For Them, 2016 Was a Nightmare. Will 2020 be Different?
PHILADELPHIA — An anchor on Bloomberg news said before making the announcement “We have some big news… huge news actually.”
It was that exact moment when gloom would set in for some. For others, ecstasy. What seemed like the perfect storm unleashing for some felt like the sun rising on a new day to others.
It was that moment when the anchor said, “The [Associated Press] is now projecting that Donald Trump has won the state of Pennsylvania.” With it, a six election straight winning streak for Democrats and the state’s electoral votes ended. After years of Republicans putting their hopes on Pennsylvania and falling short, Donald Trump did the impossible.
In 2020, Pennsylvania once again will be a state that supporters of either candidate will be biting their nails over. Whoever wins it, will earn 20 electoral votes, a coup in their path to the crucial 270 needed to win. Pennsylvania Democrats are working hard to come back from an embarrassing defeat. They are crafting a message, organizing on the ground, reaching out to voters early, and trying to break through roadblocks Republicans have placed before them. The work they are doing here could be decisive when it comes to who becomes President.
Winning in Pennsylvania isn’t easy. While the state geographically may not be large, the differences in the state could not be greater. In the southeast, center-city Philadelphia and its surrounding suburbs are dominant. In the western half of the state, there is downtown Pittsburgh. Despite both of these ends of the state having urban areas, they are not the same. Philadelphia seems like a booming northeastern metropolis, while Pittsburgh feels like a changing midwestern town. In between these two regions is vast farmland that looks more like the south than anywhere nearby.
“Pennsylvania is a diverse state.” That’s according to Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, who should know. He traveled across the entire state in 2018 to campaign to have Governor Tom Wolf re-elected.
This diversity in Pennsylvania has allowed for different trends to appear. In Southeast Pennsylvania, or SEPA, home to the Philadelphia suburbs, voters are moving towards the Democratic party. That was true in 2016 when despite losing the state while President Obama won it in 2012, Hillary Clinton improved upon Obama’s margins in the suburbs.
Meanwhile, the other trend in the state is in Southwest Pennsylvania, or SWPA. Here, former working class towns that voted for Democrats for decades are shifting towards the right. In 2016 Donald Trump accelerated these gains faster than the losses his party were having in SEPA, leading to his victory.
So, how do Democrats make SEPA move left faster than SWPA moves right? “That’s the question that is on everybody’s mind looking into 2020,” said Brendan Welch. He’s a spokesperson for the PA state democratic party, and on the team tasked with the job to make Democrats’s dreams a reality in Pennsylvania.
“There’s been sort of a shift that we’ve seen occurring over several years, especially since 2008 of rural areas shifting to the right and suburban areas shifting to the left… For whatever reason, Trump accelerated that shift, and he really turned out a lot of voters in rural areas.”
Brendan is quick to note the gains they’ve seen from Trump increasing the pace of this realignment. “Since [the election of Donald Trump] we’ve seen the suburbs come through for Democrats in 2018 and 2019, especially suburban Philadelphia.”
Brendan is correct in stating this. In the 2019 local elections, Democrats gained the three counties remaining in the Philadelphia suburbs that they did not have control over. With it, they flipped some counties they had not held since the civil war. This was an expansion after the 2017 local elections where Democrats won county-wide offices in places they had previously never taken control over.
However, at the same time while SEPA moved left, the problem in SWPA did not go away. Democrats lost four counties in total in SWPA, many of which they had controlled for years. Despite Democrats making huge inroads and gaining six counties in total, Republicans in SWPA plus rural Pennsylvania were able to gain seven, leading to a net county loss of one for Democrats.
With the problem not improving for Democrats in SWPA, I wanted to talk to someone who understood it. Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman is a Democrat who is the former mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania. While Braddock is an overwhelmingly Democratic town just outside of Pittsburgh, Fetterman is surrounded by small towns that are shifting extremely to the right. If any Democrat understands what’s going on there, he has to be one of them.
“Just as Obama was a singularly unique candidate for Democrats, Donald Trump possessed that same energy for Republicans.” The energy that Fetterman describes might be the reason why these shifts increased suddenly in 2016. The way to electorally have a pulse in SWPA as a Democrat he said was to talk about “safeguarding core Democratic principles and programs.”
Brendan Welch has to agree with this. He also talks about one key to reaching out to these voters to limit the losses they are seeing in the region is through messaging. “In rural areas [Donald Trump] goes after their healthcare he makes a tax system that hurts working families.” These are protecting the Democratic principles like Fetterman said, and it might be a sign that Pennsylvania Democrats are taking note.
Moving back to Democratic basics like healthcare and a rigged economy were extremely helpful to Democrats in the midterm elections. Democrats constantly talked about Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the push to get rid of the pre-existing condition protections clause, and the Trump Tax Bill. Using this message, Democrats were able to gain 4 congressional seats, win statewide races for senate and the governorship by double digits, and make inroads into the state legislature after years of being deep in the minority.
