Pennsylvania: Schizophrenic State
Few states resisted Barack Obama more than Pennsylvania during the Democratic primary season. Partly as a result, few states may be more critical to his hopes of winning the White House this fall.
Senior aides to presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain rank New Hampshire, Michigan, and Pennsylvania as their top targets among the 19 states that voted for Democrat John Kerry in 2004. If Obama can hold those three states, he could win without penetrating very deeply into Republican territory. He could just reclaim the two states (Iowa and New Mexico) that flipped into President Bush's column in 2004 and add a light-red state, such as Colorado. But if McCain can swipe Pennsylvania's 21 Electoral College votes, Obama could not win without taking states lodged more firmly in the GOP column--either another mega-state (Florida or Ohio) or a combination of fairly large states (such as Virginia and North Carolina).
Most of Pennsylvania's recent political developments, from the trend in voter registration to the latest statewide results, tilt toward the Democrats, often sharply. But the one exception to that pattern encourages Republicans: Although Democrats have carried the state in the past four presidential elections, their winning margins have dropped from about 9 percentage points under Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 to 4 points under Al Gore in 2000 and to just 2.5 points under Kerry. And in McCain, who polls well nationally among independents, Republicans may have a nominee capable of reversing the Democrats' two-decade advance in the affluent, growing, and once reliably Republican suburbs of Philadelphia--the trend most responsible for the Democratic rise in Pennsylvania.
Add to these factors Obama's weak performance in the April primary, and the state's top Democrats are cautioning the party to expect a tough fight in Pennsylvania. "I still think it's a swing state, and all you have to do is look at the trend lines ... in presidential politics, it has been getting closer and closer," Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell told National Journal. "And McCain is the best Republican candidate they have fielded presidentially since Ronald Reagan, in the sense that his reputation as a maverick and a moderate ... holds him in very good stead with the independents and [suburban] Republicans who have been tending to vote Democratic in the last four elections."
Yet the very ferocity of the Keystone State's Democratic presidential primary may have strengthened Obama's chances by spurring a registration surge that has swelled the Democratic lead over the GOP on the voter rolls to nearly 1.1 million, almost double the party's 2004 edge. According to Rendell, that's a record voter-registration advantage for the Democrats, and it dramatizes the extent to which Pennsylvania remains a difficult challenge for McCain, especially amid the intense disillusionment with Bush there. The state is "still in play ... but the idea that it is evenly divided between McCain and Obama, that it is a 50-50 toss-up, I think that is just wrong," says Ruy Teixeira, an electoral analyst at the liberal Brookings Institution who co-authored a recent comprehensive study of the state's demographic and political trends. "It is a purple state leaning blue, and it may be even bluer than it was in 2004. So it is a real uphill climb for McCain in my view."
For the full article, please visit the National Journal Magazine.