HEIDI KAYDEN/UNSPLASH
Philadelphia, the largest city in Pennsylvania, is critical to Democratic hopes in the midterms.
This article appears in the June 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The fate of the Democratic Party’s national fortunes this year may well be decided in Pennsylvania. The state has been a bellwether for the last two presidential elections, which were decided by tiny margins—0.7 percentage points (for Trump) and 1.2 (for Biden), respectively. The governor’s race, state legislature, and a critical open Senate seat vacated by retiring Republican Pat Toomey are all up for grabs.
In the pre-Trump days, these midterm races would have been a lock for Republicans. The party that wins the presidency has almost always lost power at all levels of government in the succeeding midterm—and the exceptions come during highly unusual circumstances, like the Great Depression or immediately after 9/11.
On the surface, the signs have not looked good for Democrats. Pennsylvania’s Republicans have recently had a big advantage in new party registrations, and they are energized around Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Rank-and-file Democrats are demoralized about Joe Manchin blocking President Biden’s all-but-entire agenda, and Biden’s approval ratings are in bad shape.
But Trump also catalyzed a major demographic and regional realignment in Pennsylvania, and national politics is more unsettled than it’s been in years, especially thanks to a feral right-wing Supreme Court majority that appears to be on the verge of repealing Roe v. Wade. Democrats just might have a shot, if they can fix their lagging performance in Philadelphia and hold on to the suburbs, or even better their margins there by winning upscale Republican and independent women appalled at the prospect of outlawing abortion.
Let me first review recent Pennsylvania electoral history. In the 2012 election, Barack Obama ran a starkly populist campaign against a villainous Wall Street plutocrat (Mitt Romney). The result was a modest 5.2-point victory based on huge margins in the urban centers of Pittsburgh and (especially) Philadelphia, small victories in some wealthy suburbs, and small enough loss margins elsewhere to carry him over the line. Obama won 85 percent of the vote in Philadelphia County (which is coterminous with the city), but narrowly lost nearby suburban Chester County, and elsewhere lost by 10 to 30 points.
Four years later, Hillary Clinton ran a much less populist campaign, focused mainly on Trump’s unfitness for office. She won Chester County by a comfortable eight points—but slid to just 82 percent of the Philadelphia vote, got obliterated out in the hinterland by about 30 to 60 points, and lost the state.
The 2018 midterm was a great year for Democrats, but as a classic backlash election (where incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey won by more than 12 points) it is unlikely to provide much by way of lessons. Without either Trump to rile up liberals or a Republican base caught napping, it simply won’t be repeated.
This November, a narrow victory along the lines of what happened in 2020 is likely the best Democrats can hope for. That year, Biden ran a campaign that was something of a hybrid between Obama’s and Clinton’s. He assembled a broadly similar coalition to Clinton, except this time actually won a majority. He bested her vote total in both Montgomery County (a Philly suburb) and Allegheny County (home of Pittsburgh and most of its suburbs) by over 60,000 each. The rest of the Philly suburbs rounded out his best performances in vote terms.
Philadelphia will likely be the place where the statewide races are decided in 2022.
However, it would be wrong to pin Biden’s victory entirely on the suburbs. In terms of percentage increase in votes relative to Clinton, his best counties were a few semi-urban or rural ones like Pike, Potter, and Montour. Bigger hinterland counties like Cumberland, Butler, and Monroe where Biden did well added substantial numbers of votes to his total.
A major contributor to that victory was PA Stands Up, a melding of progressive organizations that was formed in early 2020. “Not only were we helping our neighbors figure out the all-new voting system … we were mobilizing people on issues, and using those issues to make sure that folks were participating in the 2020 presidential election, which also included some down-ballot races that were very important,” says Ashleigh Strange, director of narrative and communications for the organization. In concrete terms, PA Stands Up says it recruited over 8,000 volunteers who made 6,869,934 calls, sent 1,803,935 texts, and had 407,913 conversations with voters.
On the other hand, Biden’s biggest weak spot by far was Philadelphia. Where he decisively won the city’s suburbs and Pittsburgh by a wider margin than Clinton, he got just 3.4 percent more votes than Clinton in Philly (his lowest improvement in any county), and actually lost ground relative to Trump, with just 81 percent of Philly’s vote. Conversely, the city was Trump’s best county relative to 2016, with nearly 24,000 more votes, or 22 percent more than his prior total.
All this suggests that Philadelphia will likely be the place where the statewide races are decided in 2022. It’s the largest county in the state by a big margin, containing about 12 percent of the population, it is majority-nonwhite—41 percent Black and 15 percent Latino—and it appears to be up for grabs like no other similarly sized pot of votes in the state. If Republicans can turn out the Trumpy hinterland and continue to make headway among the nonwhite urban working class, as they did in 2020, then Democrats are toast. But if Democrats can hold on to their suburban and rural margins, or better them in the Philly suburbs, and revitalize their performance in the urban core, then they’ve got a fighting chance.
