What's the matter with Pennsylvania?

How a changing economy in southwestern Pennsylvania has helped Republicans keep control of the state.

This shuttered coke plant in Monessen was recently reopened by ArcelorMittthal, a decision that is expected to create 200 jobs.
John Colombo

The flier accusing Westmoreland County state Sen. Allen Kuko­vich of having 'campaigned in gay bars in Philadelphia' with Ed Rendell was a low point, even for Pennsylvania. But it clearly signaled the changing political landscape throughout the southwestern part of the state, and the Republicans' eagerness to exploit it.

Kukovich, a good-government progressive, always knew that he was to the left of his constituents on social issues like abortion. But in southwestern Pennsylvania, battered by steel mill closures, it didn't matter much, he says.

"Whatever you could do to fight for any kind of economic programs or infrastructure investments," Kukovich says, "was a priority."

But he lost that 2004 election and today, even though Democrats retain a large advantage in registered voters, the conservative right dominates much of the nine-county region stretching from Butler County, through Pittsburgh, and south to the West Virginia border. A onetime Democratic stronghold, the southwest has undergone a wrenching transformation that has fueled population growth in the Pittsburgh exurbs, dotted with ranch houses and McMansions, while hollowing out depressed steel towns.

"In the 1980s, we lost 100,000 jobs in the region," says Moe Coleman, director emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh's Institute of Politics. "You traded that [industrial economy] off for a service sector, where people were being paid 8, 9 dollars per hour. It makes a whole different attitude toward life."

Residents of Philadelphia, where 85 percent of voters backed Obama in 2012, tend to blame the persistence of Republican power in the state on "Pennsyltucky," the derisive portmanteau encompassing the conservative T-shaped region of the state's vast rural middle. But staunch Republicanism in Pennsylvania's midsection dates to the Civil War.

In reality, the big change lies in southwestern counties like Westmoreland that have moved to the right. In years to come, the growing number of Democratic votes in the populous Philadelphia suburbs, once solidly Republican, will likely break the GOP grip on the state. But for now, formerly Democratic counties in the southwest will ensure that conservative Republicans continue to make their impact felt.

Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, who faces a tough re-election match next week against Democrat Tom Wolf, has slashed funding for public schools, restricted women's access to abortion and failed to do much to regulate or tax the state's booming natural-gas industry. But the legislature, whose influential members include homophobic demagogue state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (who is from the Pittsburgh suburbs), will likely remain under Republican control.

The key to Republican power is here in the southwest, among the suburbanite transplants who hew to the free-market principles that prevail in SUV-driving Amer­ica, and in the towns where deindustrialization has shattered organized labor's power, supplanting eco­nomic populism with social conservatism and alienation.

What, exactly, is the matter with Pennsylvania? It is a complicated question to answer.

Chris, 39, who only gave his first name, does graphic design work at a marketing firm in the Westmoreland County borough of Irwin on Pittsburgh's far exurban fringe. Chris grew up as a Democrat. Though he is not conservative on social issues, he switched to Republican after becoming "close to the business."

His co-worker, Rita, 62, says it's a matter of backing the party that rewards hard work.

"We don't like all the handout type of stuff that the Democrats do, that we're paying for," she says. "There are people out there who don't work that are doing better than we are."

Westmoreland County, where Republicans ended decades of Democratic control of countywide offices in 2011, is a "split," says Republican political consultant Mark Harris, that is "largely unionized labor versus suburbanized transplants."

Ted Kopas, the sole Democratic County Com­missioner left on the three-member board, remembers growing up in North Huntingdon 30 years ago and Republicans were scarce.

"I didn't know a Republican when I was a kid, or they were ashamed to admit it," he says, sitting in front of a bookshelf adorned with a hunting cap and union hard hat. Today, Kopas says that he could walk down the street outside the Greensburg county office and find 10 registered Democrats who no longer back the party.

He blames outside campaign money and a powerful local newspaper empire created by the late right-wing industrial and banking heir Richard Mellon Scaife. But he also says that the Democratic Party had grown complacent and "missed a lot of signs. As household names started retiring, we started losing every open seat. And by that time the wake-up call was hitting us right in the face."

Another Democratic mistake, he says, is that the party has allowed Republicans to make local races about hot-button national social issues —issues that have nothing to do with the work-a-day matters facing local government.

