Inside the Ultimate Swing State
Inside the Ultimate Swing State
It's going to be a real fracking intense year
Welcome to the big Sunday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
It wasn’t a particularly encouraging week for anyone with any vested interest in living in a functioning American democracy. For the past year now, it’s felt as if we’ve been in the passenger seat of a car driving straight toward the edge of a cliff, sitting shotgun with a driver who is either blind to the danger ahead or maybe plans to duck and roll at the last second before the vehicle careens into the abyss.
If Democrats really fail to pass voting rights legislation, it will be a historic catastrophe most attributable to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s cynical and illogical refusal to change the filibuster. But the party’s overall inertia isn’t just their fault — it wasn’t Manchin or Sinema that killed prescription drug pricing reform, after all, and plenty of other members have opposed expanding a Supreme Court on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade and gun control laws.
Trying to stave off Republicans from installing a full reign of terror looks like it will be this year’s main political objective, but that doesn’t mean just funneling donations to Democratic candidates. This year Progressives Everywhere will be ramping up our efforts to support progressive candidates running in local elections and grassroots groups doing the long-term organizing that empowers working people, changes political terrain, and asks more of lawmakers.
There’s no single resource that lists local candidates or grassroots organizations, so we would love your suggestions — just comment, respond to this newsletter, or email me at Jordan @ ProgressivesEverywhere dot org. We plan on building that source this year.
Today’s newsletter kicks off a brand new series here that focuses on individual states and their most important issues, political dynamics, and upcoming elections. While politics are becoming much more national in scope, local issues are still key, so it’s essential to understand the dynamics of the most competitive states.
But first, thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors: Ricardo and Judith!
There’s no better place to begin our deep dive into key states than Pennsylvania, home to a split government and a vast cultural divide. Pennsylvania will host some of the most competitive and crucial elections up and down the ballot this year, and given the assortment of issues at play in the state, it will likely be a bellwether for the rest of the country.
Lay of the Land
As a perennial swing state that both touches the Atlantic Coast and serves as a gateway to the Midwest, Pennsylvania offers a true cross-section of modern American politics.
The progressive, multiracial left has organized its way to power and influence in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and some of the state’s smaller cities, while the conspiracy-happy far-right is tightening its grip on the PA GOP.
Many moderate suburbs flipped blue in 2018 but are still very much up for grabs, while the rural parts of Pennsylvania are solid red. Labor unions still hold significant sway, especially in parts of the state where mining and steel still provide jobs, while environmental issues tied to natural resources often make for strange political bedfellows.
Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf is entering his eighth and final year in office, having spent his entire tenure at odds with a gerrymandered-enhanced, Republican-controlled legislature that has stymied most of his agenda. The lack of action on his legislative priorities led Wolf to focus on executive actions, which in turn created more tension and animosity — especially during the first year of the pandemic.
Wolf was granted special emergency powers by the legislature at the outset of the Covid outbreak, but within a month’s time, Republican legislators joined the national GOP uprising against shutdowns, quarantines, mask requirements, and any other efforts to keep people safe. They voted to repeal his powers over and over again, and after being frustrated by vetoes and the state Supreme Court, they put the issue to voters in a ballot referendum that passed in the spring of 2021.
“Wolf's popularity has faded because of the pandemic,” says Stephen Caruso, a political reporter at the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. “He seemed to really be chastened by [the referendum passing]. He didn't campaign a whole lot against it, but he just seems a little quieter.”
Impact of Redistricting
To be determined! Wolf and the GOP legislature were never going to agree on new maps, so the shape of redistricting is now in the hands of the state court system.
This is nothing new for Pennsylvania. A Republican trifecta passed egregiously gerrymandered maps in 2011, including a congressional jigsaw puzzle that gave the GOP a 13-5 advantage in Congress. The State Supreme Court tossed that abomination in 2018 and drew a map that led to an evenly split Pennsylvania delegation, but the gerrymander in the state legislature endured.
