most suprising county to switch?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Greene county, PA (the southwest corner co).

Gore won it by nearly 10% in 2000 and it has gone Democrat in every election except two (1928 and 1972) since 1892, which is the farthest back Leip's data is available. Dukakis also carried it by 30% in 1988, Mondale won it by nearly 20%.

Greene is (IIRC) mostly Catholic... it's a poor rural county and it says a lot about where the Kerry campaign went wrong that he lost it (even if it was by a handful of votes).
Eastern Greene is old mining territory and is heavily Democratic... either turnout was bad their or a lot of voters protest voted on abortion etc.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Coos County is traditionally Democratic (for NH anyways) And has cool mountains :-)

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Monmouth County, NJ going Bush.  This is usually pretty democratic turf.  I think the 9/11 factor had a lot to do with it switching.

Um... since 1904 it's only gone Democratic 4 times: 1912, 1964, 1996, 2000

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The Pittsburgh area has been trending Republican for years now. It used to be one of the staunchest Democratic areas. If the data is any indication, Fayette, Beaver, and Washington counties will also go GOP within the next 10 years, leaving only Allegheny and Erie counties as the only Democratic counties outside Eastern PA.

At state and local level it still is... at Presidential level abortion has seriously hurt Democratic candidates recently.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

How do you know it's abortion? There's no evidence that there's a greater percentage of single-issue abortion voters now than before, especially in southwest PA. The umbrella area that abortion falls under is moral values, true, however, the percentage of people who voted on that issue has actually fallen in recent years.

SW PA is heavily Catholic. For whatever reason, it's a bigger factor in Presidential voting in SW PA than it's been for a while.

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Recent Democratic presidential campaigns have ignored economic issues too much... and they've lost.