Local progressive organizers argue that there were two major factors behind Biden’s weak Philly performance: the pandemic, and Biden himself. “Part of our strength has been in door-to-door conversations, which we had to shift during the pandemic,” says Sergio Cea, an electoral organizer for Reclaim Philadelphia, an organization that emerged from Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign and has helped elect several progressive members of the city council and state legislature. It is also a chapter affiliate of PA Stands Up. “The Republican Party didn’t care about the impact of the virus when they were campaigning, they were doing door-to-door knocking.”
Even when Reclaim volunteers were talking with Philly voters, it was an uphill battle. “The other thing that we experienced was a lack of enthusiasm around Biden in general. We had to do a lot of work of moving people to more wholeheartedly support Biden, because he was so out of step with our priorities,” says Amanda McIllmurray, Reclaim’s co-founder and political director. They nevertheless put the work in, because the stakes were so high. “We did a monumental amount of organizing for someone who was not deeply aligned with us. I think those numbers would have been a lot worse had the progressive community not really stepped up for Biden.”
A potential problem with mobilizing the base is the ongoing fight between progressives and the Democratic Party establishment. Local party committees have endorsed five different conservative challengers against progressive incumbents—a highly unusual move. At least two of those challengers have been funded by Jeff Yass, a notorious right-wing billionaire. Yass has long supported Republican state senator and gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, who spent campaign money busing people to the January 6 putsch and attended it himself (Mastriano claims he didn’t enter the Capitol).
Similarly, as Alex Sammon has reported for the Prospect, in the Senate primary, moderately progressive John Fetterman (currently serving as lieutenant governor) faced blistering negative attacks from Rep. Conor Lamb—funded by the same hedge fund zillionaires who are backing Senate candidates on the Republican side. With Fetterman now the nominee, these attacks imperil Democrats’ chances in November.
In better news for Democrats’ chances (though not for the American people), the conservative movement has recently launched an all-out attack on reproductive freedom and LGBT rights that puts it on the wrong side of a supermajority of the American people. The draft version of an upcoming Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade, which is reliably supported by about 60 percent of Americans, could tilt the electoral balance toward the Democrats.
“As someone who is capable of bearing children, if I got pregnant today, I would have an abortion, and that’s the case for the majority of my friends and family,” says McIllmurray. “Even that—just connecting people with their personal stake and their personal stories, whether or not they’ve had an abortion or would consider to have an abortion, I think will be a really important piece of this story too.”
“I helped do field organizing in West Philadelphia for the gubernatorial candidate Tom Wolf [in 2018]. At the start of our canvasses we would ask all of the people that came out ‘what’s at stake for you in this election?’ Personally, for me, I would go to a story about how someone I care about and love almost died from an illegal abortion. I’m the son of Chilean immigrants where reproductive rights had not been legal for a long time,” says Cea. “It was something I would go to commonly four years ago, thinking that this is a grave threat that could happen—today we’re in a situation where it is happening.”
Sure enough, in a recent debate Mastriano said he favored banning all abortion at six weeks (which would mean virtually all of them), with no exception for rape, incest, or the life of the mother—a position supported by only about 15 percent of Pennsylvania residents.
These developments give state Democrats, particularly gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro, a powerful argument in their favor—especially in affluent suburbs, where this kind of gratuitous, atavistic cruelty drove voters away from Trump and where turnout is likely to be high. If Republicans take complete control of the state legislature and the governorship, they could well pass a total abortion ban, along with God knows what other deranged policy. A Governor Shapiro could at least block any such law.
Nevertheless, it would be helpful for Democrats to make a positive argument as well. One strong argument for Fetterman would be that he could add one more seat to Democrats’ Senate majority, meaning that the party would no longer need to keep both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on its side for every vote. A clear, explicit promise that should voters provide Democrats with control of the House and two more senators, they will pass a national legalization of abortion and gay marriage would fit the bill. Better still would be a credible plan to pass the Biden agenda on health care, family benefits, or climate change should Fetterman win—just as the promise to deliver $2,000 checks helped deliver two Senate seats to the Democrats in the Georgia runoffs in 2021.
Pennsylvania organizers aren’t waiting on such Democratic promises, though, to keep working as hard as they can. “We’re not stopping to rest on our laurels. As we are pushing Biden and other Democrats we elected … we’re making sure that they’re not going back to normal,” says Strange. “Normal, pre-COVID, pre-Trump left a lot of people in the dark.”
