So there was talk/debate/useless snark & ranting about how voter enthusiasm is down, especially amongst Democrats, throughout the country because of the recent Gallup poll. Gallup was the same polling firm who's final 2012 Presidential poll had Romney beating Obama. Now as someone who has been following and writing a lot about the various races going on, I can tell you that voter enthusiasm, especially amongst Democrats, is not down throughout the country. Maybe in places like Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois and Colorado (even though the races still remain very competitive), there are several areas around the country where Democratic voters are engaged. Now if there's one state where voter enthusiasm is very low amongst Republican voters, it's in Pennsylvania:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett is not only trailing his Democratic challenger badly, but he has lost the support of nearly a quarter of his fellow Republicans, according to polls showing his bid for a second term is in deep trouble.
With the incumbent faring so poorly, his party is counting on Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey to shore up Corbett's campaign. But even the backing of a powerful populist like Christie, renowned for his bipartisan appeal, could be too little, too late for his Pennsylvania counterpart, analysts say.
Trailing Democrat Tom Wolf in polls, Corbett has one of the lowest rates of party support of any incumbent, analysts say. If Corbett fails to win a second term, he would become the state's first incumbent governor to do so, a blow to Republican prestige at a time when the party is eager to make comeback on the national and state levels.
"His own party is walking away from him," said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, which recently showed 22 percent of Republicans deserting Corbett to vote for his opponent. - Huffington Post, 10/13/14
Here's a little more info:
http://www.reuters.com/...
Corbett has taken heat for presiding over state cuts in education funding. His Democratic predecessor cut basic funding for schools as revenues slumped and relied on temporary stimulus money until those federal funds dried up.
In 2012, Corbett brought state funding for education back up to 2008 levels, still at least $500 million below the previous year without the stimulus funds. This fiscal year, Pennsylvania is spending $5.5 billion on basic education.
Some critics also say Corbett was ineffective, having failed to push through his political agenda, given both legislative houses are Republican-controlled.
For Corbett, the bad rap on getting things done comes at a time when voters are looking to their state governments to tackle pressing issues, given the political deadlock that shows no sign of easing in Washington, D.C.
"There's disappointment with his administration," said Chris Borick, professor of political science and director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion. "They think, 'Did we just blow an opportunity?'"
Supporters tout Corbett's efforts saving jobs in refineries and shipyards and point out the state's unemployment rate has dropped.
Aiming to convince Republicans to stay the course, Corbett stumped with Christie last week at a rally in leafy Wayne, one of the Philadelphia suburbs that are key to a victory on Nov. 4.
"I've worked with him now for four years, as closely as I've worked with any governor in America," said Christie, who chairs the Republican Governors Association. "This man has earned and deserves your support."
Supporters said Corbett has failed to get his message out because his opponent has outspent him. They also think Republicans need to be better informed and the governor has not fought hard enough.
"People haven't been paying attention to what Corbett's doing," said Dan Bowser, 68, an insurance agent from Thorndale who attended the Corbett rally last Thursday. "He's not blowing his own horn the way he should." - Reuters, 10/13/14
The thing is everyone knows about Corbett's record and that's why he's doomed this year:
http://www.philly.com/...
"The question is, 'can he get a lot of voters to change their minds and do it in a relatively short period of time?'" said G. Terry Madonna, a professor of political science and Franklin and Marshall College's pollster. "History is not on his side."
Said Christopher Borick, a political science professor and pollster at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, "It becomes very hard to move people who have established a view and that's the challenge facing Gov. Corbett. How do you do that?"
The latest independent poll, by Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University, showed Corbett trailing Wolf by 17 percentage points among likely voters surveyed in the first week of October. Quinnipiac's polling director, Douglas Schwartz, also could not recall an example where a gubernatorial candidate overcame such a deficit in such a short period of time.
For Corbett, unfortunately, the election is about him and not Wolf, say pollsters.
Wolf, a first-time candidate who was little-known before February, won the May 20 Democratic primary election in a landslide, beating three other opponents who, despite having far more experience in politics and government, also had relatively low statewide name recognition.
