By Alex Roarty
PoliticsPA
roarty@politicspa.com

PITTSBURGH — Dan Onorato on Tuesday fulfilled the first part of a promise most have expected for years: He won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

Onorato now faces a next, potentially far more steep step: Beat General Tom Corbett in the gubernatorial race. As expected, the attorney general cruised to victory over state Rep. Sam Rohrer, setting up a race some had penciled in since just months after the 2008 election.

“Today, Pennsylvania voters from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, from Erie to Scranton Wilkes-Barre, to the Lehigh Valley and to all the counties in between, they voted for change today,” he said in front a several hundred supporters at a local union hall here, shortly after his opponents had conceded. “They are ready to turn our economy around, they are ready to to clean up Harrisburg, and they are ready to  get our state fiscal house in order.”

With 99 percent of the vote reporting in, the Allegheny County executive led closest rival Jack Wagner 45.1 percent to 24.2 percent. State Senator Anthony Williams lagged with 18 percent support, and Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Hoeffel had 13 percent of the vote.

The totals, provided by the Pennsylvania Department of State, are unofficial.

Despite hailing from western Pennsylvania, Onorato won three of the four Philadelphia suburban collar counties: Delaware, Chester and Bucks. Although Hoeffel won his home of Montgomery County, Onorato managed a second-place finish there, with 24 percent of the vote.

The Allegheny County executive also dominated western Pennsylvania despite sharing the turf with Wagner, who also hails the state’s second largest county. He won more than 50 percent of the vote in each major county in the region, with the exception of Westmoreland, where he won 48.5 percent support.

Onorato has been considered the race’s favorite since winning re-election as Allegheny County executive in 2007, mostly on the strength of prodigious fundraising an an election team comprising veterans of Governor Rendell’s groundbreaking campaign in 2002.

But his financial edge didn’t translate into much of a lead at the polls for most of 2009 through the first four months of 2010. The presumed frontrunner rarely cracked 20 percent support in polls until April, only a few percentage points more than his handful of rivals.

But Onorato’s poll numbers ballooned in mid-April after he began aggressively hitting the state’s TV airwaves in late March, the earliest gubernatorial candidate for either party to do so. Polls soon showed him near 40 percent support, more than doubling up his closest opponent. Its an advantage he wouldn’t relinquish for the rest of the primary — a Quinnipiac University poll released Monday showed him garnering 39 percent support among likely Democratic voters. Williams was second with 11 percent, Wagner third at 10 percent, and Hoeffel at 9 percent.

Onorato thrived despite an aggressive ad campaign from Williams, who criticized the county executive’s economic record, his alleged “pay-to-play” politics, and, in the southeast at least, his stances on abortion and gun control. The Onorato campaign hit back in an ad against Williams as a supporter of the infamous 2005 legislative pay-raise, but mostly chose to stay above the fray against the state senator.

Williams’ third-place finish despite millions of dollars spent on an aggressive TV ad campaign is one the race’s mysteries. The Philadelphia lawmaker unexpectedly entered the campaign in mid-February after Philadelphia businessman Tom Knox’s exit, and he quickly went from a candidate many insiders dismissed as angling for a better committee seat in the state Senate to Onorato’s strongest opponent.

His campaign gained strength on the back of millions of dollars in contributions he received from a handful of wealthy school-choice supporters, who rallied behind Williams’ decision to make the education issue the heart of his campaign. Their contributions were so large that, according to finance reports, he raised roughly as much Onorato despite the county executive having a three-year headstart and the benefit of frontrunner status.

A campaign official told PoliticsPA Williams spent roughly $5 million on ads.

But the money didn’t translate into support from voters. Williams showed only a marginal bump in the polls, enough to put him solidly second in the four-man race but not nearly enough to make the Onorato campaign nervous.

In the end, his third-place finish seems attributable to the fact he won Philadelphia by only 40,000 votes, garnering roughly double Onorato’s support.

The campaign would have been a much different story if either Wagner or Hoeffel had half as much money as Williams. Hoeffel, in particular, struggled to raise money despite being being the only candidate from the voter-rich suburbs of Philadelphia. The Montgomery County commissioner and former congressman positioned himself as the race’s most vocal liberal, voicing strong support for abortion-rights and an aggressive, if fiscally responsible, big government.

But his hopes of winning the nomination seemed to fade permanently with fundraising reporters were announced in early April, which showed the commissioner with only $100,000 on hand. At the time, Onorato had $6.5 million on hand.

“He was up against a candidate with a great deal more resources than he had,” said Hoeffel campaign c0-manager Lauren Townsend. “That was a big impediment to the campaign.”

Hoeffel managed only to win his home county of Montgomery, losing Bucks, Chester and Delaware to Onorato despite positioning himself as the candidate of choice for the more liberal southeast.

Wagner also struggled with fundraising, which likely contributed to the fact he was relegated to second-place status across western Pennsylvania despite the area being his geogrphical base.

He had been seen as Onorato’s stiffest competition to start the race because of his longstanding ties to many Democratic officials statewide and fiscal credibility as a result of his stint as auditor general. The three-time statewide candidate pulled in endorsements from an array of county Democratic committees and received half the votes of state committee members at the party’s winter endorsement meeting in February. Candidates need two-thirds support to earn an endorsement.

*The story has been updated to reflect updated poll returns from the Department of State.

Tags: Dan Onorato, Dan Onorato for Governor, Dan Onorato Tom Corbett

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