Published: June 14, 2008 11:37 pm            

Obama, McCain camps looking to lure Pa. Clinton voters

Although their favored candidate has exited the presidential race, thousands of local Hillary Clinton supporters need not feel dejected.

This fall, they will be the belle of the political ball.

Pennsylvania, with the nation’s fifth-highest total of electoral votes, is expected to represent a key battleground in the fight for the White House.

And to have any chance in the Keystone State, both parties recognize a critical need to woo large numbers of former Hillary backers – including the blue-collar, socially conservative Democrats who gave Clinton a big win here in April.

“The people here are in nobody’s pocket,” said Rob Gleason, a Johnstown businessman who leads both the Cambria County and state Republican committees.

This year, for the first time in decades, Pennsylvanians joined the frenetic presidential primary dance as Clinton and Barack Obama – now the presumptive Democratic nominee – campaigned exhaustively in advance of the April 22 election.

In Cambria and Somerset counties alone, the Clinton family made five appearances.

That degree of saturation is not likely to be repeated later this year.

But more than four months before the Nov. 4 election, Obama and presumptive GOP nominee John McCain already are wading into Pennsylvania: Both stopped in Philadelphia last week.

Abe Amoros, political and communications director for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, said the general-election race could spur 50 or more visits from the two campaigns.

Other observers agree that the fall campaign could mirror 2004, when George Bush and John Kerry – and their surrogates – blanketed the state.

“I think, again, we’re going to be one of the most-visited states in the country,” said Terry Madonna, public affairs professor and political analyst at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster.

McCain’s travels “won’t be taking him onto any superhighways,” Madonna and Michael Young, a Pennsylvania research consultant and pollster, wrote in a recent analysis of the race.

“Instead, he is going to have to walk it out region by region, county by county and demographic by demographic – reminding suburban voters that they once liked Republicans and that he, McCain, is the kind of Republican they liked,” the pair wrote.

McCain is considered a slight underdog in Pennsylvania because of two major factors: Democrats wield a voter registration edge of more than 1 million, and no Republican presidential candidate has won the state since George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Amoros expects that trend to continue, arguing that McCain is too closely allied with an unpopular Republican president to win much favor with Pennsylvania Democrats.

“John McCain does not represent the working class – not even the socially conservative working class,” Amoros said, adding that the nation’s economic problems are associated with Republican leadership.

“These pocketbook issues don’t play well for the Republican party,” he said.

Gleason begs to differ, arguing that conservative-leaning Democrats will not back Obama.

“I think people worry about terrorism, they worry about safety,” Gleason said. “And what their decision is going to be is, whom do they want to be commander in chief?”

Gleason points out that, in 2004, George W. Bush won heavily Democratic Cambria County.

“We did it four years ago, and we’ll do it again,” he said.

Obama took a beating in Cambria County’s primary this year, with Clinton gaining 71 percent of the vote. She had the same margin of victory among Democrats in Somerset County.

Statewide, Clinton won with nearly 55 percent of the vote.

So Obama must pull his party together in Pennsylvania – drawing female voters in particular.

Madonna sees two Democratic subsets that could cause problems for Obama.

First, he said, there are those who “don’t quite trust Obama.”

“They’re not convinced he’s one of us, understands us,” Madonna said.

Also, some women who saw Clinton’s candidacy as a historic step forward may feel angry about results of the long, hard-fought Democratic nomination process.

“The question is, how many are there in both these categories?” Madonna said. “And we don’t know yet.”

Amoros, though, said the party is not fractured. He noted that both Gov. Ed Rendell, who backed Clinton, and U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, who endorsed Obama, spoke at last weekend’s state committee meeting.

“We’re looking forward to the fall, and we have a unified front,” Amoros said.

Unified or not, there is no doubt that Pennsylvania’s Democratic party is bigger.

In order to have a voice in the tight Clinton-Obama race, voters rushed to join the party in the months before the primary.

From the week of February 4 – which included the “Super Tuesday” primaries – until the week of April 14, 156,803 Pennsylvania voters switched from some other party to a Democratic affiliation.

Only 10,703 voters switched to the Republican party, according to data gathered by the Pennsylvania Department of State.

Cambria and Somerset counties saw a similar trend, with 1,104 people becoming Democrats and 175 signing on with the Republican party during the same 11-week period. Those numbers don’t take into account the 1,396 new voters who registered as Democrats – versus 517 registering as Republicans – during that time in Cambria and Somerset counties.

Democrats have expressed confidence because their ranks have swelled.

But Gleason sees things differently. He argues that many former Republicans will return to the GOP, adding that party affiliation does not necessarily matter in a general election.

“Democrats look at (registration numbers), and it lulls them to sleep,” Gleason said.

“They’re going to get a heck of a surprise.”



Good run for the Democrats

A look at statewide and local general-election results for major-party presidential candidates since 1988, the last year that a Republican candidate won Pennsylvania:



2004

Pennsylvania

George W. Bush (R): 2,793,847

x John Kerry (D): 2,938,095

Cambria County

x Bush: 34,048

Kerry: 32,591

Somerset County

x Bush: 23,802

Kerry: 12,842



2000

Pennsylvania

George W. Bush (R): 2,281,127

x Al Gore (D): 2,485,967

Cambria County

Bush: 28,001

x Gore: 30,308

Somerset County

x Bush: 20,218

Gore: 12,028



1996

Pennsylvania

x Bill Clinton (D): 2,315,819

Bob Dole (R): 1,801,169

Cambria County

x Clinton: 30,338

Dole: 20,259

Somerset County

Clinton: 12,719

x Dole: 14,735



1992

Pennsylvania

x Bill Clinton (D): 2,239,164

George Bush (R): 1,791,841

Cambria County

x Clinton: 34,332

Bush: 20,762

Somerset County

Clinton: 12,493

x Bush: 13,858



1988

Pennsylvania

x George Bush (R): 2,300,087

Michael Dukakis (D): 2,194,944

Cambria County

Bush: 25,626

x Dukakis: 38,517

Somerset County

x Bush: 16,808

Dukakis: 13,815

        

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