Almanac Home Browse By State Browse By Name State of Pennsylvania Gov. Ridge (R) Sen. Specter (R) Sen. Santorum (R) Rep. Brady (D-01) Rep. Fattah (D-02) Rep. Borski (D-03) Rep. Klink (D-04) Rep. Peterson (R-05) Rep. Holden (D-06) Rep. Weldon (R-07) Rep. Greenwood (R-08) Rep. Shuster (R-09) Rep. McDade (R-10) Rep. Kanjorski (D-11) Rep. Murtha (D-12) Rep. Fox (R-13) Rep. Coyne (D-14) Rep. McHale (D-15) Rep. Pitts (R-16) Rep. Gekas (R-17) Rep. Doyle (D-18) Rep. Goodling (R-19) Rep. Mascara (D-20) Rep. English (R-21)

Pennsylvania started off as the center of America: Philadelphia was the 13 colonies' largest city when it hosted the Continental Congress in 1776 and the Constitutional Convention in 1787. This was one of the newer colonies, founded 50 years after Massachusetts and 70 years after Virginia. Under the benevolent rule of the early Penns and with its Quaker traditions, Pennsylvania soon became the major settlement in the Middle Colonies: its tolerance attracted Englishmen of all religious sects and thousands of Germans as well. The rich green farmlands west to the first Appalachian chain filled rapidly. Bordermen from Scotland, Yorkshire and Northern Ireland crossed the corduroy-like ridges and settled the mountainous interior where General Braddock had been beaten by the French and Indians not long before, and where a decade later George Washington would again lead troops when the Whiskey Rebellion flared up. On the banks of a wide estuary, with its thriving commerce and rich hinterland, Philadelphia was, after London and Dublin, the largest Georgian city in the late 18th Century. It seemed destined to be the London of America, the metropolis of government and commerce and culture.

But Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania, failed to hold the central position the Founders had expected. The nation's capital was put on the Potomac rather than the Delaware as part of a political deal, and the Erie Canal and the water-level railroad from the Hudson to Lake Erie channeled trade away from Philadelphia to New York. And Philadelphia lost its chance to be the nation's financial capital when Andrew Jackson in righteous rage vetoed the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States. Philadelphia's Quaker tradition, tolerant of diversity and indifferent to others' behavior, was overshadowed in intellectual life by New England's Puritan tradition, angrily intolerant and ready to use the state to impose cultural values from abolitionism to prohibition. In antebellum America, Philadelphia was eclipsed by Washington in government, New York in commerce and Boston in education and literature.

Instead, Pennsylvania became America's energy and heavy industry capital. The key was coal. Northeast Pennsylvania was the nation's primary source of anthracite, the hard coal used for home heating, and western Pennsylvania was laced with bituminous coal, the soft coal used in steel production. Connected with Philadelphia by the Pennsylvania Railroad, Pittsburgh, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join to become the Ohio, was the center of the nation's steel industry by 1890. Immigrants poured in from Europe and from the surrounding hills to work in the mines and factories there. Pittsburgh became synonymous with industrial prosperity, the inspiration behind the civic pride that celebrated chuffing smokestacks. In 1900, Pennsylvania was the nation's second-largest state and growing rapidly. But the boom ended conclusively with the Depression of the 1930s, and in parts of Pennsylvania it has never returned. After World War II, both home heating and industry switched away from coal. John L. Lewis's United Mine Workers traded higher pay and benefits for payroll cuts. Even when coal prices boomed in the 1970s, strip mining created relatively few new jobs. Similarly, Pennsylvania steel ceased to be a growth industry three decades ago, when big company management made bad technological decisions and agreed to big wage and benefit increases with the mistaken confidence they could pass the costs along. Big steel got import quotas in 1969 -- Pennsylvania has been the nation's most protectionist state since the first Bessemer converter furnaces were lit -- but they didn't create jobs. By the time quotas lapsed in the 1990s, the industry had modernized, but mostly in huge new Indiana mills and small mini-mills scattered far from the factories that once lined the Monongahela.