Something the Lieutenant Governor repeatedly said to me was to take a look at what Governor Wolf was able to do. “Donald Trump won by like what, 40,000 votes? We won by 852,000. That’s a swing of almost 900,000 votes.” Fetterman credits that with Wolf living in reality. “It’s not an act of political courage to be extreme as your district allows you to be. The real trick is getting things done.”
That first part in what Fetterman said gets to the major question the party faces. Should the party move hard to the left in an effort to contrast with Donald Trump and fix the underlying problems that got him elected? Or does it swing towards a moderate route that hopefully appeals to enough voters that he loses and small improvements are made.
Fetterman says though that both of these paths “have to co-exist.” Talk about the aspirations and your core values, but be realistic with what you are trying to do. That’s how he thinks you win Pennsylvania.
Welch and the state party think that winning the state will come down to organizing. That’s why they’re doing it very early this year. “We have organizers by the end of this month in 10 different counties, and keep expanding that very quickly all the way through the April 28th Primary, and we are rapidly expanding in every part of the state… We’re not going to take anything for granted.”
The message Welch is trying to send is that the party is going to show up everywhere. The areas that are trending blue, they’ll be in. The areas that are going against them, they’ll be there. Their base counties like the cities? They’ll be there. “We’re inviting anyone turned off by the Trump Administration’s broken promises. We’re really hitting these places like Scranton and Erie.”
Welch specifically mentioning Scranton and Erie is a signal that he knows where the problems for Democrats are. In Lackawanna County, home to Scranton Pennsylvania, Hillary Clinton barely squeaked by Donald Trump in a place where Barack Obama four years earlier won by nearly 30 points. In Erie County, which hadn’t been red since 1984, Donald Trump narrowly won. These two places are emblematic of the trends against Democrats with the hard swings towards the right they saw in just four years. Welch hopes that the early organizing the state party is doing there will help manifest frustration against the president in 2020.
In 2018, these places did move back to the Democrats. At the state and congressional level, Democrats won Lackawanna and Erie by roughly 20 points once again. However, 2018 was a blue wave year in a midterm election against an unpopular incumbent President. Surely with the President on the ballot in 2020 things will be different.
Welch takes issue with that assessment. “They’re still making the same mistakes.” Welch then specifically talks about the lawsuit currently going through the courts by Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act. “They don’t want you to know about it, and they’re scared about it. They don’t want to be blamed again for going after the healthcare of families in Pennsylvania.”
Meanwhile, standing in the way against all of these efforts are Pennsylvania Republicans. Without a primary, the Republicans do not have to waste time creating a general message before having a candidate selected and using their specific messaging. Their guy is already in the White House.
The case for Donald Trump by PA Republicans is clear: economy, and national security. “He’s gonna do even better here than he did in 16, because he has delivered. Lowest unemployment rate among African Americans, Women, Latinos… Lowest overall in 50 years. Best economy of my lifetime.” Lawrence Tabas stated that.
He’s the Republican State Party Chairman. His job in 2020 is to lead the party and work with the Trump Campaign to make Pennsylvania a red state once again.
Tabas dismisses the landslide results Democrats had in 2018 in PA. “We did not have our strongest and best asset, and that is the President.” Without Trump on the ballot Tabas explains, the party did not have the figure it needed to juice up turnout enough to beat the already energized Democrats. “You can not read into [the 2018] results. President Trump is a rockstar.”
That rockstar, though, has a problem in SEPA. When asked about the losses Republicans experienced there in 2019, Tabas pivoted to the wins they experienced. “In 2019 the Republican party strength was that we won a statewide office for the superior court of Pennsylvania, and we were outspent but we were still able to win one of those seats… We won 6 counties that had been Democrat forever.”
But the Chairman thinks SEPA may be within reach, despite the poor performances in the Trump era. “The average voter is going to focus on the two most important issues, and economics is usually one of them. The interesting thing is every Democrat running for President wants to dismantle the best economy of my lifetime.” He also points to a rally held in Bucks County, located in SEPA, where nearly 1,000 people showed up even though the President was not there. “We’ll do better in SEPA than what you expect.”
The chairman’s neglect to acknowledge the trend against the party in one region may be the biggest problem the state Republicans have. It’s similar to the problem the state Democrats have where, as Welch describes, a new organization “Turn PA blue [which] is an all-volunteer driven organization… has really been turning out voters in the suburbs.” Turning out voters in the suburbs is great, nevertheless if Democrats don’t turn out their voters in the Southwest those gains in the suburbs may be all for nothing.
Donald Trump currently trails most of his opponents in Pennsylvania in polls so far, but he also trailed Hillary Clinton. This time however, the hope for Democrats is that their new organizing methods, volunteer base, and strong message will make the polls a reality. Republicans won’t let that be an easy task.
Lieutenant Governor Fetterman understands that. “Trump is gonna be formidable…incredibly formidable.” He adds, “You can’t take anything for granted in any district this cycle.”
