A Learning Experience From PA-18's Special Election

Townhall.com ^ | March 15, 2018 | Jackie Gingrich Cushman

[Galactic Overlord-In-Chief]

Re: The district’s 50,000 vote registration edge. True. This is basically the southwest corner of the state, and has been historically Democrat. It wasn’t a fan of Reagan or Bush 41 but started to move more Republican in the 2000s. Washington County (part of the district) last voted for Nixon in 72 before it voted Republican again for McCain in 08, and has stayed in the Republican column since. Greene County right in the southwest corner voted Dem straight from Carter in 76 to Gore in 2000 before Bush 43 nabbed it in 2004, since then it’s been ours.

Having said that, Saccone’s problem wasn’t the historically Democratic rural and small town counties. He still won those, although you could still debate how much *better* he should have done in them. It was the portion of Allegheny County in the district, the Pittsburgh suburbs. Saccone just bombed there. That points to a lot of affluent voters, which are more traditional Republican voters, taking a pass on Saccone.

This might be a problem for us in the upcoming midterms if this pattern crops up in other suburbs. We have seen big suburban slides in Republican margins in the VA governor’s race and the Kansas 4th and Georgia 6th congressional district special elections (also in the Moore/Jones AL senate race, but that race was so cray cray that it shouldn’t count). In too many of these cases, it seems like a slice of suburbia is not turning out for Republicans or is actually revolting against them.

I’d like to think there’s a way to reconnect with these slices of suburbia, but if the strategy is being devised by the GOP consultancy class, we may be screwed.

I would add that there is still bad news for Democrats, at least on the Senate side, in all of this. Saccone may have cratered in the Pittsburgh suburbs but he still won historically Democratic rural territory. Gillespie in Virginia, though he got clobbered in the suburbs, dominated southwest VA (coal country). If you’re Joe Manchin in West Virginia, you have to be sweating bullets at all of this. This trend also doesn’t bode well for Donnelly, Heitkamp, McCaskill, Brown, and even Jon Tester if he’s not careful - all Dems in states with substantially rural populations.