Pennsylvania is getting the Blues, electorally, and so is the Republican Party.

That’s the color blue as in the maps that show whether states and counties have more registered Democrats (blue) or Republicans (red).

As recently as 2002, the GOP held the governor’s office, two of three statewide row offices, and both U. S. Senate seats, a majority of the U.S House seats in the state, both chambers of the Legislature, and had won a majority on the state Supreme Court by winning three straight races for that bench.

Less than six years later, Democrats won the last three races for Supreme Court, one of the two U.S. Senate seats, and majorities in the U.S. House and state House. Part of that, of course, is the effect of having a Democratic governor after an eight-year hiatus. But even David L. Cohen, Gov. Ed Rendell’s closest advisor and ally, says it is much more than Rendell. “The state is becoming more Democratic and that is part of the national trend, not just here,” said Cohen, Rendell’s former top aide as mayor and now a top executive at Comcast in Philadelphia.

That is why counties like Montgomery in suburban Philadelphia and even Dauphin County, the seat of the state Capitol, both Republican since the Civil War, now have more registered Democrats than Republicans.

That is why both of those counties, each a former crown jewel in any GOP statewide strategy, now send Democrats to Congress, something that was unusual even in Montgomery 20 years ago and rare in Dauphin, occurring only when Dauphin was the victim of an extreme gerrymander in the 1970s so that U.S. Rep. Allen Ertel, D-Williamsport, represented some of it.

That is why U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., made two major trips to Dauphin in the primary election, and U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., made three.

That is why U.S. Rep. Tim Holden, D-Schuylkill, won Dauphin, even as President Bush did the same in 2004.

The facts are simple and they show Pennsylvanians voting with their feet: In 1998, when Gov. Tom Ridge and U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter won landslide re-elections, against Democrats who fell short of even reaching 35 percent totals, the state had 3.5 million Democrats and 3.1 million Republicans – not that great a gap.

As of the latest figures, the department of state lists 4.2 million Democrats and 3.2 million Republicans – a one million registration gap. The best guess of political experts is that there are really about 3.9 million Democrats and 3 million Republicans, because lots of voters are double counted in the official statistics.

So in the last decade, what happened to double the gap between Democratic and Republican registration?

And to make some of those registered Democrats, who deserted their party with regularity in the 1990s, start voting Democratic again in Erie and Allegheny and even Dauphin and Centre.

The short answer came up noticeably during a primary event in eastern Pennsylvania, when an Obama supporter asked a liberal Democratic crowd who was most responsible for the huge registration gains Democrats were making in 2008 all over the state, trying to elicit the answer “Obama.”

But instead a woman yelled out “George W. Bush” and the crowd hooted and booed in agreement in condemnation of the president.

Most Pennsylvanians’ disgust with the incumbent president is widely evident in the polls. Bush’s popularity polls in the state are so bad he doesn’t do GOP rallies here anymore, just fund-raising events in private homes away from prying eyes and the media. His stats, in the low 20s, are barely above Nixon’s poll ratings here before Nixon resigned.

Plus, as parties tend to do when they have been in the minority too long, the Democrats have unified while the Republicans tend to fight each other in public. Gov. Ed Rendell, the hero of eastern social liberals, has played a big role in getting conservative Democrats, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey and Auditor General Jack Wagner, elected and clearing primary fields for them. He did that even though Casey and Wagner ran as a team against him for governor and lieutenant governor.

Casey has used his credibility with conservative and rural Democrats to help Barack Obama this year and John Kerry, do well in the state in 2004.

Combine that with a Democratic primary that broke the state primary turnout record by more than 50 percent (2.3 million in 2008, crushing the previous record of 1.54 million Democrats voting) and suddenly you have Republicans registering Democratic and voting Democratic.

Moderate Republicans like Specter have weathered this tide well, but conservatives in middle-class districts the GOP hoped were permanently realigned to Republicanism, like Congress folks Melissa Hart in suburban Pittsburgh Beaver and Mike Fitzpatrick in Bucks, were defeated and Hart is rated at little or no chance to win this time out as she attempts a rematch to win back her seat.

In Dauphin County, the Democrats have 81,489 registrants to the 81,340 of the GOP, a razor-think margin that is more of a moral victory. But to get there, since 2004, the Democrats added nearly 21,000 new voters and party-switchers compared to 2,160 for the GOP.

Statewide, the Obama and Clinton campaigns switched more than 200,000 GOP and independent voters to the Democratic rolls. The Republican State Committee, stunned and poleaxed by this registration tsunami, has announced plans to switch those voters back, systematically, by personal visits, mail and phone calls in counties like Dauphin, Cumberland and York, all considered bedrock GOP counties by Karl Rove in 2004.