The trick was a 60-second TV ad that began running Jan. 30 and was widely praised as effective - featuring his take on key issues, his family and his employees while bringing Wolf to life in a folksy, apolitical way that seemed to resonate with registered Democrats. It helped that Wolf, independently wealthy, contributed $10 million to underwrite his robust air campaign.
Now, Wolf only has to be nothing more than an acceptable alternative to Corbett, pollsters say.
"This is 85 to 90 percent about Corbett," Madonna said. - AP, 10/11/14
Corbett knows he can't run on his record or rely on his base this year, hence why he's changing his tone:
http://stateimpact.npr.org/...
Governor Tom Corbett says he’s thinks taxing natural gas could be an option. Just three weeks before the election, the governor is battling for his political future. In an exclusive interview with StateImpact Pennsylvania, Corbett said he thinks rather than the extraction tax advocated by his Democratic opponent Tom Wolf, it may be better to tax the transport of the gas within the state.
“Maybe the tax instead of being at the wellhead, should be in the transmission line,” said Corbett. “Now we can probably only tax it in the transmission line that is intrastate because if it goes into interstate, that is a Washington issue.”
Back in 2012 Governor Corbett enacted the impact fee, which charges Marcellus Shale gas drillers $50,000 per well. Critics, including his Democratic opponent Tom Wolf, say that method leaves a lot of money on the table. Pennsylvania is the only major gas producing state without a severance tax, which taxes the value of the gas extracted. Wolf has proposed a five percent severance tax. Corbett continues to oppose this kind of tax for now, saying it would cut too much into the drillers bottom line, causing them to move out of state. But he’s no longer calling it “un-American.” Instead, he says once the vast majority of the wells are drilled, it may be time to enact a tax.
“If this industry was 10-15 years old already, I think we’d be having a different conversation,” said Corbett.
Corbett gave no details of what a transmission gas tax would mean. But pipelines that cross state lines are regulated by the federal government, so the state would be limited to the transmission lines within Pennsylvania. Pipeline companies may be an easy taxation target because they already benefit from tax breaks. Natural gas transmission companies are exempt from both federal corporate income tax and Pennsylvania’s gross receipts tax. - State Impact, 10/13/14
But the latest bad press Corbett has been getting is also dooming him:
http://articles.philly.com/...
It's safe to say there's no "Weird Porn Scandal" index tab in the standard political campaign playbook.
Yet Gov. Corbett has been forced to deal with just that almost daily since his successor as state attorney general, Democrat Kathleen Kane, released the names of high-level officials from his tenure as A.G. who sent or received pornographic e-mails on state computers. Two appointees in his administration have quit as a result; a third refuses to resign.
The timing could not be worse for the Republican governor, already an underdog as he faces voters a little more than three weeks from now. Corbett never received or sent any of the smut, says he was unaware of it - and is furious.
If he had learned of the e-mails as attorney general, "I would have gone ballistic," he told The Inquirer Editorial Board.
Nonetheless, strategists and analysts say, the porn affair poses potential political risk for Corbett by undermining his image as a straight-arrow law enforcer, and by suggesting he is a disengaged executive.
The biggest problem, experts say: It is a distraction that devours precious campaign time.
"This is a momentum-zapper," said Chris Borick, pollster and political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. "The governor needs every break he could possibly get. Based on polls we're seeing, he needs a historic comeback."
E. Christopher Abruzzo, Corbett's secretary of environmental protection, resigned last week, as did a top aide.
"You don't want to ask for the resignation of cabinet officers in the final days of a reelection campaign," said another veteran Pennsylvania pollster, G. Terry Madonna of Franklin and Marshall College. "It reinforces a perception that this administration can't move its agenda, that it's caught up in too many internal situations." - Philadelphia Inquirer, 10/12/14
So yeah, voter enthusiasm is down but in Pennsylvania's case, it's with the opposite group of voters Gallup is referring to. Meanwhile, Tom Wolf (D. PA) has been out on the campaign trail pushing his plans for Pennsylvania:
http://www.post-gazette.com/...
