Billionaire businessman Donald Trump’s impressive victory in Tuesday’s state Republican primary election convinced Rob Gleason that the state can deny Democrats four more years in the White House.
If things break the way Gleason, the state Republican Party chairman, believes they might, the equation is simple: no Democrat has won the presidency without winning Pennsylvania since Vice President Harry Truman in 1948.
Assuming Trump is the nominee, Gleason envisions him beating likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania’s General Election.
“I met with him. He says, ‘I’m going to carry Pennsylvania,’ ” Gleason said by telephone Friday from the conservative media outlet Weekly Standard’s conference in Colorado. “I said, ‘Well, I’m going to help you.’ ... I think the stars are lining up. I always say to my Democrat friends, ‘You better be careful what you hope for.’ They say, ‘We want Trump, we want Trump.’ We’ll see what happens.”
No Republican has won Pennsylvania since Vice President George H.W. Bush in 1988.
Not one to take any election for granted, Democratic former Gov. Ed Rendell, a close Clinton ally, doesn’t dismiss Trump’s popularity. He said Trump could cause trouble for Clinton here, but didn’t sound overly worried that a lot of Democrats in this state with a strong Democratic majority will jump ship.
“I think people worry about the Democratic turnout, but I think we’ll get a good turnout because base Democrats like Hillary. But I think we’ll get a better turnout because Democrats are fearful of a Donald Trump presidency,” Rendell said.
Numbers from past elections offer a glimpse of what might happen:
• Democrats outnumbered Republicans in registered voters by more than 936,000 in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary, but only 1.64 million Democrats voted compared to 1.57 million Republicans, a difference of only about 76,000. Based on the unofficial, incomplete numbers available, Republican voter turnout for the presidential election was at least 50.1 percent, Democratic, at least 40.5 percent, and that’s with highly competitive races on both sides.
“There’s very little excitement for Hillary Clinton at all,” Gleason said. “There was more for (Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie) Sanders in Pennsylvania, and I’m not exactly sure where the Sanders voters go, but they’re not going to be excited by Hillary. Absolutely not. Will they get excited for Trump? Well, he has to get them excited.”
Rendell dismissed the notion of a lack of enthusiasm for Clinton based on primary results. He pointed to the 2000 Pennsylvania primary.
Only 61,000 more Democrats voted, but Vice President Al Gore easily defeated Texas Gov. George W. Bush in November. That was also when Pennsylvania only had 472,000 more Democrats, about half their advantage now.
“That doesn’t worry me much,” he said of the Democrats’ sharply lower turnout Tuesday.
Rendell also pointed to the enthusiasm for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama during the 2008 Pennsylvania primary campaign. Obama drew massive, enthusiastic crowds to rallies, but Clinton won the primary by 9.1 percentage points.
• Nowhere in Pennsylvania did Trump do as well as in the northeast. Again, only Republicans could vote for him, but his 67.1 percent of the Republican vote in the region’s 10 counties was top in the state with his 77.4 percent in Luzerne County — his highest share of all 67 counties. Lackawanna was sixth with 69.4 percent. His second highest vote percentage was in the southwest, 62.5 percent.
“I know we’ll do well in the southwest,” Gleason said. “But to see the northeast made me feel good.”
It’s hard to tell if this translates to Democrats deserting their party for Trump, but traditionally both regions are home to the conservative Democrats known as Reagan Democrats or Casey Democrats (after former Gov. Robert Casey). In 1984, Reagan even won Lackawanna County, one of the most staunchly Democratic counties in the state. Gleason said he thinks Trump is the kind of candidate who pulls Democrats.
“I think Donald Trump is dangerous because he will get a lot of the Reagan Democrats, but the truth is a lot of those Reagan Democrats changed their registration to vote for Trump in the primary. So I think he’ll get a lot of those folks,” Rendell said. “But for every one he gets from that category, I think he loses one suburban Republican to Hillary ... I wouldn’t be surprised if we got 1 1/2 or two Republicans voting for Hillary.”
For all Trump’s success in Lackawanna and Luzerne counties, northeast Republican turnout (47.6 percent) was lower than all regions but Philadelphia (47.4 percent) and Allegheny County (37.1 percent).
Nowhere was Trump’s percentage of the Republican vote worse than it was in the four suburban counties surrounding Philadelphia. It was 50.1 percent there, and Clinton ran strongly there in 2008.
“Hillary will come out of the five counties (the four suburbs and Philadelphia) with such a margin, that I just don’t think there are enough votes anywhere else,” Rendell said.
To which Gleason counters, “His (Trump’s) numbers there were a little low, but that’s where we have our best Republican organizations.”
Never one to say never, G. Terry Madonna, Ph.D., political analyst and pollster at Franklin & Marshall College, said most data, for now, show Trump losing the state. To date, most polls matching Clinton and Trump head to head have her substantially ahead.
“His support among Republicans is tepid. There’s a significant number of Republicans who won’t vote for him,” Madonna said. “And in every match-up poll, he loses.”
To all of which he adds a huge “but.”
“Now let me say this. In the fall, given the unpredictable nature of this election, given how wild and weird this election is, I don’t think you can rule out anything,” Madonna said. “I’m not prepared to say that this state won’t be competitive. We know what happened with six straight elections, blah, blah, blah. With this election cycle, all bets are off.”