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28 Oct 2008 02:29 pm

McCain's Pennsylvania Problem

Michael Barone diagnoses the suburban housing bust:

McCain is running even with or better than Bush in most of Pennsylvania but is running far behind in metro Philly. My sense is that the McCain campaign just can't believe this is true. Metro Philly, after all, in 1988 split evenly between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis; the four suburban counties' Republican margins matched the Democratic margins in the city of Philadelphia (conveniently coterminous with Philadelphia County). As I've noted over the years, affluent suburban territory like the Philly suburbs trended Democratic in the 1990s on cultural issues and stayed there up through 2004.

(Ethnic change played a minor role. There are more blacks in the suburban counties than in 1988, but metro Philadelphia has not had huge population change in the last 20 years.) Now, if SurveyUSA is to be trusted, the Philly suburbs are about to give Obama a significantly larger percentage than the 53 percent John Kerry won there in 2004.

Why? My hypothesis is that that is because places like the Philly suburbs are places where the recent decline in household wealth has been most conspicuous. Housing prices mean a lot more to you when your house started off at $400,000 and declined to $290,000 than they did when you started off (as may be typical of Scranton or a blue-collar town in metro Pittsburgh) at $140,000 and declined to $110,000. Newspaper coverage of our current economic distress focuses on the very poor (like a recent Washington Post story on North Carolina, which focused on an ex-convict in a cheap motel in Charlotte), but the people who are getting hurt most visibly in their lifelong project of accumulating wealth are the more affluent. They're the ones whose house values have most visibly and spectacularly declined, and whose 401(k) accounts and stock portfolios have tanked in the last few months as well. Folks in Scranton or in the cheap motel in Charlotte didn't expect to live comfortably ever after off their increased house values, 401(k)'s, and Merrill Lynch accounts; a $700 monthly check from Social Security is about what they have long expected and that's not in danger (yet). Folks in the Philly suburbs did expect to live comfortably off such assets.

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