Their official mantra has been that the heated and long Democratic primary made the registration numbers look skewed and they will get their voters back.

But even after the primary, the trend of voters reregistering Democratic remains the same, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported this week:

In the two months since Pennsylvania's April 22 primary, Democrats have added more voters than Republicans in all but five of the state's 67 counties and increased their statewide lead by 40,566 voters by the end of last week, the Inquirer reported. Republicans have lost nearly 1,500 registered voters since the primary.

In Montgomery County, the newspaper reported, the Democratic 10,001-voter registration edge grew since the primary by 3,783 voters.

County Commissioner Joe Hoeffel told the newspaper: "It should humble some of the braggarts of the Republican Party and confirm that the county is changing."

A similar trend was seen in Bucks County, where the newly-minted 3,700-registrant lead by Democrats swelled to 6,620.

And long-time GOP state and national power broker Harry Fawkes of Bucks County, one of the state's most powerful county chairmen, and a 36-year veteran in that post, said his party hasn't even started to try to recapture those lost Republicans on the registration rolls.

"We haven't pushed yet to send out letters and talk to them," Fawkes told the Inquirer. "A lot of them, we're hoping, will come back. I can't predict it. We're going to try to do it."

Allegheny County, home to the city of Pittsburgh, was also bad news for the GOP, as Democrats increased their registration lead there by 4,016 voters since the primary.

Chris Borick, associate professor of political science at Muhlenberg College, told The Patriot-News of Harrisburg that voters switching allegiances to the Democratic Party is part of a long-term trend in Pennsylvania. "It's not just an artifact from the spring," he said.

The pro-Democratic party trend is "much more systematic" than the stories about it being driven by the Democratic Primary suggest, Borick said, adding that GOP bastions in the Philadelphia suburbs -Bucks and Montgomery now have growing Democratic registration edges.

This will affect lots of elections. For example, Sen. Jeffrey Piccola, R-Dauphin, faces the first potentially strong fall challenge in his 30-plus years in the Legislature from Democrat Judy Hirsh, while Sen. Andy Dinniman, D-Chester, in the past would have been a one-term wonder if that, in once rock-solid Republican Chester County.

Back as recently as 2004, Chester County Republican registrants out-numbered Democrats and independents combined by a margin of 53-47 percent. Nowadays, Democrats and independents outnumber GOP registrants 51-49. That is why some analysts wonder if GOP Presidential candidate John McCain will concede Pennsylvania in this election and fight elsewhere. McCain’s crew here is essentially the political brain trust of former Gov. Tom Ridge. Its members say they will fight and win in the fall for McCain, regardless of the east, by winning the so-called “Reagan Democrats,” who in the past voted for Ridge and Rick Santorum in the southwest and northeast parts of the state. “We beat a 440,000 vote margin in Pennsylvania when Tom was in,” said one Ridge ally. “Now it is just a steeper hill.”

And it is steeper than they might think. The last GOP presidential candidate to win this state was President George W. Bush in 1988. Even while Ridge was helping his party win every other office in sight, the GOP lost the presidential races here to Bill Clinton twice, which can be excused, then to Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.

And Kerry ought to have been as beatable as Mike Dukakis was to Bush Sr. And people forget: Dukakis got 48 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania. And that was when the GOP registration gap was half of what it is now, and many of the Democrats were Democrats in name only – voting Republican regardless of their Democratic registration.

Go back to Insider Info

Beg and Borrow
Rendell, Legislature closer to budget agreement, but devil is in the details

Years from now, the 2008-2009 state budget will likely be known as “The Borrowing Budget.”

While the budget itself will likely rise only by roughly the rate of inflation, the overall package will raise state borrowing by about $2.6 billion.

It breaks down to about $750 million for infrastructure projects, $250 million for other capital projects, $850 million or so for alternate energy and rate abatement measures, and another $800 million or so for water, bridges, dams and other infrastructure projects.

Republicans would like a lower global borrowing number, but are being cagey so far about how far they are willing to go above $2 billion in borrowing.

Not that next year’s state-spending plan won’t hike spending. Senate GOP leaders signaled publicly Friday that they would support an overall spending hike somewhere around 4 percent or the rate of inflation, which is running a few ticks above 4 percent.

As this is being written the state budget is still being hammered into shape in behind-the-scene negotiations. So circumstances might change between the time readers see this and lawmakers act on the spending plan.

In real dollars, the spending hike being discussed is a little more than $1.1 billion from the $27 billion-plus current year spending plan.

