[Washington Examiner] HOOVERSVILLE, Pennsylvania — If you are a longtime resident of Pennsylvania, it still is a bit of a jolt to the senses to drive through what was once coal country and see an oversized, cheery, red billboard sitting along U.S. 30 reading "VOTE REPUBLICAN."
However, it is a reminder of how much the people who live in these old industrial and coal-rich counties have shed the local Democratic politics of their upbringing. Voter registration numbers, as we shall see, show as much.
Important to note: These voters have not changed personally, but their parties have done so. Democrats have abandoned their working-class voters for college-educated elites who rarely call the middle of somewhere home.
Officials in both parties in Washington — whether they are lawmakers on Capitol Hill or strategists working for one of the alphabet soup campaign arms of the House, Senate, or state legislatures, or a staffer for any of them — often struggle with how to appeal to these citizens.
Democrats did appeal to them well for so long ... until they didn’t. It was an erosion that wasn’t all that easily detected because what didn’t move in a significant way was the voter registration numbers. Part of why voters who left the Democratic Party did not change their voter registration had to do with local elections and the state’s closed primary system. |