Last week, the State Supreme Court declined to hear a lawsuit over the new Congressional maps, sending it back to a conservative court that sided with Donald Trump in one of his many desperate anti-voter lawsuits in fall 2020. It’s not the best sign, but maps proposed in December looked more promising and it would not be surprising if the State Supreme Court, with its 5-2 Democratic margin, eventually steps in. Pennsylvania is losing a Congressional seat this year, so one side is going to wind up unhappy either way.
The legislative maps are decided by a five-member commission that held its final two hearings on Friday and Saturday. With the state’s population growth concentrated in more urban areas, especially around Philadelphia, the commission’s proposed House map looks pretty fair, a stark reversal from the past decade, and has six more majority-minority districts than the current map.
The proposed Assembly map would force up to 12 GOP State House incumbents to face off against one another in primaries, and “just that number alone has really pissed off Republicans in Harrisburg,” Caruso says.
The State Senate map is also relatively even and gives Democrats a chance at flipping the chamber, though likely later this decade.
The Big Issues in 2022
It’s better to have gridlock than an eight-year procession of awful right-wing culture war policies and corporate giveaways, but the legislative gridlock has left Pennsylvania trailing behind on a number of important issues.
“There were 100 laws enacted last year, 19 of which were naming or renaming bridges and roads, the highest proportion in the last decade,” Caruso says. “There's just precious little that they get done.”
As a result, legislating and campaigning have been virtually one and the same since 2013.
Labor rights and economics
Labor unions still have significant political cache and enjoy broad public support in the Keystone State. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh traveled to Lancaster to give a pep talk to striking Kellogg’s workers in late October, shades of FDR’s labor secretary Frances Perkins’ visits to worker protests in the early New Deal era.
Elsewhere, steelworkers in Erie walked off the job for nearly three months before winning significant raises, and teachers in Scranton struck for nearly three weeks in order to win their first contract in four years, and transit workers in Philly are looking for a better deal, too.
“There were a lot of labor uprisings in 2021,” says Eric Rosso, the executive director of Pennsylvania Spotlight, a political accountability watchdog group. “Teachers took their voices to the Capitol. We have seen upticks in organizing all across Pennsylvania.. and people don't necessarily people don't view labor unions as partisan institutions, they are not Republican or Democratic.”
In fact, Donald Trump won 53% of the Pennsylvania union member vote in 2020, marking a historic shift. Democrats are trying hard to win back the working-class vote, and Republicans are doing their best to help them do so.
In November, Republicans introduced a broad package of anti-labor bills that would significantly weaken public-sector unions, including the end of automatic union dues deduction from paychecks and regular re-certification votes. They’ve proposed these things before, but this time, they included a carveout for police and firefighters unions, which, along with building and industrial trade unions, comprise much of the GOP’s union supporters.
Wolf would undoubtedly veto these bills, which represent the inverse of the policies he’s requesting from the legislature.
Pennsylvania’s minimum wage still matches the federal rate of $7.25 an hour despite Wolf’s regular appeals for a minimum wage increase throughout his governorship. In December, Wolf asked the legislature to raise that floor to $12 with a pathway to $15 an hour. Republicans rejected it outright. There may be some room for compromise, as two Republican legislators pitched a bill for a $10 minimum wage, but the rest of their caucus has yet to embrace it.
Wolf’s proposed raise is part of a larger package of pro-worker policies that also includes guaranteed paid leave, equal pay regardless of race or gender, higher safety standards, a ban on misclassifying regular employees as contractors, and fair hiring standards. It is very much a stake in the ground ahead of the midterm elections.
LGBTQ+ Protections
In 2018, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission added sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of groups specifically protected from discrimination in employment, housing, education, and public accommodations (think restaurants, movie theaters, and hotels).
They did not have the authority to extend protections against hate crimes to the LGBTQ+ community, and to this day, Republicans in the Capitol have refused to do so with legislation. They haven’t even so much as touched Democrats’ proposed Fairness Act, which would also ban discrimination in housing, conversion therapy, adoptions, and many other aspects of everyday life.
That’s left it to individual cities and towns to make it a hate crime to beat, murder, or discriminate against an LGBTQ+ person within their borders.
