In 2017 Brian Zidek and Kevin Madden won seats on the 5-member Delaware County Council. It was a big deal. Zikdek and Madden are Democrats, and NO DEMOCRATS had ever won seats on Delco Council.
Some fairly simple arithmetic will tell you that the Republicans still countrol Delco Council, for now. But unless there’s a significant reversal in Delaware County’s recent voting trend, this year’s council election could be the GOP’s last hurrah.
Maybe it was Tom Wolf’s charismatic personality that enabled him to win almost 2/3 of the vote in Delaware County last year.
Or not. More likely, most of the huge Delco turnout in last year’s midterm was responding to another politician – one from New York, who spends a lot of time in Boca Raton, and who occassionally visits Washington, D.C.
Don’t expect to see anything like last year’s blowout in this year’s Council race. But Republicans are going to have to do something even more extraordinary than what they did in 2015, when their Council candidates ran 14.9% ahead of Tom Corbett’s abysmal 2014 showing. Otherwise, they will become the former majority party on Delco Council.
What will this tell us about 2020?
First of all, look at the turnout. The 2017 Council race brought out almost 17% more voters than in 2015. But a whopping 36% more Delco voters came out for the 2018 Midterm, than for the 2014 election. If Democrats win control of council, but turnout is the same or less than it was in 2017, you can make a plausible argument that this election was partially or even mostly about what happens in Media, not Washington. But if Democrats can top the 51.3% that they notched in 2017, and turnout for 2019 vs. 2015 is anywhere near the 36% increase we saw last year, then at least in this part of Pennsylvania, the Blue Wave will still be going strong. And in all likelihood, in 2020, Delco Democrats will be able to give their presidential candidate significantyly more than the 66,735 vote margin that they gave to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
On the other the hand, if the Republicans can somehow hold their majority on Council, Democrats might try to spin it a as local phenonenon, but in reality, that would be ample evidence that the Blue Wave is washed up.