Profile: Pennsylvania’s Eighth Congressional District

Pennsylvania’s Eighth Congressional District is a surprisingly compact, swing district in a state that is known for elaborately gerrymandering its Congressional seats. It covers Bucks County and contains one of Philadelphia’s larger suburbs, Levittown, along with a series of smaller cities, towns, and rural areas. And in the last presidential election year, it illustrated exactly why it is considered a swing district: President Obama and Mitt Romney tied with 49% each. In this case study, we examine the Eighth's demographics and past election results, as well as observing how national issues play out in the local media. Our analysis shows that while the national dialogue tends to be about stark contrasts and black-and-white propositions, residents of the Eighth District are presented with a more nuanced perspective. This case study highlights trade and manufacturing, but the general lesson that a national, one-size-fits-all approach seems out of touch for swing districts is true throughout the competitive districts that decide control of the House of Representatives. We conclude that the dominant national representation of these issues in the national press—trade is bad or manufacturing is dead—fails to capture how these issues are covered locally.

District Overview

Pennsylvania’s Eighth Congressional District is compact, comprised mainly of Bucks County, with a small portion of northern Montgomery County (about 10% of district residents) as well.¹ Bucks—one of the three original counties founded by William Penn—has something of a dual nature. Lower Bucks is more heavily settled, with subdivision filled townships and census-designated places like Levittown (population 53,000), one of William Levitt’s post-war assembly-line suburbs. Lower Bucks is the site of former steel mills that relied on the ocean-liner navigable Delaware River. Upper Bucks is more bucolic, with rolling hills and small boroughs, although it is still suburban in character. Bucks has no large cities, and of the 23 boroughs (Pennsylvania’s legal term for a small city or village) only five have more than 8,000 residents and none more than 10,000 residents.²

The Congressional District is doing fairly well, economically speaking. In June, the non-seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 4.6%, a few ticks lowers than the national rate of 5.1%.³ The manufacturing industry is still an important industry sector in the Eighth, employing 49,000 individuals.⁴ And while it is no longer the behemoth that it was in decades past, the manufacturing sector may be growing in this area, driven by newer, modern outfits.⁵ Other important industries include education, health care, and biotech.⁶

Demographic Snapshot

To see why the Eighth District is often competitive, it is helpful to look at demographic differences between it and two more ideologically tilted districts: Pennsylvania’s Second District, where Democratic representation is the norm, and the Tenth District, where Republicans have the seat locked-up. For starters, even though the two districts are only a few miles apart in Southeastern Pennsylvania, the purple Eighth is entirely suburban while the blue Second District, based in Philadelphia, is nearly all urban.⁷ The red Tenth District, stretching from the central part of the state to the northeastern corner, is over 60 points more rural than the purple Eighth and almost 75 points less suburban, based on a zip code analysis of the 2012 American Community Survey.⁸

Even more notable is the difference in median household income between these blue, red, and purple districts. Households in the purple Eighth out-earn residents of the blue Second District by an amount larger than the Second’s median income itself—$73,522 for the purple Eighth and $34,928 for the blue Second. That’s a difference of $38,594 per household. The purple Eighth District also beats out the red Tenth District in median income by $23,535.⁹ The poverty rate in the purple Eighth District is more than 21 points lower than in the blue Second and half that of the red Tenth, while the number of households with six-figure incomes in the purple Eighth is nearly 20 points higher than either of the other two.

Politics and Elections

The purple Eighth District was held by a Democrat for most of the 1980s (although by narrow margins), before becoming reliably Republican throughout the 1990s. By the mid-2000s, it began to feature some of the most hotly contested House races in the country. Current incumbent Republican Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick won an open seat in 2004, lost two years later to Democratic Iraq War veteran Patrick Murphy in the 2006 Democratic wave, and then won again in the Republican Tea Party wave of 2010.¹⁰ In the two most recent elections, Fitzpatrick cruised to victory comfortably, outperforming Mitt Romney in 2012 by well over 20,000 votes (8 points). This year, he has decided not to run for reelection. Instead, the Republican candidate is Fitzpatrick’s brother Brian, a former FBI agent.¹¹