Thus far, 70 municipalities have passed the ordinances, but it’s a patchwork legal system that allows discrimination and violence to fester and even thrive in more red parts of the state. In fact, the new Republican city council majority in Chambersburg, a town in the central part of the state, is moving to repeal an anti-discrimination ordinance that Democrats passed just last year.
Expect this to become a sharply debated topic as the year wears on.
Education
The future of school funding in Pennsylvania is quite literally on trial. Back in 2014, a consortium of plaintiffs that included six urban school systems, parents, and civil rights groups launched a novel lawsuit challenging the state’s formula for funding schools. It was sent to trial in November, which has, in turn, led to a more public accounting of the deep inequities in the system.
Right now, funding is heavily reliant on local tax revenues, which creates a huge gap between the annual per-student budgets in cities and more affluent suburbs. Many other school districts have signed letters of support for the lawsuit, while the inherent racial and tax implications of the lawsuit make it a prime candidate to become a flashpoint in the upcoming election.
“In our school board races this year, we saw parents’ legitimate anxieties about keeping their children safe get exploited,” Rosso says. “It becomes a much more tangible issue at the school board level, because those affect everybody's day-to-day life in a way that the state mandates and federal mandates do not. Republicans exploited that and it was to mixed results in Pennsylvania last year, but it does not bode well as I look ahead to next year.”
Energy and the Environment
Fracking is unequivocally toxic for the planet and a vast majority of Pennsylvanians are in favor of more tightly regulating and eventually shutting down the natural gas drilling industry, but its grip on the western part of the state continues.
The region has a growing number of fracking sites and “cracker” plants, where natural gas obtained by fracking is refined and then turned into little pellets used in plastic products. Those factories have created far fewer new jobs than the tech and health care sectors, but it’s in a post-industrial region that needs help, so just about every prominent Democratic elected official has embraced their continued growth.
Conscious of the rapidly approaching environmental apocalypse, Democrats have stressed their support for mitigating the damage the plants cause with mostly useless policies like cap-and-trade. The real division isn’t over whether the fracking and cracker plants will continue to expand, but whether the state will help finance their construction or profit from their output with new taxes.
“Wolf has been pretty insistent that he wants a separate tax on natural gas producers,” Caruso says. “Right now they pay a tax just when they drill a well, but they don't pay a tax on the gas produced. So that means that if there were no new wells being drilled, but all the existing wells pump out hundreds of thousands of MBT units of gas, there's no tax on that.”
There aren’t many proposals less Republican-friendly than levying new taxes on powerful oil companies, so yet again, this is more of a campaign issue than anything else.
Races to Watch
Gov. Tom Wolf is termed out of office. Senator Pat Toomey is retiring. New Congressional and legislative districts are likely to create more intense primaries. And quixotic attempts by Republicans to overturn the 2020 election continue to wind through the court system, threatening to overshadow this year’s elections.
Governor’s Race
Democrats have all but cleared the field for two-term Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who has long been perceived as Wolf’s heir apparent.
He checks all the boxes on the typical Democratic candidate checklist, including fierce opposition to all things Trump (he sued over Trump’s travel ban), outspoken support of voting and abortion rights, and quiet support for legalizing marijuana. He made his name in part by exposing a vast network of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, an investigation that has led to years of further legal battles.
At the same time, Shapiro has worked to create a law & order image, leading to public and legal feuds with progressive Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner.
With no real primary competition, Republicans have been training their fire on Shapiro, trying to tie him to Wolf every chance they can get.
“It makes sense because Wolf’s numbers aren’t great — not in the toilet, but they're not great, so Shapiro is really trying to separate himself from Wolf,” Caruso says.
Wolf has been gung-ho about Pennsylvania joining the RGGI (colloquially known as Reggie), which is a compact amongst 11 states in the northeast that requires power plants to pay for the amount of carbon they emit. In the fall, Shapiro was very critical of RGGI in conversations with voters and reporters in western Pennsylvania, home to most of the state’s remaining operational coal-fired power plants, which put him at odds with Wolf.
His office ultimately approved the state’s entrance into the compact in December, explaining that as much as he disagreed with the policy, he did not have the power to block it. Predictably, Republicans blasted Shapiro for the decision and hope to make an issue out of it when they figure out their own gubernatorial nominee.
