Pennsylvania Republicans may come to regret defeating former Congressman Joe Hoeffel for U.S. Senator by re-electing U.S. Senator Arlen Specter in 2004 for two reasons. First, Specter's iconoclasm feeds their divisions in Pennsylvania and nationally. Second, Hoeffel is threatening to help lead suburban Montgomery County, once one of the strongest Republican counties in America, to Democratic control this year.
Control of Montgomery means that what a former Republican country commissioner once told me was a "dysfunctional family" of Republicans will continue to disintegrate. A higher and higher percentage of the ever-diminishing number of Republicans in Montgomery County are Republicans because the Republicans countrol the county. When that control changes, so will the loyalties of many thousands of Republican voters, contributors, and campaign workers.
For the Democrats to take over Montgomery County requires that Hoeffel--the best known face of the Montco Democratic Party having been a candidate at regular intervals there since 1974 for state representative, country commissioner, Congressman, and U.S. Senator--also help carry in current County Commissioner Ruth Damsker, who is perhaps the hardest working County Commissioner in Montgomery County history.
Of the four candidates for County Commissioner, Damsker is only one who has never run for statewide office. The Republican nominees are District Attorney Bruce Castor, a candidate for the Republican nomination for Attorney General in 2004, and County Commissioner Jim Matthews, the Republican nominee for Lieutenant Governor in 2006 and the brother of TV commentator and author Chris Matthews.
The latest publicly released poll, by Republican pollster Neil Newhouse, has Castor in first with 55%, Hoeffel in second with 51%, Matthews in third with 40%, and Damsker losing with 34%. Damsker's style of actually minding the business of Montgomery County and working to steadily improve social services there is working against her in this poll; but she has a great message for voters interested in effective, genuine public service.
A Hoeffel/Damsker victory will almost certainly solidify Democratic control of the state House--adding at least several Democratic seats to the current 102-101 Democratic margin--and lead to the pickup of at least one currently Republican Senate seat and and currently Republican U.S. House seat, PA-6, currently held by Jim Gerlach.
A Hoeffel/Damsker victory will also lead to Montgomery County becoming a solidly Democratic base in statewide elections, adding to Philadelphia's numbers and offsetting Republican support elsewhere. Pennsylvania Democrats won three gubernatorial elections since the Civil War before Democrats took over Philadelphia in 1951; since then the Democrats have won eight gubernatorial elections. With Montgomery County solidly in the Democratic ranks, the Democrats will have a much stronger chance of winning our third consecutive gubernatorial election in 2010 for the first time since the Civil War.
In Montgomery County, the Republican Party has become the party of pay to play, something that many grassroots Republicans deplore. The Republican majority in Montgomery County has been too quick to hand out contracts to their friends, and too slow to protect the environment, control sprawl, and deliver local services in an efficient and effective manner in a county split up into many townships, cities, boroughs, and school districts.
A Hoeffel/Damsker victory will bring meaningful reforms to the table and by constructive example help set the direction for local governments across Pennsylvania. There certainly are many other important elections in Pennsylvania in 2007--closely contested races for the Supreme and Superior Courts and runaway mayoral races for the Democrats in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, for instance--but the Hoeffel/Damsker election may be the most important.
I have heard Joe Hoeffel tell the story of how he got involved in Montgomery County politics. He had headed the McGovern campaign at Boston University, and tried to volunteeer for unsuccessful Congressional candidate John Kerry, but Kerry lost his phone number.
In 1973, Hoeffel came into contact with the guy in charge of getting a state house candidate in his district, which the Democrats had not won in generations. The guy was impressed enough with Hoeffel to offer him the nomination on the spot, and Joe was public spirited enough to take it. In retrospect, the event was the Montgomery County Democratic political equivalent of recruiting a future major league all-star to play in a sandlot baseball game.
Joe Hoeffel has come a long way since then, and so has Montgomery County. The eras of Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush has convinced many of the managers and professionals in what may be the most heavily managerial and professional country in Pennsylvania that the Democratic Party is the party best fitted to govern. In addition, there has been a migration of Democrats from Philadelphia, New York, and other Democratic strongholds to Montgomery County.
In conversations I have had with Montgomery County Republicans over the years, I have found many of them remarkably willing to concede that Democrats do a better job at the state and federal level. They are quite willing--occasionally, even quite eager--to have Democrats fighting for state and federal dollars for their communities. Local government has been the area of greatest Republican resistance.
But Democrats are winning representation and control of more and more school boards, townships, boroughs, and municipalities there. If the Democrats can take over BOTH of the majority county commissioner seats--and sweep the row offices as well--the wall the Republicans will have climb to win hotly contested statewide elections will have gotten at least ten feet taller.