A 2008 Election Campaign Reminiscence: Battling for Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in Small Town Pennsylvania (7)

by R. Lee Cook

One of the key things Bill and I had discussed at great length in the beginning of our conversation was the traditional Democratic electoral strategy for winning the state of Pennsylvania, which depended on generating large victory margins in Pittsburgh in the west and in Philadelphia to the east and then holding down the Republican tide in the small towns and rural areas of the state. I now asked Miller for his assessment of how effective he thought their grassroots organizing effort had been in 2008 in reducing the intrepid Republican electoral advantage among this rural voting segment countywide.

“There are a lot of reasons for the imbalance here between the Republicans and Democrats. I have candidly talked about the religious issue as a factor; in some of these areas, if you are a Democrat, you probably wouldn’t tell anybody in that church because for some reason those people are just against us. So that is a problem. There are a lot of reasons why the numbers are the way they are.”

“However, my goal, and I think the goal of most Democratic chairpersons in the T, which is the area where the imbalance is dramatic, our goal as part of the state Democratic Party, is to reduce that number by many different ways. In Clarion we reduced the number to a very manageable couple of thousand. [In 2008] the difference was 3000 and that was 1004 better than what we did in the Kerry campaign and to me that was a win.”

“So the structure of Pennsylvania is different than a lot of states in that we have Philadelphia whose margin was 400,000, suburban Philadelphia another 300,000; Pittsburgh 130,000, Erie and then Allentown. So, where you have that margin, by keeping our margin to 3000 was good because as I have mentioned before- that is chump change when you have the margins you have in the urban areas.”

“I live in this area and I enjoy living here. It is a beautiful countryside. The air is clean and I love it here. But the one thing that we struggle with is the philosophical imbalance; not just the political imbalance, the philosophical imbalance that we have. Many of them [rural voters] would be part of the anti-healthcare crowd even though they don’t have it. They are anti-union even though the union would help them. It is very frustrating, but those are the numbers and that is what we fight.”

“We reduced the margin, and that was my goal. In fact, I was patting myself on the back here a little bit, but you know what? Elk County, which is down the road, Obama got over 50% in Elk County. He won Elk County and I went ‘wow’ when I saw it because they are my friends. They worked just as hard or harder than we did and that is how they did it. Like I mentioned earlier, I think the key is knowing that the candidate and the party is with you, and working with you and putting their money where their mouth is. That had never happened here before. And I want to study this in-depth so I know Pennsylvania wasn’t an anomaly. This happened in other states too. You cannot tell me that Virginia didn’t do the same thing, North Carolina and Florida and Ohio for certain. It had to happen there too. I think it is a blueprint that we will follow in the future. I wish we could have kept it a secret but I’m sure the other side has gone to school on what we did.”And yes indeed, the performance of the Clarion Democrats in this election had been quite impressive, reversing the trends of the past two general elections that had been so enticing to McCain strategists, but in the end had proved to be illusory- a kind of electoral fool’s gold. But the same had been true throughout Pennsylvania as the statewide returns convincingly showed. As Bill Miller indicated, his Clarion Democrats reduced the margin of loss to the Republicans by just over 1000 votes, 1033 actually, as the McCain-Palin ticket garnered 10,737 votes or 60.4% while Obama-Biden received 6,756 votes or 38% of the total votes cast. By comparison, in the 2004 General Election incumbent President Bush received 11,063 votes or 64.4% to Senator John Kerry’s 6,049 or 35.2%. In 2008 the Republican victory margin was 3,981 as compared to its 2004 margin of 5014. In 2008 Miller’s Democrats not only reduced the margin of the Republican victory, but they also, more importantly, reversed their decade long trend of gains.

Moreover, state-wide Pennsylvania Democrats also reversed the trend of recent Republican gains which had so encouraged McCain strategists at the beginning of the 2008 general election season to stake so much of their time and resources on switching this state into the “red column”. In the 2008 general election the Obama-Biden ticket would receive 3,276,363 votes or 54.7% compared to McCain-Palin’s 2,655,885 votes or 44.3% of votes cast- a resounding Republican election defeat that may finally end the mainstream media’s designation of Pennsylvania as a “key battleground state”.

He had shared with me the atmosphere at his home on election night. Now I asked Bill to describe what the day of the inauguration was like for him and his wife Judy. He started by telling me “It was truly an emotional thing with inauguration.”