Stuart Rothenberg | Congressional Democrats’ Pennsylvania Problem

Posted on July 03 2012 – 10:00 PM – Posted by: Doug Brady

But if the southeastern corner of the Keystone State has started to resemble New Jersey and Connecticut, Western Pennsylvania increasingly looks like West Virginia or southeastern Ohio, areas where voters have started to think and behave more like Republicans. This movement of working-class voters toward the GOP has helped offset the partisan trend in the Philadelphia suburbs, keeping Pennsylvania an interesting and competitive state.

Pennsylvania swung wildly between 2006 and 2010, as most of the country did.

Democrats gained a total of five House seats in the Keystone State in the 2006 and 2008 elections — one-tenth of their total haul. After the ’08 elections, Democrats held 12 of the state’s 19 Congressional districts. Two years later, the numbers flipped, with Republicans sitting in 12 seats.

Redistricting after the 2010 census, of course, has further changed the state’s arithmetic because the GOP-controlled state Legislature made it more difficult for House Democrats to make gains by packing Democratic voters together, including throwing two incumbent Democrats into the same district.

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Article source: http://conservatives4palin.com/2012/07/stuart-rothenberg-congressional-democrats-pennsylvania-problem.html