In eight years since Pennsylvanians last chose a new governor, the landscape of each major political party has shifted in ways that could have some impact on the May 18 primary.
The Democratic Party that picked Ed Rendell as its candidate in 2002 has grown by 550,000 members, to more than 4.3 million, and its center of gravity has tilted slightly toward the Philadelphia region. Its voters are a bit younger, a bit more liberal.
The Republican Party has changed in some opposite ways.
Its ranks have shrunk by 103,000 voters, to 3.1 million, and its geographic core has shifted slightly west, toward Pittsburgh. With a loss of many moderates, and a failure to attract many new voters, it has become older, more conservative.
These changes, though subtle, figure into the campaigns being mounted by each of four Democrats and two Republicans running to succeed Mr. Rendell, who after two terms in office cannot seek re-election.
With Philadelphia having experienced an 8 percent growth in Democratic registration — an additional 74,000 voters — state Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams sits in a stronger position to follow a strategy based mainly on gaining votes in his hometown. In the four-way race, a candidate could win the party’s nomination with as little as 30 to 35 percent of the vote.
Democrat Joe Hoeffel, a Montgomery County commissioner, likewise may be helped by his party’s growth in the Philadelphia suburbs. In his home county, which had a Republican majority in 2002, Democrats now boast an 82,000-voter edge over the GOP.
So say the latest registration figures, complete through April 19, the deadline for registering to vote in the primary.
The five-county Philadelphia area, which had 34.4 percent of all Democratic voters in the state in 2002, now has 36.6 percent, a gain of 284,000 voters, according to those figures.
At the other end of the state, the two Pittsburghers in the Democratic race — Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato and state Auditor General Jack Wagner — must contend with significant erosion of their party’s base in southwestern Pennsylvania.
In the May 2002 primary, 27.8 percent of all Democrats lived in a nine-county region of the southwest. Today, it’s just 23.8 percent, a loss of 20,000 voters.
This is due in part to population loss — but analysts say it is also the result of conservative Democrats’ disenchantment with the liberal tone of the party’s politics at the national level.
“Democrats in Western Pennsylvania were always more conservative,” said Berwood A. Yost, director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin and Marshall College.
Read more in the Post-Gazette
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