Democrats take the lead in Chester County
The 2020 year brought reason for Chester County Democrats to cheer.
In May, figures kept by the state Department of State showed that those county voters registering as Democrats had surpassed registered Republicans, making it the last of the suburban ring counties around traditionally “blue” Philadelphia in which that was the case. The county had, as many had predicted for months, turned, if not “blue,” then a deep shade of “purple.”
Then in November, the 182,372 votes cast by county voters for Democratic presidential candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr. helped propel the former vice president to victory in the hard race for the White House. County commissioners’ Chairwoman Marian Moskowitz, the county’s first Democrat to lead the county’s threeperson board of commissioners, was among those who signed documents in the Electoral College vote in early December.
As of the latest count, there are 152,051 Democrats in the county, compared with 150,661 registered Republicans. The gap between the two major parties, once seen as virtually insurmountable, has been closing for the past 12 years at least, and now stands at 41.5 percent for Democrats and 40.9 percent for Republicans, a slight, but historic, edge.
“More Democrats than Republicans in Chester County?” said Dick Bingham, chairman of the Chester County Democratic Committee when news of the flip broke. “Who would have believed it?” Republican majorities and pluralities in neighboring Bucks, Delaware, and Montgomery counties disappeared in the Democratic surge years ago.
Bingham, who has seen the GOP margin erode in his home county almost monthly since he took over as head of the party in 2018, noted that 20 years ago there were over 80,000 more Republicans than Democrats, and 18,000 more in 2016, when he said Republican registration peaked. “Since that time there has been Republican flight, decreasing their registration by over 7,000, and a Democrat stampede, gaining over 11,000 new registrations in that same time.
“The registration flip has occurred over many years with literally hundreds of people working very hard to make it happen,” Bingham said. “And the trend is accelerating. As we have proven over the last three election cycles, Democrats win the vast majority of countywide races even with a registration disadvantage. We have no intention of letting up now.”
Even without a registration edge, the party has been able to replace all the Republican Row Office elected officials in the past two local election cycles. The party now controls all the seats in the county courthouse save one.
In addition to swinging
the county to Biden’s favor, the Democratic Party was able to re-elect all of its incumbent legislators to their posts in Washington and Harrisburg, retain a newly opened state Senate seat by electing state Rep. Carolyn Comitta to replace the outgoing state Sen. Andy Dinniman, and flip one of its three state Senate seats from Republican to Democrat with the election of Birmingham labor leader John Kane in the 9th District.
Things were not always thus. In 1980, the year of the Reagan Revolution, when the GOP presidential candidate took 60 percent of the county’s vote, Republican voters outnumbered Democrats better than
2-to-1. It was remarked that had half of the county’s then-92,920 GOP voters dropped off the face of the earth on Election Day 1980, they would still best the county’s 40,467 Democratic voters by almost 6,000 voters.
The party’s presidential electoral victories continued through the 1980s and 1990s, topping off with a 70 percent edge for Reagan in 1984. But in 2008, thenU.S. Sen. Barack Obama scored a historic victory in the county by winning 54 percent of the vote (Lyndon Johnson got the same percentage in 1964 in the wake of the John Kennedy assassination.) Obama basically tied the Republican nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, and then Hillary Clinton defied the state results in 2016 by out polling Donald Trump 52 percent to 43 percent.
“Chester County voters are looking for the qualified candidates who can get results, and it will be important that Democrats continue to recruit candidates who are qualified, capable, and can appeal to all of Chester County,” said Commissioner Josh Maxwell, who joined Moskowitz as the county’s new leadership in the courthouse.
“This trend is not just indicative of people changing their party registrations, although that’s a big part, it’s also because our county is growing in numbers and new people are moving here and staying here because they love it here,” Maxwell, who previously served as mayor of Downingtown, said. “A whole new generation of folks new to Democratic politics and politics in general are winning seats on school boards and councils.
“Now that the numbers are in our favor, we must govern effectively and continue to improve our wonderful county.”