Democrats see the open seat as a target and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee placed the district on their “Red to Blue” list before the party had even selected a candidate.¹² The Democratic primary election was won by State Representative Steve Santarsiero, who had the backing of organized labor.¹³ Especially in a presidential year, the district is expected to be extremely competitive, with the race considered a toss-up by the Cook Political Report, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, and the Rothenberg and Gonzales Political Report.¹⁴

Election Results under Current District Lines¹⁵

Local Issues

To better understand competitive districts like Pennsylvania’s Eighth District, we examined how nationally-important issues play out on the ground. Messages about policy and politics won’t resonate with voters if they are keyed to a polarized national debate instead of the reality as local voters experience it.

In order to highlight the differences or similarities between the national and local conversations about important issues, Third Way has undertaken an analysis of the local media in the district. In January of this year we began tracking five topics in six area newspapers prevalent in the local media market, generating 161 results for analysis. The topics we focused on were k-12 education, health care, manufacturing, trade, and racial issues. Every week, we archived relevant articles, editorials, op-eds, and letters-to-the-editor from the Bucks County Courier Times, Intelligencer, Midweek Wire, Patch.com, as well as the Philadelphia papers the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Philly.com. The goal was to focus on local salience, and national wire stories were excluded. This analysis highlights issues surrounding trade and manufacturing, two topics that received a lot of attention.

We found a greater level of nuance than is reflected in the national conversation. We selected two issue areas that are particularly relevant to the Eighth District—trade and manufacturing—but believe that our findings illustrate that there is a larger lesson to be learned about how competitive districts are different from a typical Democratic or Republican stronghold.

National debates on trade and manufacturing tend to be black-and-white and boiled down to sound bites. Trade is either good for America or it is destroying jobs, manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas and aren’t coming back. Yet in the purple Eighth District, the debate over trade and manufacturing is both more concrete and more complicated. Based on our media analysis, residents of the district are presented with information on both the benefits of trade and the impact on regional jobs. Although the manufacturing industry has undergone many changes, people in the district are seeing evidence of new opportunities in manufacturing and local businesses and workers adapting. Understanding how national debates on issues like these translate at the local level provides us with a fuller picture of the world that voters inhabit in swing districts.

Free Trade

While much of the national narrative is focused on who reaps the benefits of free trade and who bears the burdens, the language can be starkly black-and-white. Trade is either America’s ticket to economic success in the 21st century, or it is destroying jobs. Yet swing voters tend to believe that we live in a global economy and trade is an important part of modern life, which squares with our earlier public opinion research into the issue.¹⁶ In the Eighth District, residents are exposed to both the benefits of trade and the positive impact on American jobs.¹⁷

For example, the port of Philadelphia has expanded over the past couple of years and is looking to add more space to accommodate recent surges in wood pulp. The pulp comes primarily from Brazil and Chile before being distributed to manufacturers in Pennsylvania, across the northeast, and into Canada to make everything from paper towels to diapers. The wood pulp business has more than doubled recently, creating work for stevedores and terminal employees, and there is further need for an expansion to accommodate the dynamic growth.¹⁸ 

This is part of larger strategy for the region to position itself to take advantage of global trade. Earlier this year the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia and the World Trade Center of Greater Philadelphia unveiled a plan to expand exports in the region. Already Philadelphia metro area exports about $32 billion in sales, supporting 201,000 jobs. The goals of the new plan are to expand capacity and catalyze export growth. They estimate that the region could see $6.3 billion annually in new exports, creating an additional 35,000 jobs.¹⁹

However, trade debates in the local press highlight concern over trade’s impact on some American workers. In the opinion section of The Bucks County Courier Times, there was recently a robust back and forth between supporters and opponents of expanded free trade that illustrates this conversation. 