"For someone running for town council to say they're against abortion rights, they're just pandering," he says. "It was always under the guise of 'he doesn't share our values.' Whatever that means."

In Kopas' hometown, the countryside has been converted into $300,000 homes. While the mill communities were bound together by union and industry, exurbanite commuters are not. And they make a ripe target for the Republican message.

"I think when you're not connected to a community in a broader sense, you might vote more conservatively," says Kukovich. "Whenever you feel that you've made it, you might feel more satisfied."

And "the satisfied" might see government as more of a problem than a solution. The resulting ideology is something "more of an anti-politics. There's a lot of people who don't participate and, if they do, they vote against" candidates who back public spending, he says.

But who cares what southwestern Pennsylvanians, who have shrunk as a share of the state's population, think? Democrats should, because American democracy does not guarantee majority rule — as shown clearly in Pennsylvania's 2012 election results.

Though 51 percent of state voters cast ballots for Democrats in U.S. House races, Democrats won just five of the state's 18 seats. Republicans, likewise, won majorities in both the state House and Senate in the face of a Democratic-leaning electorate.

One factor is cynical: Republicans controlled the state legislature after the completion of the 2010 Census, and used that power to redraw congressional districts in their own nakedly partisan interest.

The other factors aren't cynical, but have to do with the unrepresentative nature of American democracy. One is that Democratic voters turn out at lower rates in mid-term elections, when there is no presidential race at the top of the ticket.

Another is that while Democratic-leaning voters are increasing in number, they are also clustered around major urban population centers. Even the most fair effort will result in Democrats concentrated in fewer districts, and Republicans more evenly spread out across the state's wide expanses.

In the increasingly Democratic Philadelphia suburbs, three U.S. House districts were redrawn to maximize the advantage of Republican incumbents.

In western Pennsylvania, one seat was eliminated because of population loss, forcing two conservative Democrats, Jason Altmire and Mark Critz, to run against each other in a district redrawn to favor Repub­licans. Critz defeated Altmire, and went on to lose to Republican Keith Rofthus in the general election.

U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, whose district is based in still-liberal Pittsburgh, is now the sole Democrat in the House from west of Harrisburg.

Pennsylvania is a microcosm of how Republicans manage to hold onto power overall in an increasingly Democratic United States. A majority of Americans voted for Democratic House candidates in 2012, yet Republican Rep. John Boehner remained speaker.

Conservatives often claim that white, working-class voters didn't change, but rather that they were abandoned by a Democratic Party that shift­ed left and became associated with urban elites.

"Traditional Democrats, blue-collar Democrats, the party sort of shifted away from the values and traditions of the old Democratic Party," says Salena Zito, a columnist for the conservative Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

But Republicans in the region have also crafted a conservative economic populism that seeks to shift worker anger away from the boss and toward government.

In his campaign, Democrat Critz depicted Rothfus as a "millionaire Wall Street lawyer" who wanted to gut Medicare. But in a commercial, Rothfus was depicted as a "regular guy" and father of six who "shares our values," pledging to "fight for small businesses and against big government" and to "protect Medicare by repealing Obamacare."

In another, racially loaded commercial, featuring a Chinese food box and fortune cookies, Rothfus attacked labor-backed Critz for outsourcing jobs and "sending our tax dollars to China."

There are also indications that local Democrats are uncomfortable with a national party run by a black president.

"There's no question Western Pennsylvania is a racist area," legendary Democratic Rep. John Murtha told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2008, explaining why Obama would have trouble getting votes in the area. "The older population is more hesitant."

The comments outraged many, as did Obama's remarks that in some "small towns in Pennsylvania" people "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

In southwest Pennsylvania, Obama was so disliked that in 2012 a huge number of Democrats who cast ballots in the area declined to vote for the presi­dent in the primary. Like much of the area's poli­tics, the move echoed nearby West Virginia, a one­time Democratic bastion where Obama faced a surprisingly tough primary challenge from a no-name man serving a federal sentence for extortion in Tex­as. These events prompt a lot of media speculation and, in response, resentment from those under the microscope.

"Our guns are not a solace," Dennis Roddy, a south­west native and, at the time, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter, wrote in 2008 in a Slate essay. He is now a top aide to Corbett. "They are a testimony to our distrust of the ruling classes.