Mr. Wolf spoke about his education and tax proposals during a news conference outside Aliquippa High School.
Mr. Wolf has proposed a major restructuring of the state’s income tax to provide a significantly larger personal exemption, coupled with a higher tax rate for income above that level, in an effort to make the system fairer and more progressive.
He has said repeatedly, however, that he can’t provide more specifics on the overhaul until he gets into office and has access to fuller details on the distribution of income and other fiscal data. But he has also said that individuals making between $70,000 and $90,000 would pay more under his revised system; those making less would pay less, and that only more affluent would pay more.
If he were to defeat Gov. Tom Corbett on Nov. 4, however, he would have only a few months before he would be obliged to present a budget proposal to the Legislature.
Asked if that would give him time to get up to speed on the revenue data he would need to flesh out his proposal, he said, “I haven’t decided. I don’t know how long it will take to get that data together. ... I don’t know how long that will take.”
Mr. Wolf said that, in addition to the need to get access to current state data on taxes, his goal of formulating a proposal to submit to the Legislature is clouded by the fact that he does not know how large of an inherited deficit he might confront.
“I am looking at a tax system that is fairer. ... I’m also trying to be honest here, And there are two things I don’t know,’’ he said.
“I don’t know what everybody pays in taxes and I shouldn’t. I’m an outsider, I’m not part of the government. ... I shouldn’t have access to that as a candidate.
“Once I’m in office, it becomes appropriate for me to get that information,” he said. - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 10/13/14
That's fair but I do like this:
http://articles.philly.com/...
Democrat Tom Wolf said Thursday he would push, if elected governor, to abolish the School Reform Commission and transfer state control of Philadelphia schools to a locally elected school board.
Wolf took exception to the dramatic step the SRC took last week when it canceled its contract with the teachers' union and imposed terms requiring members to pay 10 percent to 13 percent of the cost of their health-care benefits; currently they pay nothing.
"I'm against what [the SRC] did," Wolf said. "What I would do is restore the funding to the Philadelphia school system that would make unpalatable choices like that unnecessary."
Wolf discussed the issue during a 70-minute meeting with members of The Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News editorial boards. In the wide-ranging session, he also said he opposed privatizing the state liquor system and reiterated his refusal to add specifics to his income-tax plan, saying it would be "dishonest" to do so before he can look at state revenue data.
He said it was wrong that Philadelphia is the only school district in the state without an elected board of education. A board chosen by voters would be preferable to one appointed by the mayor, Wolf said.
"The problem in a city like Philadelphia, or in any city, the priorities of the council and the mayor, education is not necessarily going to be number one," he said. "You've got police, fire, sanitation, and other things that can take precedence." - Philadelphia Inquirer, 10/11/14
Wolf will certainly have the experience and the intelligence to get Pennsylvania back on track:
http://www.post-gazette.com/...
Mr. Wolf often describes himself as a different kind of candidate. Rather than working his way up the political ladder in a more traditional path, he’s trying to start near the top, leaving a long and successful career in business to challenge Gov. Tom Corbett. But in another sense, Mr. Wolf’s bid is not a break from his past. It’s a move that completes a circle in his life as he furthers his real-world education in issues that he studied for years in a career that once seemed headed to the higher reaches of academe rather than to his family’s building supply firm in York County.
Mr. Wolf had come to Dartmouth from The Hill School, an elite Pottstown, Pa., boarding school that has turned out public figures including former Secretary of State James Baker and the late Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire. He started at Dartmouth as a Navy ROTC member. Then he decided to leave school to join the Peace Corps at 19 and was assigned to a post in rural India.
“I came away from that experience with a real sense of efficacy, that I could do things. And if I didn’t know how to do something I could learn it and that there wasn’t anything that I couldn’t do, and I think that has stayed with me throughout my life,” Mr. Wolf said last week.
“I did things like, I learned how to survey a field for an irrigation project. I learned about high-yielding rice and diseases and pests of high-yielding rice. I never knew that before. I learned how to take apart a motor. I wasn’t the best mechanic in the world; I was a pretty lousy mechanic. But I learned how to take equipment apart and put it back together again.”