The result has been the slowest population growth in the nation: there were 9.5 million Pennsylvanians in 1930, 12.0 million in 1996. Pennsylvania cast 36 electoral votes for Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and 23 for Bill Clinton in 1996; it had as many congressmen (30) as California in 1960, but now has 21 while California has 52. People growing up here are as likely to leave the state as stay, and few out-of-staters move in. Pennsylvania looks and sounds today more like it did in the 1940s than any other major state. The 1980s boom did produce some new Pennsylvania growth in southeast Pennsylvania, around Philadelphia, which partook of the upscale boom that was more spectacular up and down the East Coast. Center City Philadelphia sprouted new office towers, the edge city around King of Prussia blossomed, and pharmaceutical and biotech jobs replaced those of the Fairless steel plant. Outlet stores proliferated around Reading and Lancaster, and new jobs sprung up in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. In the 1990s there has been some growth in the west, radiating outward from Pittsburgh, with the growth of a high-tech, research-oriented economy.

Although Pennsylvania started off as our center of government, government has not been central to Pennsylvania for most of its history. During the Civil War, Pennsylvania was the site of the northernmost advance of the Confederate Army -- Carlisle, just north of Gettysburg -- and for generations after was the most Republican of the large states -- for Lincoln and the Union, for the steel industry and the high tariff. Its malodorous Republican machines built parties which were not representative of one ethnic segment but had a place for just about everyone: in Philadelphia's huge City Hall, a knockoff of Paris' Hotel de Ville; in Pittsburgh's massive, Roman-columned City-County Building; in Harrisburg's grandiose Capitol with its rotunda modeled after St. Peter's in Rome and staircase modeled after the Paris Opera. In 1932, Pennsylvania was the only big state that stuck with Herbert Hoover and voted against Franklin Roosevelt. But the New Deal, John L. Lewis's United Mine Workers and the CIO industrial union movement, and a series of bloody strikes made industrial Pennsylvania almost as Democratic in the 1930s and 1940s as it had been Republican from the 1860s to the 1920s. Even then, parts of Pennsylvania not heavy with big steel factories and coal mines -- the northern tier of counties along the New York border, the central part of the state around the Welsh railroad town of Altoona, and the Pennsylvania Dutch country around Lancaster -- an area referred to by political consultants as the T -- remained the strongest Republican voting bloc in the East. Philadelphia became a mostly Democratic city, but in the suburban counties the antique Republican machines stayed in control. The result was a key marginal state in presidential elections from the 1950s to the 1980s, and not always a state that moved in one direction.

In the 1980s, prosperous eastern Pennsylvania trended Republican and ailing western Pennsylvania trended Democratic. The east gave decisive margins to Ronald Reagan and George Bush while greater Pittsburgh produced some of the nation's highest percentages for Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. Both regions have reversed direction in the 1990s. The fall in suburban real estate values in the early 1990s helped produce an upset Senate win for Democrat Harris Wofford in 1991, when he ran even in the usually Republican Philadelphia suburbs; it was Wofford's campaign which put the healthcare issue on the national agenda. Metro Philadelphia, which voted only 50%-49% for Michael Dukakis in 1988, gave Bill Clinton a 51%-33% margin in 1992 and an even more impressive 58%-33% in 1996. Western Pennsylvania meanwhile dabbled with Perot populism and was repelled by Clinton's cultural liberalism. This was the Pennsylvania which supported Democratic Governor (1986-94) Bob Casey's abortion restrictions. In 1988 Dukakis carried metro Pittsburgh 59%-40%, and Pennsylvania west of the first mountain ridge 51%-48%. Bill Clinton carried this western region only 45%-35% in 1992, with 20% for Perot, and by only 51%-39% in 1996.

