TL;DR: Adderall (although I do think this post is worth reading!).
Could be an odd map, since the reason he's so behind is because the Paterno cultists in central PA have made him their scapegoat.
Not really. Education cuts are by far his biggest liability. He also has a Blanche Lincoln problem (his base doesn't care for him, and the other side plus the middle despise him).
PA received, from the federal government, one-time funding earmarked for education, as part of the stimulus package. When that funding ran out, PA did fully not replace it with state funds, although the amount of state funds spent on education still increased. To spin that as an "education cut" is similar to the Republican claim that Obamacare "cuts Medicare by $700 billion." (In that it requires somewhat tortured logic and, you have to admit, is made with a level of disingenuousness). Plenty of other red and blue states with Republican and Democratic governors did not fully replace stimulus payments, without political controversy.
Corbett's ratings took their dive exactly coinciding with the Paterno saga, and the link is easy to see anecdotally; look at any news article about Corbett and half the comments will be from Paterno cultists.
Even though, as I alluded to above, a surprisingly high percentage of Paterno cultists are open about their views, there are presumably a fair few many who would feel uncomfortable actually verbalizing their subconscious feelings about the matter; i.e. saying that a child rapist should've escaped scrutiny so that the reputation of their alma mater's football team and coach could go untarnished.
I.e. they have unresolved cognitive dissonance. And the way people resolve cognitive dissonance, when they have an subconscious feeling but are feel they cannot admit to themselves how they are feeling, is to find some seemingly unrelated way to be able to outwardly express their subconscious feelings without admitting to themselves what the implications of those feelings are.
Lee Atwater expressed the concept well with his infamous quote about how a candidate might appeal to racist voters:
Now, what people often miss when they cite this quote is that Atwater is
not talking about how to "dog-whistle" in a way that will go over the heads of the most fashionable denizens of Manhattan and San Fran. Those people will accuse conservatives of being racists anyway, and even if they didn't, still wouldn't vote for them. What's changed is that "racist" has become, over the last 60 years, socially considered amongst the worst possible descriptors that could be applied to a person - basically up there with "rapist" and "terrorist," and not necessarily in that order either. Even actual Klansmen will usually deny being "racists" ("it isn't racist to say that the white race can be proud of our culture too").
People who subconsciously hold racist views nevertheless don't want to think of themselves, or be thought of by others, as "racists" - considered by all respectable people, and they think of themselves as respectable people, to be the worst non-violent modern sinners there are. So a candidate seeking to appeal to them can't, in this day and age, explicitly invoke race. Not because eliding the issue of race will in any way appeal to the NPR enthusiasts of Ann Arbor (whose potential sources of cognitive dissonance are limited to the fact that they're terrified of setting foot in Detroit), but because your retired autoworker in Wyandotte might well be outraged by "hip-hop culture," but would never in a million years want to associate herself with "racism." Non-racial racial politics isn't necessary to keep the anti-racists in the fold; it's necessary to keep the
racists in the fold, by resolving their cognitive dissonance.
Back to the "education cuts" issue. This is the sort of thing that would normally be a sort of partisan he-said she-said stalemate. Here in MA, there has been a scandal at the Department of Children and Families, where a blind eye was turned to cases of child abuse that ultimately resulted in deaths of several children. When Charlie Baker was HHS secretary under Gov. Weld, for fiscal year 1996 he was able to hire new caseworkers and increase the caseload at DCF while coming in about $1 million under budget. So Coakley alleged that Baker's coming in under budget meant he starved DCF of funds. In actuality it just shows that he was an effective civil servant, and it couldn't possibly have any relation to the recent scandal because anyone who was a child in 1996 is an adult today.
Baker, for his part, has attacked Coakley for defending the Commonwealth against a lawsuit brought against it by a non-profit childrens' advocacy group alleging (correctly, as it turns out) that the DCF was not doing enough to protect children under its supervision from abuse. While defending the Commonwealth (which won the case), she painted what we now know was a too-rosy picture of DCF. But this too is an unfair criticism, because it's the job of the Attorney General to provide the best possible defense to the Commonwealth when it is sued. Unfortunately, the best possible defense was too good of a defense, but that's hardly a reason to pin the scandal on Coakley instead of those more directly responsible.
If you look at any story about the MA gubernatorial race, the comments section will have masses of people repeating each side's DCF attacks, with ALLCAPS and multiple exclamation points!!! aplenty. But one thing you'll also notice is that only the most rabid partisans are much impressed by their attack-ad paraphrasing. Nobody replies to one of those comment threads to say that it convinced them to change their vote. Both the rabid partisans of the other side
and less intense types will simply reply with the obvious rebuttals.
Nobody likes to think of themselves as mindless partisans, so mindless partisans resolve
their cognitive dissonance by seizing on the first attack line they hear as the
most outrageous thing they've
ever heard, final proof of how all the Rs/Ds are corrupt evil liars and they are completely justified in not even considering their candidates. If they secretly suspect that said attack has a loose relationship with the truth, cognitive dissonance can easily be resolved by deciding that it is an incontrovertible and hugely important fact which ought to be urgently disseminated across multiple news article comment sections with copious ALLCAPS and !!!! to show people just how angry it ought to make them.
The education issue in PA would normally be something that would, like the DCF attacks in MA, end up being two circlejerks amongst mindless partisans that ordinary people wouldn't pay much mind to. Ds would say Corbett cut education spending (including the stimulus payment), while Rs would say that no, actually Corbett increased education spending (not including the stimulus), while Ed Rendell cut education (not including the stimulus). Both groups of partisans would repeat their talking points in a well-capitalized and well-emphasized manner, and just about nobody genuinely on the fence would find either side the least bit persuasive.
Your average Penn State football fanatic is furious that their team is now the most hated in all of college athletics, that it was sanctioned by the NCAA, and most importantly that their beloved coach had his name dragged through the mud and died of a broken heart. So they direct their anger at the guy who started the investigation which caused all those things to happen. A surprisingly high number will just come right out and say it. Another group also subconsciously want to exact revenge on Corbett for destroying Paterno, but they feel cognitive dissonance; they can't quite bring themselves to actually say they'd
really rather Sandusky have gone unpunished and kept on raping more young children.
So they resolve their cognitive dissonance by finding some other reason to justify their hatred of Corbett that doesn't have to do with the Sandusky/Paterno case. The Democrats are saying Corbett cut education, so that's the
most outrageous thing they've
ever heard; that horrible man treating the children almost as bad as he treated poor Joe! (Tom Corbett: He hurt children far more than Coach Joe ever did!)
So the comment threads will be filled with people identifying themselves (accurately) as Republicans or swing voters and who profess to finding the Corbett education cuts argument utterly convincing as proof of his total moral depravity.
Perhaps the denizens of Pennsyltucky are genuinely, contra stereotype, super-exercised about their Republican governor transferring insufficient funds from their region of the state towards pedagogy in Philly. But that is kinda odd, given that Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Ohio all didn't fully replace the next year the stimulus funds they received for education, and yet that move was pretty uncontroversial in all of them (at worst, unconvincing dual partisan circlejerks as described above). In fact, O'Malley was term-limited, but Christie, Cuomo, and Kasich all were or are about to be reelected by huge margins.
Hmm.