Since Gov. Ed Rendell asked for an increase of $1.2 billion, that makes the negotiations sound more productive than they have been.

As the Senate GOP, House Democrats and Rendell edge closer to a global spending number, major arguments are unresolved about how to spend that increased appropriation, about $500 million worth of those arguments. Rendell wants that money for various programs.

By contrast, the Senate GOP wants to use those funds to increase business tax cuts, pay $250 million in this year’s bills that Rendell wants to pay out of next year’s budget, and they have their pet programs they have to put back into the budget.

Then there is the debate over whether the state should tap into the Rainy Day budgetary reserve fund. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dwight Evans, D-Philadelphia, and Sen. Vince Fumo, D-Philadelphia, are leading the push for that, while House and Senate Republicans have firmly said no.

“The clouds are out but it isn't raining yet,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Gib Armstrong, R-Lancaster, offering a metaphor for the Republicans’ position.

On education funding, while lawmakers are saying Rendell will get his roughly $300 million increase for K-12 basic education and likely get to keep funding his other initiatives, which cost another $600 million a year, they want to thwart him on two other issues: his plan to write a new education funding formula that leaves 101 of the 501 school districts with minimal increases for six years, and his planned six-year, $2.6 billion education funding equity rollout plan.

Unhappy about the legislative assumption that Rendell will lose the two most important of his three education funding battles – remember, this is a governor who always will take less this year for a lot more in years two and three – bitterness has begun to show in budget talks, especially around a welfare savings proposal.

A group of Rendell allies put together a spreadsheet, the Internet news service Capitolwire reported, showing that House Republicans and Senate Republicans had each gotten about $250,000 in campaign contributions from 14 big pharmaceutical companies since the beginning of 2005.

That raised the specter of accusations that the Legislature had rejected a plan to have the state handle pharmaceutical reimbursements for Medicaid Managed Care patients because of those donations, rankling some legislative leaders and lawmakers. Then Dan Fee, Rendell’s former campaign spokesman who now works for some groups backing the governor’s policy priorities left no doubt by telling Capitolwire: “There's one thing that never changes in Harrisburg: when common sense fails, there's usually campaign contributions involved. While lawmakers were angry about that, they got apoplectic when Rendell’s official spokesman, Chuck Ardo, alleged a different kind of corruption on their part, telling Capitolwire: "It's perplexing why members of the Legislature are so willing to increase welfare spending?”

“It's possible that some members are auditioning for post-government employment with the same companies who oppose the carve-out while financially supporting their position,” Ardo said. “Although they have given the public plenty of reason to distrust government we believe the people of Pennsylvania would rather have accountable public servants run the program than anonymous employees working toward greater profits for Big Pharma or the managed care industry."

The GOP contends the savings aren’t real, and as Senate GOP spokesman Erik Arneson said, they believe it is bad public policy that will endanger patients and “DPW cannot even inspect personal care homes and small day care centers in a timely manner – why would we think that they can properly manage this?”

The point here is not the policy dispute. The GOP and a majority of legislative Democrats have defeated this plan the last two years and will do so again. The significance is that Fee and Ardo attacked legislators of both parties as essentially corrupted on this issue because of campaign contributions just days before a budget agreement.

Which shows some real anger seething in the Rendell camp, the kind of anger that could delay the emerging budget deal.

Which is a big deal, because in budget terms the remaining questions seem very solvable:

They are, essentially:

– Should the state borrowing $2.2 billion or $2.6 billion?

– Should the state spend $28.1 billion, $28.3 billion or $28.5 billion this year?

-- Will Senate Republicans agree to let Rendell and legislative Democrats tap into the Rainy Day Fund for up to $375 million of the $875 million in that fund for when budgets turn bad?

-- How many hundreds of millions of dollars in this year’s bills should be shoved off to next year?

-- How much in next year’s bills should they now plan to pay off in the following budget year?

-- How much of the $250 million legislative surplus will be plowed into this year's budget?

Those are all negotiable matters, even in this administration, where governor-Senate GOP trust is quite low, if almost non-existent.

But after the Senate GOP won the brand new power to name half of the state appeals court judicial nominees, a precedent-setting move – and did that after they scuttled the Supreme Court nomination of Rendell pal and Commonwealth Court Judge James Gardner Colins.

Add that on top of the name-calling over the welfare spending cut plan, the question is: Does Rendell want a negotiated agreement where he gives up not only Colins and his health care plan and two-thirds of his education plan, to get more borrowing? Or is he trying to pick a fight and create a crisis where he can get more and make the Legislature look bad?

And, of course, this is Ed Rendell, for whom every budget and issue is a high-wire act: lots of up side, lots of risk. Stay tuned!