Who is coming out ahead from these changes? The Republicans -- but not by much. Pennsylvania's two very different Republican senators both won their most recent election with 49% of the vote. Governor Tom Ridge was elected in 1994 with even less, 45%, because an anti-abortion candidate took 13% of the vote. That could be available to an anti-abortion Casey Democrat next time, indeed to Bob Casey, Jr., son of the former governor and now state auditor. Republicans have majorities in both houses of the state legislature, but only a paper-thin margin in the House, up from 102-101 in 1994 to 104-99 in 1996. In the 1996 presidential race, Pennsylvania's percentages for each candidate were very close to the national average. But Democrats here tend to be culturally more conservative than those in most states and Republicans sometimes culturally more liberal; the balance is more like the America of the 1950s than the America of the 1990s, and strategies that work nationally can be counterproductive here. If Pennsylvania is a bellwether, it strikes an atypical note.

Presidential politics. Pennsylvania, with its 23 electoral votes, has been a swing state in every close presidential election, and even some that were not close; it voted near the national average in 1996. However, it is not typical of the country. With its older, deeply-rooted population, it tends to be culturally conservative; with its long-dying blue-collar communities, it tends to be economically more liberal -- though both tendencies are being muted with time.

Pennsylvania's late April presidential primary has not been crucial since 1976, when Jimmy Carter clinched the Democratic nomination here by beating Henry Jackson and Morris Udall. Bill Clinton and Bob Dole easily won the unremarkable 1996 primaries.

Congressional districting. Pennsylvania lost three congressional districts in the 1950 Census and two in each of the following four decades, reducing its delegation to 21. Control of redistricting was split between the parties, but the new plan seemed to eliminate two Republican seats. In fact, anticipations here, as in many other states, were confounded as both parties in 1992 and 1994 lost seats they were expected to win and won some they seemed sure to lose. But enough veteran Republicans have survived in safe seats so the state has four committee chairmen and would have a fifth had not one incumbent been removed from his post because of a criminal indictment.

The People: Est. Pop. 1996: 12,056,000; Pop. 1990: 11,881,643, up 1.5% 1990-1996. 4.5% of U.S. total, 5th largest; 31% rural. Median age: 36.9 years. 16% 65 years and over. 87.7% White, 9% Black, 1.1% Asian, 2% Hispanic origin. Households: 55.7% married couple families; 25% married couple fams. w. children; 36% college educ.; median household income: $29,069; per capita income: $14,068; 70.6% owner occupied housing; median house value: $69,700; median monthly rent: $322. 5.3% Unemployment. 1996 Voting age pop.: 9,197,000. 1996 Turnout: 4,506,118; 49% of VAP. Registered voters (1996): 6,805,612; 3,336,933 D (49%), 2,910,614 R (43%), 558,065 unaffiliated and minor parties (8%).

Political Lineup: Governor, Tom Ridge (R); Lt. Gov., Mark Schwieker (R); Secy. of Commonwealth, Yvette Kane (R); Atty. Gen., D. Michael Fisher (R); Treasurer, Barbara Hafer (R); Auditor General, Robert P. Casey Jr. (D). State Senate, 50 (20 D and 30 R); Senate President, Mark Schwieker (R); State House, 203 (99 D and 104 R); House Speaker, Matthew J. Ryan (R). Senators, Arlen Specter (R) and Rick Santorum (R). Representatives, 21 (11 D and 10 R).

Elections Division: 717-787-5280.

Filing Deadline for U.S. Congress: March 10, 1998.

1996 Presidential Vote Clinton (D) 2,215,819 (49%) Dole (R) 1,801,169 (40%) Perot (I) 430,984 (10%)

1992 Presidential Vote Clinton (D) 2,239,164 (45%) Bush (R) 1,791,841 (36%) Perot (I) 902,667 (18%)

1996 Republican Presidential Primary
Dole (R)	435,031	(64%)
Buchanan (R)	123,011	(18%)
Forbes (R)	55,018	(8%)
Keyes (R)	40,025	(6%)
Lugar(R)	31,119	(5%)

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