is because places like the Philly suburbs are places where the recent decline in household wealth has been most conspicuous. Housing prices mean a lot more to you when your house started off at $400,000 and declined to $290,000 than they did when you started off (as may be typical of Scranton or a blue-collar town in metro Pittsburgh) at $140,000 and declined to $110,000. Newspaper coverage of our current economic distress focuses on the very poor (like a recent Washington Post story on North Carolina, which focused on an ex-convict in a cheap motel in Charlotte), but the people who are getting hurt most visibly in their lifelong project of accumulating wealth are the more affluent. They're the ones whose house values have most visibly and spectacularly declined, and whose 401(k) accounts and stock portfolios have tanked in the last few months as well."

Actually, the rest of the article is full of dogiedoodoo.

[skooooo]

1. Interesting.

It would seem that the AA turnout in Philly would explain it as well? I don't know what the ethnic mix in the suburbs is, but ..?

[bluestateguy]

2. Barone is a snot nose jerk, but he knows demographics very well

His knowledge of demographics is very interesting and useful. He also knows his history. But he is also a big time neo-con/American triumphalist, and he thinks "the free market" is the answer to all of our problems. That's when I start to tune him out.

[yellowcanine]

3. In other words, McCain is fighting the last war. As do most military men.