Penn Primary Nite LIVE Blogging

It looks like Obama's strategy to rack up big margins in the affluent Philly suburban counties has been stymied.

10:09 PM:
With 19% reporting. Hillary Clinton is winning Northampton County, home to Lehigh University but also Bethlehem Steel, whose union workers have come out for her. JVLaB

10:24 PM:
As John and I sit here trying to get good numbers, I'm focusing on Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs. In a few of my past posts, I've pointed to Montgomery and Bucks counties as potential boons to Obama's chances--at least in the sense that they could allow him to blunt Clinton's numbers elsewhere across the state. It seems, at least now, as if Obama has underperformed here, especially in Montgomery.

I'm also interested in getting, probably tomorrow, some detailed numbers from the city of Philadelphia. When I do, I'm going to look back at some previous presidential races in Philly and see if we can see some parallels, neighborhood by neighborhood. If you've read my posts going back to the beginning of electiondissection.com, 1968 will be the first place I look. CBMurray

10:34 PM:
Looks like Northampton County's precincts might be starkly split, between university-heavy Obama wins and union-heavy Bethlehem and Allentown. JVLaB

10:40 PM:
McCain is only mustering about 72% against a dormant Huckabee campaign and a meandering Ron Paul. Interesting note: McCain is bringing in that number statewide. No "Pennsyltucky" effect boosting Huckabee's numbers there. JVLaB

10:46 PM:
This story in today's Washington Post gives a nice portrait of a changing Reading, Pennsylvania. Now half Latino, the city finds itself in the midst of transition from what it once was--blue collar, white ethnic--into a place not quite yet defined. As of now, Berks County has gone heavily to Clinton, 58%-42%. CBMurray

10:52 PM:
Clinton clobbering Obama in what many expected to be Obama-favorable Bucks County by a 2 to 1 margin, and in Montgomery County, Clinton is winning by her statwide margin, 54-46%. JVLaB

11:06 PM:
Exit Polls. Obama does better among men. However, the cleavages of age and race remain stark. Also of interest is education. Despite Obama's earlier advantages among the most highly educated, he split with Clinton among those with college and post-graduate degrees. Income also seems to be a bit more murky with Obama doing best among the highest bracket but Clinton doing very well in the 100-150K range. CBMurray

11:14 PM:
Talk about your “bitter” voters! In Centralia, the fabled ghost town where a mere 21 residents still live above a coal mine fire that’s been smoldering for 40 years, Clinton beats Obama by 4 to 1 – votes that is. JVLaB

11:49 PM:
Obama wins Dauphin County, whose seat is heavily Afro-Am Harrisburg, the “Keystone Kapital.” Obama runs away there, but stays competitive in the largely white surrounding townships, especially in more prosperous localities like Swatara, Susquehanna, Lower Paxton and Derry. JVLaB

Pennsylvania Paradox

Building upon Prof. CBMurray’s post, Philly’s bellwether suburban Montgomery County sits at the heart of this year’s Pennsylvania Paradox, where the Democratic presidential primary finds Keystone political players and their traditional constituencies all mixed up. Lining up behind Hillary Clinton is Gov. Ed Rendell, the Upper West Side-born socially liberal Jewish former Philly mayor with a history of battling public employee unions. Barack Obama’s most prominent surrogate is Sen. Robert Casey, Jr., the pro-gun, pro-life Catholic Democrat; a union stalwart and a scion of Scranton.

Rendell lost the 1986 Democratic gubernatorial primary to Casey’s father, the late Robert Casey, Sr., but defeated Casey, Jr. for the same nod in 2002. (ElectionDissection.com would be remiss if we failed to note that a Clinton-Casey clan rivalry dates back to 1992 when nominee Bill Clinton refused a Democratic convention speaking slot to Casey, Sr. to air his anti-abortion views, despite a long history of both families sharing the services of consultants Paul Begala and James Carville.) Rendell won that contest by racking up huge majorities in the affluent, socially liberal suburban counties that ring his Philly base. Rendell beat Casey, Jr. by 13 points, but won only 11 of the Keystone State’s 67 counties.

Casey, Jr. even mustered over 20% in the city of Philadelphia, where pro-union, pro-life urban ethnic Catholic Democrats are not yet extinct. But in Montgomery County, home of the tony “Main Line” towns that were once the heart of WASPy liberal Republicans, Rendell trounced Casey, Jr. 88%-12%, and racked up margins nearly as lopsided in surrounding Bucks, Delaware and Chester counties.