We just wish someone would read us correctly at some point and not do it in the voice of an adult reading a children's story."

That the Democrats moved to the left nationally, at least on social issues, is conventional wisdom. But is it true?

Scholars have found that while the Republican Par­ty has moved sharply to the right, Democrats have not moved much to the left. Arguably, Democrats have actually moved to the right on the economic issues that hold the most appeal to blue-collar workers.

As industry collapsed across the Rust Belt, national Democrats did little to help. Instead, they often backed free trade agreements like NAFTA, supporting the creation of a global economic architecture that keeps workers in the economic basement.

Bill Clinton won big in Westmoreland in 1992, but barely squeaked by in 1996, two years after implementation of NAFTA. Al Gore lost in 2000, Kerry got crushed in 2004, and Obama was blown out in both of the following elections.

The same has held true for Democratic gubernatorial candidates, who won southwestern Pennsylvania's nine counties every time except once from 1950 to 1994. In 2002, Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell swept Phila­delphia suburbs but barely won the southwest, and he lost Westmoreland County. In 2010, Corbett crushed Democrat Dan Onorato in most of the region.

Democrats think they can win Rothfus' seat back someday (it's not likely next week), but there is a debate over how.

Some believe that only a conservative Democrat can win, while others contend that the party can only prevail by drawing a clear contrast with Republicans. Critz's seat, long held by Murtha, a powerful member of Congress famous for directing enormous investments to his constituents, suggests another possibility: Voters recognize results.

A close reading of Obama's infamous quote, often cut short, shows that he too recognized this fact.

People, he said, can't be "persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives" in places where "jobs have been gone now for 25 years" and continued to decline "through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not."

What Obama failed to understand is that skepticism toward trade agreements like NAFTA is not the same as the jingoism of anti-immigrant sentiment. Instead, the anger is a frank assessment that both parties have become wedded to a global economic elite that has failed them.

Both left- and right-wing sympathies have been present in Westmoreland County for decades. In the 1972 Democratic presidential primary, Hubert Humphrey, a moderate, labor-backed liberal, won 35 percent of the county's vote, segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace won 29 percent and anti-war progressive George McGovern won 17 percent.

As social and economic forces shift, winning the Democratic vote has long been a muddied calculus.

Next week's election will be a test as to whether southwestern Pennsylvanian voters' commitments on guns, coal and abortion will give way to anger over the fact that Corbett's small-government conservatism has gutted public education.

"For the first time, I'm hearing from these folks that they are now making a connection" between Harrisburg's anti-tax philosophy, the quality of schools and rising local property taxes, says Kukovich. "I'm seeing a little bit of a backlash."

If Wolf turns Corbett into a one-term governor, the victory will reflect a Pennsylvania electorate that has turned unquestionably leftward. The state is routinely described as swinging — or, to para­phrase Democratic political strategist James Car­ville, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.

But Democrats maintain a huge edge over Republicans in voter registration, and no Republican presidential candidate has won Pennsylvania since 1988. Polls show there is majority support statewide for increased education funding, abortion rights and gay marriage.

State Sen. Daylin Leach, a progressive who represents the formerly solidly Republican Montgomery County suburbs, is emblematic of the partisan shift overtaking the region — and that might one day help deliver Democrats a lasting majority in state politics. Leach, who backs marijuana legalization, didn't even face serious criticism after he admitted to smoking weed on a recent fact-finding trip to Colorado.

For now, though, Pennsylvania's liberals cannot afford to ignore the plight of the southwest part of the state. This is especially true as long as Democrats, especially in Philadelphia, continue to turn out in such low numbers for mid-term elections.

Corbett — politically inept and more conservative than expected — made easy work of turning off moderate voters. But for Democrats, finding ways to re-engage people pushed to the economic margins is a more difficult task. On the tattered main street of Monessen, a broken steel city, it is difficult to find anyone who actually plans to vote.

"Our age group don't really seem to vote much," says Kiera, 28, shopping at the Dollar General with her brother. People don't have any "interest, or they feel their vote" won't change anything.

The business district of this fallen Mon Valley steel giant has dried up alongside industry jobs, and people have left for elsewhere. For young people, there is not much to do except get into trouble, including a lot of heroin, says Kiera. Both siblings commute about 20 miles each way to a job cleaning a UPS warehouse for a non-unionized subcontractor.

