Oct 29, 2014 3 min read

A local poll shows Washington County’s likely voters favor Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, while statewide polls show incumbent Tom Wolf has a strong lead.

Washington & Jefferson College students performed the poll under the direction of political science department chairman Dr. Joseph DiSarro. It showed 44 percent of likely voters prefer Corbett, while 37 percent prefer Wolf. Nineteen percent were undecided.

The poll used a tax question as a control to verify the results. Fifty-five percent of respondents said they would not favor an increase in state income tax to pay for education, while 45 percent said they would.

The Franklin & Marshall College Keystone poll shows a strong preference toward Wolf, but the gap is narrowing. Corbett was trailing behind Wolf by 20 percent in September and by 14 percent in October among likely voters.

“Washington County’s a little different,” DiSarro said.

He said the county is more conservative than Pennsylvania’s more heavily populated regions.

The statewide poll showed 10 percent of likely voters were still undecided in October.

An Observer-Reporter poll showed 13 percent of those surveyed are not planning to vote. Four percent said they were not sure. The survey was based on 157 responses.

DiSarro said the election is not generating very much interest, which makes results unpredictable. He said undecided voters tend to vote for the incumbent.

In Washington County, he said he thinks favoring Corbett is based on one key issue.

“What this poll seems to suggest is folks aren’t really happy about the severance tax,” he said.

He said he thinks Wolf’s proposed tax on Marcellus Shale drilling companies for extraction would limit exploration in the area.

“They’re thinking about their pocketbooks,” he said. “They’re thinking about the economic implications.”

He said education is too complex an issue to fix simply by increasing funding with taxes.

Wolf’s strategy to focus on education funding as his main issue is working based on the results from most polls, DiSarro said. But Corbett’s campaign could benefit by focusing more on his plans for school vouchers, he said.

DiSarro said he was not surprised that the results of the local poll varied from statewide numbers.

“Things are going reasonably well in this area and we’re experiencing things that we haven’t experienced since the days of steel,” he said. “Then you’re going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg for Western Pennsylvania.”