Chester County no longer a GOP stronghold

Columnists at The West Chester Daily Local News are still trying to make sense of the Nov. 4 election results, which saw Democrats make dramatic gains in Chester county, once a Republican stronghold.

Here's a sampling from recent columns.

From Jim Giuliano:

Democrats in Chester County are rejoicing over victories by some of their candidates and by the changing voting patters that show a swing away from the solid Republican monolith that we once knew and tolerated, if not loved.

The whole thing is quite a shock to those of us who can remember the days when the Chester County Democratic Party could hold its annual meeting in the back of a minivan and still have room left over for a tray of cold cuts.

Here's what's really strange. The pattern is repeating itself across the country. I heard one Republican analyst say, because of growing Hispanic populations, the party is worried about losing Texas in the next election. Texas!

So even the powerful can fall when they don't heed the will of the people. And there's a lesson in there for Democrats.

From Jim Callahan:

None of this is the fault of the local Republican Party. It was the Democratic candidate. People like him. I'm sure that most party Republicans worked as hard as they could, ditto for Democrats, but at some point candidates can supersede political organizations. This was that kind of an election in Chester County and in the nation.

Seemingly dragged along for the ride were two Democratic candidates for state representative, Tom Houghton in the Oxford area, and Paul J. Drucker in the Tredyffrin-Phoenixville area. The re-election of Democratic Rep. Barbara McIlvaine Smith validated her absurdly close victory over Republican Shannon Royer two years ago with a much more comfortable margin this time over Royer. It seems the only kind of luck Shannon has is buzzard's luck. He said he got beat in 2006 because it was a lousy year for Republicans. He was right. He said the same thing last week. He was also right.

The Republican Party can snap right back in 2010 if conditions are remotely favorable. There is one slight difficulty. All three are incumbents. And incumbents can be difficult to dislodge.

From Dan Kristie:

Still, more than half of the votes cast in Chester County were straight-party. Of the 252,674 people who voted, 128,298 handed in a straight party ballot. Of those ballots, 63,717 were Republican, 61,768 were Democrat 2,555 were Independent, 237 were Libertarian, and 21 were Constitution.

The straight-party voting might have made the difference for a few state house candidates. I think it really helped Democrat Paul Drucker in the 157th District, but the election returns are such that, without outside polling data, I can't really make a convincing argument.