Replies

The teachers held a rally outside the school board meeting Monday to say they weren't ashamed of the union demand for a 19 percent pay raise this year. That issue was beginning to gain traction and I feel the incumbents are a viable opposition, especially when this Pennsylvania State Education Association bought school board (Nearly 5-thousand dollars to Dover CARES) starts up the spending and raising the taxes. Five seats up in two years.

That's the point though. In a conservative district, with a 19% pay raise and property tax hike threatened, the Republicans still lost. This is the kind of district in which Dems shouldn't even be able to field a candidate. Thanks to the creationist agenda pushed by the school board, the Dems found a window of oppportunity, and won.

Yes and no..The incumbent candidates were of course "Christians" and mostly "political virgins"..they didn't want to get down and dirty on this..radio ads ran for three days before the election that mentioned the 19 percent pay raise..the news media ran a front-page Sunday spread that mentioned it even before the radio ads..there was a spy in the incumbents camp reporting back to Dover CARES and I think that led to the news story where a union rep tried to rationalize the demand as a "starting point."
The Monday night rally was driven in part by Dover CARES fears about the issue. The issue that was at least partially mentioned in the literature that the incumbents put out at the last minute...Ronald Reagan once said that politics is like "seeing the world with its pants down."...that's something that was hard for some of these Christian people to understand. This 19 percent pay raise could have won it for them because the anger of the voters in PA yesterday was driven by the 16 to 54 percent pay raises given legislators and legislative leaders, judges and the governor's staff in a middle of the night vote last July by our legislature. Two
Supreme Court Justices were up for retention. Democrat Nigro was voted out by a 30-thousand margin statewide. Republican Newman survived by 100-thousand votes because of Tom Ridge phone calls that went out Monday. The margin against the judges was 2-1 in the Dover area yesterday. The legislature is desperately trying to repeal the raise now before they face the wrath of the voters next year. But back on Dover they should have shoved this 19 percent pay raise in the voters face yesterday and they would have gotten the 100 or less votes they needed to win.