Tuesday on the RCP Podcast, RCP senior elections analyst Sean Trende talks about his new piece, the first in a series based on a new large-sample poll of residents of southwestern Pennsylvania from RealClear Opinion Research and Emerson Polling: “Restoring Trust in the Heart of PA’s Political Realignment” “Part of the reason we chose this region is it has the city of Pittsburgh. It’s got typical big city problems, it’s trying to reclaim a tax base that’s moved out to the suburbs, it’s trying to reinvent itself as a tech marketplace as the steel industry is gone, and you’ve also got this rural area in Appalachia,” he explained. “Michael Dukakis carried all these counties in Pennsylvania, but today they’re overwhelmingly Republican. So not only do we get a nice diversity in this region that we can kind of break down into subgroups and cross tabs, but we’re in an area that is ground zero for one of the most remarkable transformations in America.” “We’re going to be looking at big picture things. Who are the people that trust the government, who are the people that don’t?” he explained. “What makes this really unique for a regional study is we have a sample size of around 1,500 respondents, which means we can really get a granular look.” “We’ll also look at brain drain, why 18–29-year-olds are leaving,” Trende added. “That’s not an exaggeration: about 70% of young people plan to move, compared to older residents.” “All of this lays the foundation for future work. And for the stats geeks, yes, we’ll be doing regression analysis to try to find the fundamental drivers of the lack of trust in this region.” “Our mantra is to meet the voters where they are, even in places where we don’t think their concerns are well-founded; we’re mostly interested in reporting them. This isn’t necessarily about ‘fixing’ these voters. It’s also about giving corporate leaders, government leaders, community leaders, and politicians an understanding of what they need to do to regain trust in this region,” he said.
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