Obama rising

Last Friday, at Soldiers ‘ Sailors Memorial, Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Bob Casey delivered… Last Friday, at Soldiers ‘ Sailors Memorial, Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Bob Casey delivered one of Barack Obama’s most significant endorsements in the campaign so far. Standing in the auditorium beneath the opening lines of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Casey admitted that one of his reasons for supporting Obama was watching the excitement that young people like his four daughters have imparted on the campaign.

The energy and enthusiasm in the room that day was palpable. And, not surprisingly, the excitement was not limited to young people alone – the crowd was characteristically a mixture of young and old.

“I was just energized and terribly emotional,” Colbert Dianne, a senior citizen from Stanton Heights, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. On the bus ride home, I watched a woman show off her new Barack-and-Michelle Obama tote bag to friends.

It was people like Colbert and the woman on the bus to whom Bob Casey was speaking when he described how Obama began his career as a community organizer “in the shadows of the steel mills of Chicago.”

Casey, who originally indicated that he wished to stay neutral in the battle between Clinton and Obama for the nomination, finally decided to take a stance contrary to the Clinton endorsements that have come from Gov. Ed Rendell, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, our own Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and most members of Pennsylvania’s Democratic establishment. Though the endorsement was largely an appeal to the working-class, conservative-leaning Democrats who helped Casey beat Rick Santorum in 2006, it was also likely aimed at super-delegates – a sign that, with the support of figureheads like Casey, Obama could carry swing states like Pennsylvania (a must-win for Democrats in the general election).

But will his endorsement have any effect? I noted in my last column a figure provided by Franklin and Marshall pollster G. Terry Madonna, who told me that 65,000 Pennsylvanians had switched their party to Democrat to vote in the primary. Turns out that number was a bit premature. OK, way premature. The voter registration figures, just released by the State Department last week, show that roughly 86,000 voters switched their registration to Democrat; more than 120,000 new voters signed up with the party to cast a vote in the Obama-Clinton face-off. Pennsylvania Democrats now number more than 4 million – a historic first for any party in the state’s history. “I’ve never seen numbers like this in one week,” Leslie Amoros, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State, told the Los Angeles Times.

The Obama campaign ran a huge ground campaign in the weeks leading up to the registration deadline, appealing door-to-door to independent, unregistered or swing voters who fit the profile of past Obama converts. The Clinton campaign, already holding a strong lead, held a less aggressive effort to register new voters.

The Obama campaign is claiming the newly registered voters as a victory, but some news reports following the voter registration deadline have made clear that not all new voters are Obama voters.

“We were registered Republicans, and we will always be Republicans, but we want to help Hillary get the No. 1 position for the Democrats,” Sandra Reed, a 70-year-old Republican from Gettysburg, told the Evening Sun. “So, we are switching for the primary to vote for Hillary, then we will switch back and vote for McCain.” Monica Dutko, the elections director of Adams County, told the paper that several of the switchovers she’d spoken to were forthcoming about the fact that they were changing at the suggestion of Rush Limbaugh. The radio show host recently asked his listeners to switch parties to ensure that Clinton (the supposedly weaker Democratic candidate) was the nominee in the general election.

Stories like that suggest there’s no guarantee on the new voters, and it’d be impossible to gauge just how much of an effect those Republican turncoats could have. Still the emergence of new voters looks good for Obama. The regions of the state with the largest amount of new Democrats are the suburbs of Philadelphia and central Pennsylvania. The suburbs comprise an affluent, well-educated electorate with a fairly even racial divide. The central part of the state, though susceptible to Limbaugh’s influence, is probably equally as likely to be home to first-time voters excited by this race. Both scenarios look good for Obama and suggest that the conventional wisdom that Hillary will win by a huge margin might not be as inevitable as most of us once thought.

In his endorsement speech last Friday, Casey called Obama the underdog in Pennsylvania. “But we know something about that in Pennsylvania. We know that we’ve been underdogs, too.” One of the most recent polls, released by Public Policy Polling on Wednesday, has Obama leading Clinton 45 to 43 percent – suggesting Pennsylvanians may already be warming to the thought.

E-mail Marin at mec45@pitt.edu.