Pennsylvania is getting further and further out of reach for Mitt Romney, putting additional pressure on him to win one of the eight so-called super swing states in November. Bot more important, the Pennsylvania's movement away from its flirtation as a swing state shows how changing demographics—and some well-placed, anti-Bain Capital ads—put the state back in the blue.
Public Policy Polling has Obama up a solid 50/42, though before Obama's campaign breaks out the Andre they should note that the president's disapproval rating is actually one point underwater (though margin of error, etc.). How do voters elect a candidate they don't particularly like? By hating his opponent: Keystoners have a real problem with Mitt Romney, who has an approval deficit of 14 points, 37/51. Voters may not be thrilled with Obama, but they're more than happy to vote for him over Romney.
This result was certainly not set in stone. Pennsylvania has gone blue for the last five elections, but got real close to flipping in 2000 and 2004, when it voted Democrat only by a hair. This got it labeled a swing state, and Republicans tried hard to swing it to their side in 2008.
But state demographics have been working against them. The Brookings Institute's 2008 report on the state's trends noted "strong growth in college graduates and skilled service industries and increased diversity due to a burgeoning Hispanic population," and points out that the eastern half of the state has been trending away from its rust belt roots into the more democratic northern corridor.
And still central to the state's vote results, even as they wane demographically, are white working class voters. These were the hardhats who were supposed to turn against Obama in the 2008 general, especially after his "guns and religion" comment, which was about small-town PA voters. And when pundits pitched the theory that voters would balk at voting for a black, liberal president, no matter how ahead he was in the polls—the once-important Bradley effect—they pointed at white PA working class voters.
Nono of that happened; Obama took PA decisively. The only question was whether his victory was part and parcel with the national enthusiasm over Obama, a one-off election that was meaningless in the long term, or a sign of a palpable shift in the state's politics back to solidly Democrat.
Regular readers of PoliticOlogy (hey!) will remember when this blog recommended that Romney and Santorum fight it out in Pennsylvania with everything they had, even if the victory would be ultimately irrelevant to the GOP nomination. If the GOP really wanted to flip Pennsylvania, it would need a serious ground organization for the fall, especially as the Obama camp already had a widespread presence in the state. Instead, Santorum dropped out, and Romney coasted to victory, losing the chance to introduce himself to the state's blue collar voters.
Obama is fast at work making that introduction for him via a relentless assault on Romney's days at Bain Capital. Pennsylvania was hit hard by the steel industry's crash in the 80s and 90s. Obama wants working class voters to know that Bain Capital profited off that decline: the steel company featured in the Obama campaign's ads, GS Industries, is from Kansas City, but the ad's rust belt scenery could be anywhere in Pennsylvania. And where are the ads running? Pennsylvania. The Obama campaign doesn't have to convince white working class voters to love Obama when they can convince them to hate Romney for his venture capitalism, and a 51% disapproval rating is a sign that they do.
This is all the more important as Romney's margin of error in the eight swing states is slim. He's going to win Florida, and possibly Nevada and North Carolina, and everything else will be a battle. Nabbing PA and its 20 electoral votes would have been a huge boon for him. Instead, he may have to cut ties with a state that, eight years ago, looked to be about to become Republican.
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