Quote:
Originally Posted by PhillyRising
The Philadelphia suburbs are the political king makers in Pennsylvania. If you don't win them, the chances of someone running for a state wide office is not going to win unless turnout in the rural Trump counties are heavy and they win them at 80-90% of the vote total.
The four suburban counties are why Democrats now have the majority in the state legislature. The current governor is from Montgomery County and he is a Democrat. I live in Chester County which was staunch Republican forever and now flipped blue. The rural counties keep trying to push the far right agenda and in a purple state like PA...they aren't finding as many takers as they would like in Southeastern PA.
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Politically, at the statewide level, yes. You are spot on.
However, who votes and decides statewide elections only matter at the margins of government spending (executives can only do so much to alter the geography of spending). The bigger factor is the underlying distribution of population and the consequent distribution of legislative elected officials. The legislative process more greatly dictates spending patterns than any specific choices an executive can make while in office. All of my previous points still speak to this: Pennsylvania has a much more even popular distribution than either New York or Illinois. I’d also add to my original comment that rural Pennsylvania is significantly more populated than rural Illinois and similar to (or maybe also more populated than) rural New York.
So, yeah, the collar counties matter most in determining the executive (and other row offices), but does that mean that collar counties matter most in determining the distribution of funding? No, it means they marginally affect the statewide outcomes such that their preferred candidate can marginally affect spending patterns.