Despite Rendell’s indefatigable barnstorming for HRC this year, given Obama’s strength among college educated, affluent social liberals this primary season, the post-primary map is likely to resemble that 2002 Rendell-Casey, Jr. map, but with Casey-endorsed Obama winning Rendell territory and HRC romping away in Casey Country: Pittsburgh, Coal Country and Appalachian “Pennsyltucky,” her traditional down-scale, union-heavy base this cycle.

Montgomery County leads these trends. In fact, Montgomery was the only county that Casey père couldn’t carry in his landslide 1990 reelection. The Main Line forsook the pro-life Democrat of working class roots for Barbara Hafer, the liberal Republican state auditor and a vociferous advocate of abortion rights. (Despite hailing from suburban Pittsburgh, Hafer’s career reflects Montgomery’s political evolution: she switched parties in 2003 and her daughter is vying for the Dem nod to challenge freshman Republican U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy (PA18).

And after voting for him in ’94 and 2000 (against pro-life Pittsburgh-area fmr. U.S. Rep. Ron Klink), Montgomery County lost patience with trade-bashing, gay-baiting Sen. Rick Santorum, favoring none other than Bob Casey, Jr. against him, 62-38%, surpassing Casey’s statewide margin.

This evolving partisanship is marked by stunning shifts in party registration totals, which might give Obama a fighting chance to pull off an upset. ElectionDissection.com advisor Bill Boyle pointed us to this graphic, illustrating the steep drop-off in those suburban Philly counties in Republican and independent registrations coupled by even sharper gains for Democrats. A reporter friend who spent time on the ground in Pennsylvania’s hotly contested 2004 Republican Senate primary recounted how, to narrowly fend off a challenge for renomination from then-U.S. Rep. Pat Toomey, Sen. Arlen Specter scrambled to re-register Philly ‘burb voters who had switched parties to vote for Rendell in ’02, suggesting that the graphic might be even more dramatic had Specter not needed to undertake that effort.

Hillary’s saving grace may be Montgomery’s heavily Jewish precincts, which have turned out historically for both Republicans (Specter, fmr. U.S. Rep. Jon Fox) and Democrats (U.S. Rep. Allyson Schwartz, fmr. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky) with ties to the Jewish community. The test will be whether Jewish voters who favored Hillary Clinton in Florida (note her margins in CDs 19, 20 & 22), New York (see Riverdale’s Assembly District 81) and Maryland (see precincts in Pikesville, B’more Co.) will do so in enough numbers here to tamp down Obama’s expected margin of victory, neutralizing Obama’s Rendell 2002-inspired strategy.

Coal Country: Molly Maguires Sympathy Never Spiked Labor's Vote

Republicans are talking up pickup possibilities in PA11, which would be quite a coup given the Dems' long hold on the seat and the bleak outlook for the House GOP this fall.

More on this race to come, but when researching this CD, the Almanac of American Politics' noted that this Pennsylvania Coal Region's "honest jobs with long hours, modest pay, poor working conditions and high death rates" are "facts of life that made the violently pro-union Molly Maguires popular here." Wikipedia's (albeit never quite authoritative) entry on the "Mollies" includes a map (above) of Coal Region counties, noting their influence here.

PA11 doesn't quite overlap with these five counties - Lackawanna, Luzerne, Columbia, Schuylkill, Carbon, and Northumberland - but it takes in parts or all of three of these counties (Shuylkill falls in PA11 and Northumberland in PA17).

Curiously, for a region with a tradition of sometimes violent labor unrest, none of these counties have returned a notable left wing vote. Only in Northumberland did Eugene Debs' crack double digits and push incumbent Republican president Wm. Howard Taft into fourth place in 1912, his Socialist Party's banner year. And that year, Teddy Roosevelt failed to carry the whole region even as when he captured the Keystone State's electoral votes. Only in Luzerne did LaFollette outperform his statewide average in '24. Luzerne and Luckawanna were two rare mid-Penn. counties to go vote Dem in 2004, and generally have Democratic traditions, but the other three have voted GOP for the most part, excepting '64 and FDR's reign, though Columbia voted Dem during around the turn of the century.

For a socially conservative, labor-heavy white working class region, George Wallace's populist appeal fell flat in Coal Region in '68, with just around 5% in this area, unlike the Philly and Pittsburgh areas where he racked up more impressive numbers in similar prectincts.

More evidence of the region's social conservatism and the apparent ability of the coal companies to suppress labor's electoral success here: the Prohibition Party outvoted the various Socialist and labor parties in Coal Region during their 1890's and 1900's heyday.