That just may take a while.
There are at least a dozen Republicans running for governor, and for the most part, they’ve all pledged fealty to Donald Trump and are amplifying his list of dishonest grievances. Leading the way are State Sen. Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania’s leading proponent of the Big Lie and a so-called “forensic” audit of the 2020 election who went to DC on January 6th but swears he didn’t storm the Capitol, and former Rep. Lou Barletta, a far-right firebrand who earned national attention for enacting an anti-immigrant ordinance when he was mayor of Hazleton.
Barletta was the Republicans’ 2018 candidate for Senate but got blown out by Democrat Bob Casey. Whether he’d been endorsed by Trump remains something of a controversial subject. Mastriano, though, is likely the most viable far-right candidate.
“He is doing real organizing, and the type of organizing that he's doing is scary, because it is actually bringing in people that have really dangerous views, the people who did participate in the insurrection,” Rosso says.
The next question is whether playing one of the many Trump cheerleaders will be the right call in a state that rejected him last year.
“I think appealing to Trump will get you a good floor in a primary, but I don't know if it gets you all the way,” Caruso says. “I mean, this is also the state that elected Pat Toomey, who has been one of the Republicans more skeptical of Trump in the Senate.”
Senate Race
The Republican primary here is nearly as crowded and filled with perhaps even more surreal. Trump endorsed former failed House candidate Sean Parnell last fall, but Parnell dropped out a few months later after his ex-wife alleged that he physically abused her and their children during a custody battle. It should be noted that Trump never rescinded his endorsement.
Parnell last week endorsed a new entrant into the race, hedge fund titan David McCormick, who lives in Connecticut but recently bought a house near Pittsburgh to satisfy residency requirements. He just so happened to have worked for the Carlyle Group, the hedge fund that used to be run by new Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, and most of Trump’s crew has quickly gotten behind him in hopes that he can disguise his extremism by wearing khakis and an open-collar button-down like Youngkin did in November.
His main rival right now? Dr. Oz, who has even less personal connection to Pennsylvania but just as much money to spend on commercials and casual clothing. The heart surgeon turned TV snake oil salesman has been running around the state in Carhartt gear, which has been pretty rich to see.
On the Democratic side, it’s largely a three-way race between Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, and Congressman Conor Lamb. Each would make history: Fetterman would be the first weed-loving giant to serve in the Senate, Kenyatta would be the Senate’s first Black gay member, and Lamb would be the first-ever Lego man to be a senator.
Fetterman, who was the mayor of Braddock and ran an unsuccessful Senate primary campaign in 2016, is the clear front-runner and leading fundraiser right now. Rosso, however, thinks that’s more a matter of name recognition than actual political popularity.
“If you were to actually look at Fetterman’s results when he ran for lieutenant governor and Senate last time, what he did not do was turn out people of color and the suburbs, which are really driving the democratic change here,” he says. “They actually voted for other candidates in his primary."
Kenyatta has the endorsement of the Working Families Party, which could help keep him competitive until the stretch run when people really start paying attention.
Not everyone is so down on Fetterman, of course, and he could appeal to the blue-collar white voters that the Democratic Party so desperately wants and needs to recapture. Plus, he’s not exactly a boring centrist on most policies, either, and has no problem blasting the Democratic holdouts in the US Senate.
Lamb is going to try to build his campaign in the suburbs but should have trouble keeping up with the momentum that the other two have already built. The Pennsylvania Democratic Party has been energized by progressive organizers in both the larger cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as well as more small to mid-sized cities such as Reading and Erie.
Other Races
Last year, progressives helped Ed Gainey become the first Black mayor in Pittsburgh history by providing the field work that led to his upset victory over incumbent Mayor Bill Peduto in the Democratic primary.
Now, western Pennsylvania progressives are lining up behind State Rep. Summer Lee, who is running for a modified version of the Congressional seat that Conor Lamb is exiting at the end of the year.
“Progressive insurgent candidates will challenge longtime incumbents now because there is the infrastructure that could support them,” Rosso says.
Municipal elections were held last year, while state legislative elections really depend on what happens in redistricting. More on that as the maps emerge.
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