These are examples from nine op-eds and letters-to-the-editor from earlier this year. One writer’s op-ed argued that “China has our money, but we have their products” and asked that if “Americans spent $482 billion last year to buy Chinese goods but the Chinese no longer have the $482 billion worth of goods to sell[, why] is that a problem?”²⁰ In response, one commenter said:

"Trade made America great, when it was in addition to production[.] People like the author see nothing wrong with "free trade" because he can get cheap shoes. Abandoning production to concentrate on consuming has made us debt ridden and [dependent]. Paying countries to produce things which we then import has increased our poverty."²¹

A letter in response to the op-ed said that trade proponents “never considered the money turnover rate” and stated that money sent to other counties stays in those countries and costs American’s jobs.²² This local debate shows that voters are presented with information about the struggle to ensure the U.S. engages in and benefits from the global economy without losing domestic jobs.

Manufacturing

Manufacturing jobs in America have been disappearing for decades, and the Eighth District, which was long a bastion for companies that made things, has seen the industry shrink as well.²³ As manufacturing jobs shrunk in America, the national narrative became relatively gloomy—jobs have been shipped overseas and aren’t coming back. However, Bucks County still retains a core of advanced, high-skilled manufacturing jobs, and there is a sense of optimism that the industry will continue to be an important source of jobs, even as it goes through ups-and-downs.²⁴ What follows is an analysis of twenty articles and op-eds about manufacturing in the Eighth district from earlier this year.

For example, one local business detailed how it had transformed from a small cabinet-making operation to a national supplier of fixtures for retail stores through innovation. When discussing the changes in the economy and the shift towards online retail, one owner said, “They’ve always closed and reopened stores. It is part of the cycle. There is some adjustment because of the online buying, but that’s OK as long as they adjust to it.”²⁵ 

Indeed, the area hosts an annual ManuFest, focusing on local manufacturing job opportunities in the area. More than 40 local businesses participated, touting the value of technical education for students looking for career paths. The event draws attention to manufacturing in the region with the aim of bridging the gap between young people and businesses who “are looking for the next generation to help fill positions because there are companies that can’t expand without good people.”²⁶

Other stories throughout the local press focused on modern manufacturing, highlighting its “tremendous growth” and how the industry is changing. One company is combining older workers such as machinists with younger ones who have computer science skills. Manufacturing is changing. As one CEO put it, “We used to hire machinists, people who were coming from the tooling industry, people that could run milling machines, lathes. . . . Now we hire 'degreed' mechanical engineers to do everything.”²⁷ This type of advanced manufacturing is also tied to another important local source of jobs, the pharmaceutical industry, and media coverage reflected the ties between the two, such as innovative 3-D printed medicinal pills.²⁸

The impact of energy policy on manufacturing was also a source of local conversation. Although natural gas fracking does not happen inside the Eighth District itself (or any part of Southeastern Pennsylvania), the impact of having a voluminous source of affordable energy nearby to manufacturing was often discussed in the local media. Industry figures penned several op-eds discussing how the shale gas boom was good for manufacturing.²⁹ One writer said that “[t]hanks to an abundance of cheap gas, we are seeing a resurgence in manufacturing” and that “with the new energy reality, some companies that had relocated overseas are migrating back, bringing millions of dollars in new investment with them - and thousands of jobs.”³⁰

These local stories show that residents of the Eighth Congressional district are witnessing the evolution of manufacturing. In their community papers, they see technological change has disrupted existing industries and that advanced production processes require us to rethink who does the manufacturing, shifting from hard hats to grad caps. Instead of focusing on the job loss, like the pessimistic national narrative, our media analysis of the Eighth suggests that there is some optimism about the future of manufacturing that has an important role to play in the local, 21st century economy.

Conclusion

Pennsylvania’s Eighth District is a wealthy, white suburb, looking very different from the safe blue and red districts in the state. National framing of political issues may not effectively translate to the local level, where nuance is appreciated and there are important differences between voters in competitive districts and those who live in seats that are safely won by one or the other political party. As our analysis of local media indicates, residents of the Eighth see manufacturing evolving with the times and recognize the complexities in policy debates over issues such as energy and free trade. A one-size-fits-all approach won’t suffice in these types of swing districts, and both sides would do well to understand that.

Appendix

Demographics of Select Pennsylvania Congressional Districts³¹