The Realignment of Pennsylvania Politics Since 1960: Two Party Competition in a Battleground State (review)

James L. Sundquist uses the Foreword to this book to praise Renée Landis for her contribution to the realignment genre, namely, the uncoupling of the notion of realignment from that of critical elections. David Mayhew has made a case for this in his recent critique of the realignment paradigm. But minus the idea of critical elections, what is left of the realignment genre? The answer is, just the type of analysis provided by Landis in this book: an investigation of electoral change over time, putting election data into its historical context. Such a study reveals that there is a process of change in the electorate, with one party gaining over time. In the case of Pennsylvania since 1960, "the increasing Democratic consistency of the Philadelphia metro area, the decreasing Democratic strength in the Pittsburgh metro area, the declining Democratic vote in the southern border counties except for Lancaster, the rise in Democratic voting in the rapidly growing northeastern counties in the region of the Pocono Mountains, and the relative partisan stability of the northern and central regions" (169). Landis makes an excellent case for this thesis in the book on Pennsylvania from 1960 to 2008, and one can agree with Sundquist that "We finish the book feeling that we truly understand what happened in that time and place" (xxi). However, do we understand why it happened?

There is reason to doubt that we do. Landis is right that there has been partisan shifts in Pennsylvania since the 1960s, and that there is a new set of political issues since that time, the cultural issues like abortion, school prayer, and now gay rights. Her book has three theses, then. The first concerns statewide partisan change, the second the emergence of new crosscutting cultural issues, and the third, and much stronger, thesis is that the new crosscutting issues are responsible for the partisan change, that the partisan change is a "culture-wars realignment." But this last thesis is not argued for in any systematic way, much less proved. In lieu of an argument, there is instead in the first chapter a string of quotes from John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira on the politics of the "ideopolises," which here means Philadelphia and its surrounding counties. The story goes that white professionals there tend to support the Democrats because they are attracted to their positions on cultural issues, or because they are turned off by Republican emphasis on them.

This type of argument is too simplistic. Elections are about many different things. Political parties strategically pursue victory in elections, and if there are trends in the issues that are important to a segment of the electorate, they will adapt. Landis herself explains why Republicans can do so well in statewide elections despite the Democratic trend of the state: "Pennsylvania Republicans have been exceedingly savvy at adjusting and accommodating themselves to the partisan realities they confronted" (150). Elections are a lot more complicated than an answer to a public opinion question, as is borne out by the plethora of details in Landis's excellent two-chapter narrative of Pennsylvania's tight electoral competition.

By Landis's own classification, most of the victorious Pennsylvania politicians for Governor or United States Senator since 1960 have been moderate or conservative on social issues. On the presidential level, even Bill Clinton, as Landis points out, "went to great lengths to distance himself from what he viewed as the losing Democratic stances of the culture-wars realignment" (15). If emphasizing one's social liberalism were an unalloyed electoral benefit, then successful state politicians would not hesitate to do so, but instead most successful Pennsylvania politicians have downplayed their differences on these cultural issues. It makes sense that politicians would want to deemphasize very divisive issues. But if they are playing down the big issues of the day, then elections are...