PA Midterm Election Results: It’s Not That Deep

Everyone recognizes that politics is a swinging pendulum, but this time the pendulum was a wrecking ball, leaving Pennsylvania Republicans with considerably more rubble to clean up than a few roadside campaign signs.

Before we commission a dozen panels of “experts” and a 143-page Republican autopsy report, consider the explanation I frequently hear from my teenage daughter on a wide variety of topics: “it’s not that deep, Dad.” Voters were unhappy with Donald Trump, and Democrats offered an outlet to register the complaint. That’s as deep as it needed to be to win – and win big.

The check-engine light was flashing well before Election Day. Quinnipiac’s October Pennsylvania poll found that 60% of likely voters disapproved of Trump. Franklin & Marshall’s October survey found that 45% of registered voters felt financially worse off than a year earlier, with the economy the leading concern across partisan groups. Two years after being promised a more affordable future, many voters were still waiting for it to arrive.

I had spotted an unorthodox warning sign myself just days before the election while taking my kids trick-or-treating. Our central Pennsylvania neighborhood is one of the area’s top Halloween destinations, with houses close together and relatively affluent residents. You could fill a suitcase with treats. Yet less than an hour into the two-hour trick-or-treat window, we were encountering more upside-down bowls than bowls with candy still available.

I wouldn’t suggest replacing Gallup with a Halloween candy audit, but it was a marked change from years past. I wondered how many households had quietly decided that the candy budget was the candy budget, and when it was gone, it was gone. Empty bowls cannot forecast election results, but perhaps it can serve as an unconventional vibe-check of the general electorate.  

Republicans cannot dismiss that frustration as merely a national backlash. Pundits have spent years asking what will happen to the GOP after Trump; somehow, the party now must figure out its future with Trump still in office.

Democrats, meanwhile, understood the public angst and connected it directly to Trump. Their argument, stripped to its essentials, wasn’t deep. It was simply that he was the problem and they weren’t him. But they also made the same promise of affordability, and now comes the awkward business of delivering it. Disliking Trump is not a policy position.

Here in Pennsylvania, I don’t envy the position the newly established Democratic trifecta finds itself in. The Independent Fiscal Office estimates a roughly $5 billion gap between ongoing spending and recurring revenue. Both parties helped produce the current budget, and both have enjoyed claiming credit for the good parts while pinning the bad parts on the other side and deploying it in a campaign mailer. With Democrats in control of the governor’s office and both legislative chambers, they will have considerably fewer places to forward the complaints.

If they preserve those spending commitments (which they will) and add more spending without sufficient economic growth, the pressure for tax increases will build. Asking families to send Harrisburg a larger share of their paychecks would require quite an explanation from a party recently elected on affordability. The same goes for an agenda that makes energy, business development, or employing people more expensive. Calling something an affordability plan does not make the math math.

That is the political risk of mistaking a rejection of your opponent for approval of your entire demand list. Democrats have won an opportunity to demonstrate that their approach will leave Pennsylvanians better off, but I’ve not seen a policy platform that has a basis in reality.

It will take time to clear the rubble, and Republicans cannot rebuild simply by waiting for Democrats to disappoint. Democrats, in turn, have to give voters something more useful than another reminder that they dislike everything about Donald Trump. If everyday life remains expensive and the excuses start sounding familiar, the next electoral verdict may not be that deep, either.

Carl Marrara is executive director of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association.