His Peace Corps stint over, Mr. Wolf returned to Dartmouth in 1971. After graduating, he got a master’s degree from the University of London, then started work on his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mr. Wolf’s 500-plus page dissertation was titled “Conflict and Organizational Accomodation in the House of Representatives, 1878 to 1921.”
The word “accommodation” is actually misspelled on the typed title page of the work archived on MIT’s website. That didn’t stop the American Political Science Association from giving it the E.E. Schattschneider Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of American government submitted that year.
It’s a look at how the internal identity and procedures of the House shifted in response to the broader changes in American politics over that span. Some of the conditions he describes in looking at the turn of the 20th century resonate in today’s political culture among voters increasingly estranged from a gridlocked national government.
After completing his course work at MIT, Mr. Wolf moved back to Mt. Wolf, York County, a town named for his great-great-grandfather, to work on his dissertation. At the same time, he worked for the family company, now known as The Wolf Organization, a national supplier of kitchen and bath cabinetry and other building products.
“I think what I realized was, I really enjoyed academia and I was good at it. But what I enjoyed about it was reading about, studying, what people actually did. I wanted to be part of it,” he said. “What brought me back to York was I realized that instead of observing and analyzing life, I wanted to dig in and be part of it.
“Working for the company, I realized I was pretty good at that and I enjoyed that, and I decided to stay.”
The next chapters in the Wolf story are familiar from the narrative emphasized again and again on the road to his primary victory over three candidates with significantly more extensive public records. He and two cousins borrowed money to take over ownership of the family firm. He became a pillar of the York community, serving on boards, donating money to a litany of charities and causes.
“I was chairman of the United Way in York County. I was chairman of the York County College Bard of Trustees. I was chairman of the chamber of commerce, chairman of better York, chairman of WITF — the PBS station in southcentral Pennsylvania. I was involved on the board or the chairman of the board in almost every organization in York County.”
He sold most of his interest in the family business in 2006.
He retained his interest in politics at a different level, becoming a major contributor to Democratic candidates, including former Gov. Ed Rendell, who would later name him secretary of revenue during part of his second administration, where he served from 2007 through late 2008. Mr. Wolf dismisses a question on whether his trajectory from studying politics, to business and on to practical politics was part of some long-term plan.
“If I had really thought about a political career as a Democrat, I would not have come back to [heavily Republican] York County,” he said.
If there was a plan, it ran seriously off the rails in 2008, when his old business appeared ready to sink in the waves of the Great Recession. By then he had already begun laying the groundwork for a run for governor in the 2010 cycle that would bring Tom Corbett to office. Mr. Wolf abandoned his bid, invested in the company anew and shifted its operations so that it returned to profitability.
“I loved running a business,” he said, “[and] hard as it was, coming back the second time, that was probably the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my life.” - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 10/12/14
And Wolf is getting some big name help on the campaign trail:
http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/...
First lady Michelle Obama will be campaigning for Tom Wolf, the Democratic candidate for governor of Pennsylvania. She’ll appear Wednesday morning at the Emanuel Recreation Center, 8500 Pickering Avenue, in Mt. Airy.
Doors open to the public at 9am. Organizers are giving out free tickets, available at Wolf’s local field offices, in West Oak Lane, Norristown, and South Philadelphia, on a first-come, first-served basis, due to space limitations.
And vice president Joe Biden, himself no stranger to these parts over the years, will be at a Philadelphia event on Thursday highlighting the importance of investing in America’s infrastructure. - CBS Philly, 10/13/14
It's clear we are going to win this race but lets see if Wolf can help other Pennsylvania Democrats who are on the ticket. Click here to donate and get involved with Wolf's campaign, State Senator Mike Stack's (D. PA) Lt. Governor campaign, the Pennsylvania Democratic Party so we can take back the State Senate and Manan Trivedi (D. PA_06) and Kevin Strouse's (D. PA-08) campaigns:
http://www.wolfforpa.com/
http://www.stackforpa.com/
http://www.padems.com/
http://www.trivediforcongress.com/...
http://www.kevinstrouse.com/