President Obama’s path to reelection is already precarious, but it would become infinitely more difficult if he’s unable to improve his standing in Pennsylvania. The president travels to the Keystone State this week in hopes of winning over the large swath of working-class white voters he’ll need if he is to carry a state that has voted reliably, if narrowly, for Democratic presidential contenders since 1988 — but which is looking more like a toss-up for Obama in 2012.
Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by hundreds of thousands in the perennial swing state, but many either remain suspicious of the president or have abandoned him altogether. It’s a rebuke that is playing out nationwide but is particularly problematic for Obama in the suburbs and blue-collar towns of must-win Pennsylvania.
Obama is either tied with or trailing Republican front-runner Mitt Romney is most pollsters’ hypothetical match-ups, a dramatic plunge in a state Obama carried by 10 percentage points in 2008.
But Obama’s Pennsylvania success last time was buoyed by a record showing of minority and young voters who helped him survive despite losing the white working class by 15 points. And with the economy still stubbornly resisting a broad recovery, Obama’s problems are likely to grow, his supporters admit.
“Heck yeah, Obama has problems here,” said one high-ranking Pennsylvania union leader. “I’m genuinely worried that he’s just lost too many white voters and that all the people who were starry-eyed last time for him will just stay home.”
Such a development would be disastrous for Obama. The president faces even longer odds of carrying the traditionally red states he won in 2008, including Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana. So Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral votes, becomes all the more crucial in an election most analysts expect to be closely contested.
Obama’s ace in the hole is Vice President Biden, who was raised in a Catholic family in Scranton. Biden will be dispatched routinely during election season in hopes of shoring up the president’s deficiencies with blue-collar voters, according to campaign officials.
And Team Obama is also banking on a deeply entrenched union presence and surplus of Democratic local office holders to provide the organizational muscle needed to mobilize his core constituents. In 2008, Obama relied on a coalition of younger liberals and political operatives from others state to organize his successful Pennsylvania effort.
However, organizational prowess could make little difference to conservative Pennsylvania Democrats who still largely base their vote on cultural issues — an area where they remain particularly skeptical of the president.
In 2008, Obama outraged Pennsylvania voters when he claimed — in a ritzy fundraiser in San Francisco — that the Keystone State’s small-town residents “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” Obama lost Pennsylvania’s primary to then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, who trounced Obama among older white voters.
So Obama on Wednesday will travel to Scranton to talk about the economy and to beat up on Congress. The president will call on lawmakers to extend a payroll tax cut, one of the few parts of his $447 billion jobs blueprint that could achieve bipartisan support.
