Battling in the ’burbs

Old money and high society are the core of the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia.

Chicago Tribune

ARDMORE, Pa. — The farmers market features a winery and a gourmet cheese stand, the local cricket club is thriving and some of the front lawns in this old-money suburban enclave look like the entrance to a national park.

If Barack Obama has any chance of beating Hillary Clinton in this state’s Democratic primary April 22, and a poll released Tuesday shows he is steadily narrowing her lead to single digits, he’s going to have to charm voters, especially women, in and around the Philadelphia suburbs they call the Main Line.

In this haven of old money and high society, Obama and Clinton are fervently wooing the economically conservative but socially liberal voters, many of whom are disenchanted with Republican politics once so dominant in this land of stately homes and private clubs.

“They’re the classic brie-and-Chablis voters,” said G. Terry Madonna, professor of public affairs and director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll. “They’re upscale, college-educated, very successful people who tend to be very liberal on cultural issues,” Madonna said. “They’re the types of voters who, 20 years ago, were Republican, and they moved away from the Republican Party partly because of its swing to the right.”

They’re also the type of Democrats whom Obama has been attracting in earlier primary states, and who now offer him an opportunity to cut into the advantage Clinton holds over him with rural, blue-collar and senior voters elsewhere in Pennsylvania.

The contest for Pennsylvania, once considered firmly in Clinton’s corner, has closed to within six percentage points, with Obama now trailing the New York senator 50 percent to 44 percent in the Keystone State, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll. It also shows the Illinois senator closing the gap among women and widening his lead among blacks in the state.

Yet Clinton can lay legitimate claim to the Main Line territory too, with its wealth of professional women who have made their way much the same way she has. Women have been the sturdy pillar of her candidacy, sustaining her especially in Rust Belts states such as Pennsylvania.

The Main Line communities, home also to some of the better-known liberal arts colleges, and their surrounding towns are a battleground in the Democratic primary, a target area in a state that could validate or break Clinton’s argument that she is the candidate who can win large battleground states in the fall.