A new Quinnipiac poll depicts an unsettled governor's race taking shape before a fluid Pennsylvania electorate.
The survey found Tom Corbett, the Republican attorney general, in the strongest position of any of the likely 2010 contenders, but even he remained an unknown to a majority of the voters. On the Democratic side, none of the likely candidates had made much of an impression on the electorate.
One of the poll's more intriguing findings was that, nine months after President Barack Obama's landslide win in the state, a generic Republican candidate edged a hypothetical Democratic candidate for governor with independent voters tipping the balance in the GOP direction.
Next year's elections for senator and governor will be watched for evidence of whether Pennsylvania, once a classic swing state, has continued a trend toward a more reliably Democratic stance. Amid dismal approval ratings for the state's most prominent Democrat, Gov. Ed Rendell, the findings provide a snapshot of a state still up for grabs despite recent Democratic gains in party registration and a string of successes in presidential and statewide contests.
In the generic match-up, the Republican and Democrat were essentially tied, with the GOP candidate at 38 percent and the Democrat at 37 percent. Four out of five voters of each party stuck with their own candidate, but independents broke in favor of the GOP, 32 percent to 23 percent. But, again underscoring the unformed shape of the 2010 contests, a plurality of independents, 44 percent, said they did not know which party would get their vote.
Separate from their official party registration, the Quinnipiac survey asked the 1,173 voters whether they considered themselves Republican, Democrat or independent. Douglas Schwartz, who supervised the university's polling, said that the party identification findings had shifted modestly away from the Democratic upsurge of recent years in each of their last two surveys, in May and in the most recent one, conducted from July 14 to 19. Whether that's a transient shift or a more significant trend is impossible to know, but if it proved part of a larger pattern, it would be a dramatic contrast to Pennsylvania's Democratic tide in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles.
A Republican win in 2010 would, however, continue the modern trend of the major parties trading control of the governor's mansion in eight-year cycles. Battered by the Harrisburg's protracted budget impasse, the man whose eight years will be up after next year recorded his lowest approval ratings ever in the survey. Peter Brown, a Quinnipiac expert who studies Pennsylvania, noted that Mr. Rendell's standing was a significant influence on these findings and on the choice of who will succeed him.
"If Rendell's approval is at 39 [percent] a year from now, the Democrat is going to have some problems," he said, "Just as John McCain's biggest problem in '08 was George Bush."
In a potential primary match-up, Republican primary voters put Mr. Corbett far ahead of his likely rivals, but essentially tied with "don't know." The results were 38 percent for the second-term attorney general, 15 percent for Rep. Jim Gerlach, a Chester County congressman, and 9 percent for Pat Meehan, the former U.S. attorney for Philadelphia. Thirty-seven percent of the GOP voters didn't yet have a choice for their nominee.
On the Democratic side, "don't know," with a 54 percent majority, was winning in a landslide. Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato had the support of 16 percent of the Democratic voters, state Auditor General Jack Wagner had 16 percent and Tom Knox, a Philadelphia businessman, had 13 percent.
Those findings were a counterweight to the conventional wisdom that Mr. Onorato, who has raised the most in outside contributions among the Democrats, is the early front-runner in the contest. They are bound to capture the interest of the handful of other Democrats, including Montgomery County Commissioner Joseph Hoeffel and Scranton Mayor Chris Doherty, who are reported to be considering a bid for the nomination.
Responses to questions on their overall approval or disapproval of the contenders suggested that the vast majority of Pennsylvania voters would have a tough time picking any of them from a lineup. Mr. Corbett was the best known of the bunch, with 38 percent of all voters saying they had a favorable impression of the prosecutor and just 6 percent offering an unfavorable opinion. But the majority, 55 percent, said they hadn't heard enough about him to express an opinion.
Even though Mr. Wagner has won two statewide elections by strong margins, three out of four Pennsylvania voters couldn't offer an opinion of him, a degree of anonymity shared by his longtime rival, Mr. Onorato, and by Mr. Gerlach, the GOP congressman. Mr. Meehan and Mr. Knox had even lower public profiles.
More data from the survey can be found online at: http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1327.xml?ReleaseID=1350.
Politics Editor James O'Toole can be reached at
jotoole@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1562.
First published on July 22, 2009 at 12:00 am
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