I found this post at Billy Penn, a group blog about Philadelphia, on what happened in the 2016 election in Pennsylvania very interesting:
For the first time since 1988, Pennsylvania has elected a Republican presidential candidate despite a Democratic voter registration advantage of nearly a million people. With more than 99 percent of returns in, Trump has carried the state by about a percentage point and more than 60,000 votes.
Why? There are a few reasons — the main one being that the places in Pennsylvania that have historically mattered just didn’t this year. The Philadelphia suburbs were not the difference-maker. Instead, it was Trump’s utter clean-up in southwest Pennsylvania and his ability to flip several counties that went blue in 2012.
I can’t help but wonder whether we’re going to be shocked at the results of the 2020 decennial census.
I noted with keen interest that the GOP has broken the Democratic supermajority in the Illinois House. Any comments on that? A portent?
You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
For the last year and a half Mike Madigan and his minions have blamed the state’s budget impasse solely on the state’s Republican governor. The implication is that only the governor has any responsibility to budge.
The Democrats in the Illinois legislature could have enacted a budget any time they cared to. They didn’t care to because that would mean they’d need to take the blame.
More Illinois voters figured that out.
The consensus among Illinois pols seems to be that when you combine Trump’s victory with Rauner’s putting money into some Illinois House races it adds up to Republicans breaking the supermajority.
If you will recall, I predicted Trump would win. No one in the area was excited about Clinton. Maybe someone in the NYTimes was really writing that she was flawless, I don’t know, but not in PA. And in my area, spreading more as you went west and north, there were tons of true Trump believers. Also lots of people who were just mad. (From my POV both meanings of that word apply, but you still get the same result.)
Steve
I remember reading this lengthy analysis of
Why Trump Can Win Pennsylvania in July, which argued that Pennsylvania had actually been trending Republican over the last few election cycles. He argued essentially that Trump could win if he appealed to blue-collar Democrats in the Scranton area without alienating Pittsburgh area suburbanites. A lot of the details escape me, but he didn’t foresee Trump winning Eerie County.