"We both work 8.50-dollar-an-hour jobs, and we still have a hard time making ends meet," she says.
For Kiera, lofty promises aren't enough.

"What would actually catch the attention is the action of it being done," she says.

Tina Fischer, 57, shopping in a nearby aisle, agrees.

"Oh honey, I don't follow no politics," she says. "They help maybe the rich, never the poor."

Fischer's husband works a unionized job at All-Clad making pots and pans. But she is on Social Security disability after working at Walmart and Giant Eagle grocery. Politicians, she says, make promises to get votes but never follow through.

Behind Dollar General, an incubator of Republican political-economic might is humming. ArcelorMittal recently reopened the long-dormant coke plant along the Monongahela River, which will provide an estimat­ed 200 jobs while producing a product vital to the steel industry. And across the southwest, the natural-gas boom has been a boon, securing royalties for landowners and creating demand for locally made steel.

It won't turn the economic tide here. But for Republicans like U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, who cited Monessen's refurbished plant in condemning the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for proposing "dozens of new rules that would make steelmaking more expensive and difficult in the United States," it is a political opportunity.

Natural-resource extraction plays a critical economic role in the region, and Republican-aligned energy companies profitably accuse Democrats of waging a "war on coal." The message is ubiquitous on area billboards.

And when Wolf marched in the Labor Day parade in Pittsburgh this fall, the gubernatorial candidate was heckled by members of Boilermakers Local 154, who shouted, "Stop the war on coal! Stop the war on coal!" That union, along with the Laborers' District Council of Western Pennsylvania, has broken with labor to endorse Corbett.

Proposed federal power-plant regulations could very well lead to a reduction in mining jobs. If the plan isn't accompanied by intensive economic development, the fact that fighting global warming is a moral imperative will be cold comfort to the jobless.

"Even Democratic voters that may not be in the coal or shale industry ... have a family tradition of that being part of who they are, and they see [climate-change regulation] as an impediment to economic success in the area," says Zito, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist.

That's a mind-set that the Tribune-Review, a staunch opponent of environmental regulation, has worked hard to mold. Indeed, many Westmoreland County Democrats blame the Tribune-Review papers for the region's turn right, and Kukovich even suspects that the 2004 campaign against him was basically run out of their office.

The Greensburg Tribune-Review was taken over by right-wing libertarian heir Richard Mellon Scaife in 1969, and he started the Pittsburgh-based edition in 1992. Today, the company owns daily and weekly papers throughout Westmoreland County and in Fayette, Indiana, Armstrong, Butler and Allegheny counties.

While much of the reporting may be neutral, the editorial page is scathingly conservative. And for years, it was closely overseen by Scaife, who was known to use the papers to advance his political agendas.
For all the papers' influence, Zito doubts it was decisive.

"I don't know that we should take full credit for that," she says. "Our paper has always been about being fiscally responsible" but is often progressive on the social issues that have driven so much enthusiasm on the right.

What the papers did exploit, however, was the collapse of a symbiosis that once existed between organized labor and the Democratic Party in steel and coal towns. Unions provided workers with a tangible middle-class quality-of-life, and Democratic politicians advancing pro-labor policies were credited for helping to deliver it.

"The decline in manufacturing has removed that significant tie which united unions and Democrats with their constituents," says John Kennedy, a professor of political science at West Chester University and author of the book Pennsylvania Elections.

Many people now feel untethered. But for older blue-collar workers, being a Democrat often remains a core feature of their identity.

"I'm a Democrat," says Les DiVitto, 85, the owner Lucchesi's Italian restaurant in downtown Monessen. "I've been a Democrat all my life."

The retired union mill worker didn't say how he planned to vote. But his wife, Pauline DiVitto, 84, says she'll be casting her vote for Corbett. People don't have money to spend at the restaurant anymore, she says.

Democrats still win in Monessen, though not as big as they once did.

An elderly retired steelworker outside Lucchesi's, who didn't give his name, is inclined to vote for Wolf. But he knows that not all Democrats would do the same.

"Just like Reagan. If he didn't have help from the Democrats, he wouldn't have won." Not that he backed Reagan. "Hell, no. I vote straight Democrat my whole life."