Commentary from Vince Carocci

ELECTION 2005—WHAT IT MEANS FOR 2006

November 2005

By VINCENT P. CAROCCI

Now that the voters have registered, and rather forcefully, at that, their collective discomfort with the quality of government being dispensed from the State Capitol, it’s fair to draw some initial conclusions about what the results tell us and what that may portend for politics in Pennsylvania, 2006.

The first is that when the electorate on November 8 rejected Justice Russell Nigro and retained Justice Sandra Schultz Newman (by the narrowest of margins) for new 10-year terms on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, they confirmed that the depth of their anger over the generous, across-the-board pay raise enacted four months previously by the General Assembly was as wide as it was deep.

The second, however, is that it would be much too premature at this point to presume that their anger carries over into the 2006 gubernatorial and legislative elections, and to predict how it might affect outcomes across the state.

Here’s an early analysis of the results according to State Election Bureau returns posted 36 hours after the balloting. The vote to retain Justice Newman was 775, 643 “Yes” and 660,548 “No.” The vote to reject Justice Nigro was 687,517 “Yes” and 716,214 “No.” Regionally, the results broke down this way:

The Southeast: Justice Newman (of Montgomery County) can thank her home base for her retention. Philadelphia and the four suburban counties—Montgomery, Chester, Delaware, and Bucks—gave her a 118,500 majority. In the 62 other counties across the Commonwealth, she was rejected by a combined vote of almost 3,500 votes. Nigro also carried the southeast by a substantial margin, 105,600 votes. But it wasn’t enough. His quest in the remainder of the state was rejected by 133,700 votes.

Central Pennsylvania: The seat of state government and the heart of the organized opposition truly was energized by its proximity to the State Capitol. The five most populous counties—Cumberland, Dauphin, Lancaster, York and Lebanon—rejected both judges rather convincingly: Justice Newman by 63,700 votes; Justice Nigro, by 78,000. The only county in the Central Pennsylvania umbrella to support retention was Berks, voting “Yes” on Newman by 5,900 votes and on Nigro, by 600.

The Southwest: The southwest was a close second to Central Pennsylvania in its opposition to the pay raise and the judges. The six most populous counties—Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Washington and Westmoreland—voted against the judges by a combined margin of 143,000 votes—rejecting Justice Newman by 51,645 and Nigro by 91,141. Only one major county in this vortex voted in favor the justices, that being Lawrence which turned in a 5,600 majority for Newman and 3,961 for Nigro.

The Lehigh Valley and the Northeast: These two regions displayed similar voting patterns. Lehigh County went in favor of Justice Newman by 896 votes, but rejected Justice Nigro by 2,223. Northampton County gave Justice Newman a 1,500-vote margin and Justice Nigro, 670. Combined, the heart of the Lehigh Valley supported Justice Newman by a mere 2,400 votes and turned down Justice Nigro by almost 1,600 votes. The same applied to Northeastern Pennsylvania where Justice Newman received retention margins of 3,800 in Lackawanna County and only 515 in Luzerne; Justice Nigro was retained by 3,000 votes in Lackawanna but denied by 550 in Luzerne.

The Northwest: Except for Crawford County, the pay raise wasn’t a serious factor in the region of the Commonwealth geographically the most distant from the Capitol. In Crawford, voters rejected Justice Newman by almost 1,200 votes, and Justice Nigro by 2,800. Both jurists, however, fared very well in populous Erie County, Justice Newman winning a retention vote by a margin of 14,700 and Justice Nigro by 11,100.

In summary, Justice Newman carried 48 of the 67 counties; Justice Nigro won a retention vote in only 39. Nine counties—Carbon, Clarion, Fulton, Greene, Huntingdon, Indiana, Lehigh, Luzerne and Mercer—voted in Justice Newman’s favor by almost 7,000 but voted against Justice Nigro by just under 5,000. Justice Nigro had a higher retention vote than Justice Newman in only one county, Monroe, where he won in the “Yes” column by 6,800 votes compared to 6,600 for his colleague. In Philadelphia, his home county, he trailed Justice Newman’s favorable margin, 51,750 to 46,400.

In immediate and inevitable post-election political analysis, it was clear that the Republican state organization recognized early on that the retention vote was problematic and—not wanting to give a Democratic governor the opportunity to replace a jurist of their number-- implemented a modest campaign to save Justice Newman. This included television advertising in traditional GOP areas and electronic phone calls from former Gov. Tom Ridge urging her retention. Her gender may well have played in her favor and, according to press reports, Gov. Rendell offered to make telephone calls in southeastern Pennsylvania on her behalf (scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours?), which she accepted. Justice Nigro, on the other hand, had no similar organized effort launched on his behalf, and the same press reports advised that he failed to take Gov. Rendell up on a similar offer to make calls on his behalf.

So where does that leave us looking ahead to 2006. It says here:

1)—Legislative incumbents on the ballot everywhere but in the southeast, (and perhaps, Erie and environs,) have reason to be concerned. They had better mind their “P’s” and “Q’s” in terms of their constituent services, conduct, attendance and voting record. Only the most supremely confident among them would presume that the sour mood of the electorate in their districts will dissipate next year by the mere gesture of repealing the pay raise that generated this hostility in the first place. (And, as opined by a woman columnist in Harrisburg reflecting on the role gender may have had in Justice Newman’s results, after voting to repeal the pay raise, they might also think of buying a dress for added protection as well.)

2)—The impact of the southeastern Pennsylvania vote on the 2006 gubernatorial election, given Gov. Rendell’s political hold on the region, would seem to be as promising and as potentially decisive as it was four years ago. Gov. Rendell won the five-county region by 515,000 votes in his 2002 gubernatorial bid while losing the remaining 62 counties of the state by a combined 200,000. His role in negotiating a settlement to the nettlesome recent public transit strike affecting thousands of commuters who use the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority daily should only reinforce his standing in the southeast. Unless the nominee of the state GOP can minimize the governor’s probable margins in the southeast, the party’s pursuit of the governorship is likely doomed to failure.

3)—The anti-pay-raise-government-reform coalition which launched the successful campaign to register voter disapproval by targeting Justices Newman and Nigro have every right to relish in what it accomplished and the message it sent to elected officials of the Commonwealth Nov. 8. But it would be folly and naïve to assume that the “No” vote the coalition generated this year will translate automatically into similar success next year. The issue in November, 2005 was as straight-forward as it ever gets in politics—“Yes” or “No,” that’s it. Races to take out legislative incumbents are much more complex and complicated because the totality of an incumbent’s record—his or her reputation, visibility, accessibility and service to the community over the life of their tenure--come into significant play. Additionally, the coalition was the beneficiary of low expectations this year. No one truly expected them to be as successful as they were. Not so next year where expectations will be so much higher, and we know expectations in politics often play an instrumental role in the success or failure of political ventures. The challenge confronting the coalition in 2006, assuming the coalition holds, will be substantially more formidable than it was in 2005.

4)—Finally, to the electorate at large, the best advice at this point is this: Stay tuned. There are new chapters to be written in this saga, and things could get really interesting.

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