Day By Day

Sunday, May 21, 2006

Pennsylvania Politics -- The Primary Post-Mortem

Terry Madonna and Michael Young take a look at the results of Pennsylvania's Primary elections in which a number of luminaries were forced into early retirement. What does it mean?

Well, for one thing, the voters are really pissed. [duh!]

The Republican Party is split between moderates and conservative. [double duh!!]

A small, but very committed reform coalition is taking shape.
Yet to congeal into a coordinated platform, its elements include reducing the size of the legislature, term limits, lobbyist registration, campaign finance reform, reigning in the power, pay and perks of lawmakers, and calling a state constitutional convention to overhaul dramatically the entire state government.
(interesting, but at this point not very important).

The reform movement is geographically localized in rural areas of the mid-state and southeast and is concentrated in the Republican electorate. [This I can testify to from personal experience. I live in that region and the anger against both the Democrats and the Republican leadership is palpable.]

The Pennsylvania legislature is going to swing rightward after the fall elections. [Yep! Most of the successful challengers are conservative Republicans and that's going to have an impact.]

Read it here.

To add my own personal prediction. At long last we will get some property tax relief [YAY!]. Now if we could only get Maryland to do the same.

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