Statewide election candidates face off for Governor’s Mansion and Senate seat

Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato is a life-long resident of Allegheny County. He grew up… Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato is a life-long resident of Allegheny County. He grew up on Pittsburgh’s North Side, and now that he is running on the Democratic ticket for governor, he has said that he hopes to bring Pittsburgh’s recent economic success to the whole state.

To do that, he must beat state Attorney General Tom Corbett, another familiar face in Pittsburgh. Corbett began his legal career as an assistant district attorney in Allegheny County. After three and a half years, he was hired in 1980 as an assistant United States attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania.

Both gubernatorial candidates won their respective party primaries by comfortable margins.

Onorato took the Democratic nomination for governor with 45.1 percent of the vote. In second was the other candidate from the Pittsburgh area, Auditor General Jack Wagner, who received 24.4 percent of the vote. State Sen. Anthony Williams, who represents Philadelphia, took 18.1 percent of the vote, and Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Hoeffel received 12.4 percent.

“Harrisburg culture has eroded our faith,” Onorato told people at his May 18 victory party at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers headquarters in the South Side. “Pennsylvania needs a governor who will put tax payers first.”

Corbett won the Republican nomination with 69.1 percent of the vote. His principle challenger, state Rep. Sam Rohrer, who represents parts of Berks County, received 30.9 percent of the vote.

Recently, media coverage of the gubernatorial race has been dominated by statements Corbett made regarding the state’s large number of unemployed.

“The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there,” Corbett told Harrisburg radio station WITF at a campaign stop in Elizabethtown. “I’ve literally had construction companies tell me, ‘I can’t get people to come back to work until . . . they say, ‘I’ll come back to work when unemployment runs out.’”

Onorato held events across the state criticizing Corbett for his comments, and his campaign produced Internet videos and blasted reporters with press releases. Corbett has maintained that his comments were taken out of context and were not meant to be offensive to the hardworking people of Pennsylvania.

Polls showed Corbett with an about 10 percent lead in the beginning of August, some three months before election day.

The other race expected to captivate voters across the state is being run between U.S. Congressman Joe Sestak and Republican Pat Toomey. Each candidate largely captured the hopes of their respective party, and the race is expected to be a tight one.

Sestak beat five-term U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter in a close Democratic primary election that received national and international attention.

Sestak, who represents Delaware County, won by a 7 percent margin, taking 53.8 percent of the vote. The long-time incumbent Specter received 46.2 percent of the vote after switching parties more than a year ago.

Toomey, who received 80.9 percent of vote, is running against Sestak in November for Pennsylvania’s only Senate seat up for election. Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, who will be up for re-election in 2012, holds the other seat.

Since primary day, coverage of the Senate race has focused on several issues, including each candidate’s relatively extreme ideologies and a job offer President Obama apparently offered Sestak to cancel his challenge for the Democratic nomination, sometimes referred to as “Jobgate.”

Toomey cited the apparent job offer as one more example of “politics as usual,” in an attempt to inflame the national electorate’s anti-establishment attitude. Sestak and the White House repeatedly denied all allegations of misdoing, and the turmoil has since largely receded.