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Why Greensburg turned red in 2021

by Salena Zito, National Political Reporter 

 

January 19, 2022 07:22 AM

GREENSBURG, Pennsylvania — For the first time in Westmoreland County history, no Democrat was elected to a countywide office seat in the November 2021 off-year elections.

Not only did Republicans sweep all of the row office races here, they also won the district attorney and coroner races, ousting longtime officeholders that many in the community respected.

“They won a statewide Supreme Court seat and other judicial races, but they also won seats outside of the more conservative west in the Philadelphia suburbs in county government and for township supervisors, seats they had lost during the Trump years,” said G. Terry Madonna, a political science professor at Millersville University and a frequent commentator on Pennsylvania politics.

It turns out this wasn’t an outlier. A full year's look by Gallup at political preferences in 2021 shows that they have undergone a dramatic shift away from the Democratic Party. Whereas a 9 percentage-point plurality perceived themselves as Democratic one year ago, Republicans had surged to a 5-point edge by the fourth quarter of 2021.

Both the 9-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter and the 5-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter are among the largest Gallup has measured for each party in any quarter since it began regularly measuring party identification and leaning in 1991.

Youngstown State University professor Paul Sracic said it is pretty unprecedented for a party to fall this far from grace in just one year. “This big party shift just doesn’t ever happen, and these numbers are just stunning.”

Sracic speculates the numbers just have to make Democratic strategists sick to the stomach. “It is hard to think of a worse-case scenario,” he said.

The former two-time Fulbright Scholar, an expert in modern American populism, said it is also fascinating that these voters are moving away from Democrats despite a tremendous amount of cultural pressure. “And that is an important nuance to include at looking at this historic shift.”

Sracic said the political and cultural messages from the Democratic Party are more often than not echoed by the entities that have outsize power in our culture, “such as Big Tech, academia, corporations, national sports organizations, the national news media, unions, and Hollywood. And these voters aren’t just pushing back from that pressure, they are rejecting it.”

These results are based on aggregated data from all U.S. Gallup telephone surveys in 2021, which included interviews with more than 12,000 randomly sampled U.S. adults. It is the same survey I watched carefully in 2016 in trying to calculate whether anecdotal reporting was reflected in the data available during that year’s presidential election.

These voters didn’t tell many how they were voting the 2016 cycle or in 2020 because of the cultural pressure that came from all of the entities Sracic mentioned. Former President Donald Trump won in 2016 in part because few saw it coming. He won more votes than anyone expected in 2020 for the same reason. Now, however, with him off the national stage, voters are less timid about saying how they feel.

“There is an underlying anger for a lot of voters that they can't say things that are considered taboo among the media and the ruling class, that they aren’t allowed to debate things like mandates, school choice, crime, etc. because when they do, a label is attached to them,” he said. "And I think what you are seeing is that breakthrough in this survey."

There are people skeptical of both sides, often referred to as swing voters, who were not in love with Republicans or Democrats but were willing to give Democrats a chance last year. When the Democrats were given that chance, they answered to a group of liberals, and that is forcing both centrist Democrats and swing voters to pick Republicans instead.

The other problem for Democrats in this survey that many folks won't pick up on is that it is not all ideologically driven. A large part of this is about simple competency.

A lot of people didn’t like Trump because they believed he was not competent — in particular on COVID. But in his place, they got a president in Joe Biden who has proven to be incompetent and negligent on COVID.

His COVID message is a muddled mess. The administration can't provide the promised at-home tests. They couldn't get our people out of Afghanistan safely. They said they wanted people to go back to school, but the schools are closing again.

Biden has not just been incompetent on these issues but outright negligent. And he is dragging his party down with him.

As much as we love to believe that we are either Left or Right in this country, many people do not view the world so ideologically. They don't like either party. But they do insist on competence.

For Biden to drag himself and his party out of this historic hole, he has to change his tack. It is probably too late to go back to his election promises of an ideologically moderate, relentlessly competent administration. Neither he, nor the staff who huddle around him, nor the Democratic leadership have shown any willingness to govern that way.

In their little world, they are doing just fine — except their world is becoming too small to form an electoral majority.

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