Is Republican Party taking over Fayette County?
Have you heard the story of the political boss and the down-ballot candidate? The candidate was worried that all the money was going to the top of the ticket and none to him. At the top of the ticket was Franklin Roosevelt.
The political boss, a Democrat, explained: “Did you ever go down to the wharf to watch the ferry come in? Did you ever look down into the water at all those chewing gum wrappers and all the banana peels and the garbage? When the ferryboat comes into the wharf, automatically it pulls all the garbage in, too. The name of your ferry is Franklin Roosevelt. Stop worrying.”
For years in Fayette County to run successfully, say, for township supervisor or state legislator, practically all you had to do was to make sure you were nominated by the Democrats. Your ferry was the Democratic Party.
No more, as state Rep. Tim Mahoney’s defeat on Tuesday to a Republican upstart demonstrates. In former days (and before his district was pushed into Republican Somerset County), Democrat Mahoney would have been good for another five or more terms, or until he did something incredibly stupid or scandalous, or until he retired, on his own.
The era of Democratic dominance is over. What’s next?
As the county and the region cast more and more conservative and Republican votes, the issue for many down-ballot candidates becomes: is it time to jump the Democratic boat for the Republican one?
Presidential politics and more broadly national politics shape local politics. It’s always been thus. The Civil War spawned the era of Republican hegemony. The Great Depression ushered in the Democrats.
And just as Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and his re-election in 1936 solidified the county’s Democratic base for the next half century plus, recent presidential votes point the GOP way for years to come.
The trend at the presidential level is fairly obvious. In the election of 2008, Obama vs. McCain, the latter beat the former in Fayette County by a percentage point. Four years later, Mitt Romney topped President Obama 55-45.
The election on Tuesday saw Donald Trump decimate Hillary Clinton by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, 65-33.
More than 52,000 Election Day ballots were cast for president on Tuesday in Fayette County. The Democratic candidate received just 17,000 of them.
The Republican tide is evident elsewhere in western Pennsylvania. Washington County voters cast 56 percent of their votes for Republican Romney in 2012.
With practically the same number of people voting in 2016, Washington County went for Trump over Clinton by a margin of 60 to 33 percent.
Westmoreland County, which was the first among its neighbors to break from the party of Roosevelt, this all the way back in 2000, favored Romney over Obama four years ago 61-38. The Trump-Clinton split was 64-32.
In Greene County, President Obama captured 40 percent of the vote against Mitt Romney in 2012. Hillary plummeted to 28 percent this year.
It took an extraordinarily deft candidate to resist the Republican wave in the contiguous counties of southwestern Pennsylvania in 2016. Just about the only one to meet the challenge was state Rep. Pam Snyder of Greene County, who captured 53 percent of the vote against a Republican challenger in a contest that was spread over three counties, Greene, Fayette, and Washington.
Otherwise, the Democratic candidates for state legislature pretty much flamed out.
Bill Shuster, the incumbent Republican, clobbered the Democrat nominee for Congress in the 9th Congressional District by 27 percentage points, in a contest that was noteworthy because it was so odd: Democrat Art Halvorson, a spring write-in, was, in reality, a tea party Republican.
Passing himself off as a Democrat was a fairly dumb thing for Halvorson to do. His fall campaign made robocalls in which the candidate announced himself as the Democratic nominee for Congress. He would have done better to say, “I’m the tea party conservative in the race.”
As it was, “Democrat” Halvorson was swamped in Fayette County. (Apparently the only voters to get the word about Halvorson were in Westmoreland County, where he collected 2,072 votes against Shuster’s patriotic-sounding 1,776.)
In the congressional campaign, we may have had glimpse of the future of local politics. A total of 11 Democratic township supervisors endorsed Shuster.
For several of these, I’m guessing it wouldn’t be a big deal to take the next step and join the GOP. After all, election to local office hardly immunizes one against the contagion of a spreading political philosophy, no matter how ill-conceived or inconvenient it may be.
There is also the matter of political survival. Southern Democrats saved their political skins by converting to the party of Reagan in the ’80s and early 90s.
The same imperative just might now be at work locally, compelling not a few pols to exit the Democratic Party for the Republican Party.
For western Pennsylvania stalwarts of FDR, the 2016 returns had to be both bracing and frightening. How much lower the party is likely to sink is anyone’s guess.
That ferryboat Democrats were accustomed riding to shore? It looks like it’s headed out to sea.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.