Nov 11, 2023 3 min read

This week, most of the national headlines focused on the rough sledding Republicans had in Tuesday’s off-year elections, but in the counties outside Pittsburgh, the GOP romped.

Republicans maintained their majority hold on the Washington County Board of Commissioners, which they gained in 2019, and it was much the same tale in Fayette and Greene counties.

If you could fire up a time machine and go tell an observer of politics in these three counties 60 years ago that one day Republicans would hold a majority on the board of commissioners in all three, they would have thought you had just swallowed some pretty powerful hallucinogens. These are places that enthusiastically supported John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and even Adlai Stevenson when he was being clobbered elsewhere by Dwight Eisenhower. No one would have thought that one day they would be in thrall to the GOP.

But, there was another story of shifting political allegiances that happened in Pennsylvania this week. PennLive.com reported that the board of commissioners in Dauphin County, where Harrisburg is located, might for the first time in at least a century have a Democratic-majority board of commissioners. The outcome is still pending, since a Democratic challenger has a mere 42-vote lead over a Republican incumbent, and provisional, military and overseas ballots that have yet to be counted could erase that advantage.

Look also to Mt. Lebanon – once solidly Republican, its precincts mostly supported Democrat Sara Innamorato in the race to be Allegheny County executive.

But these stories illustrate how, as many a political philosopher has noted, there are no permanent victories in politics. Times change, people’s concerns change, issues change and the electorate itself changes. Consider that if you were a voter in Washington, Greene or Fayette counties who cast their first presidential ballot for Kennedy in 1960, you would now be in your 80s.

Earlier this year, the Observer-Reporter and the Herald-Standard reported on how Washington, Greene and Fayette counties had, over the last couple of decades, gone from being Democratic strongholds to Republican redoubts. The reasons cited include the growing divide between rural and urban America, the decline of manufacturing industries and their unionized labor force, voters whose loyalties were forged during the 1930s New Deal leaving the scene, the rise of evangelical Christianity as a potent political force and the way even local elections have become nationalized.

Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Atlanta’s Emory University, noted, “These things are all interconnected. We’ve seen this across the whole country pretty much in rural America and areas where you have a small nonwhite population and a less-educated white population and more religion….”

Will Washington, Greene and Fayette counties be dominated by Republicans 60 years from now, when our moment is as distant as the Kennedy era is from today? Quite possibly. But you probably shouldn’t bet a whole lot of money on it.