by Fred Logan
The election of a Republican mayor in Pittsburgh, in and of itself, may not be very important to the national Republican Party establishment. After all, Pittsburgh is shrinking and by population is ranked the 66th-largest city in the entire United States.
But former Pittsburgh police officer Tony Moreno’s current campaign to be elected mayor of the city may be important to the GOP’s hopes and dreams for the 2022 elections for the Pennsylvania state government and the U.S. Congress, and also for the 2024 national elections for the White House and the US Congress. Pennsylvania was a key battleground state in 2020.
Win or lose, Moreno’s campaign should draw some public attention to GOP politics in Allegheny County, one of the Democratic Party’s two major strongholds in the state. This may, in some way, help to boost the GOP’s prospects in 2022 and 2024.
With that in mind, watch in the coming weeks for Moreno to move further toward the right; don’t be misled by the location of his June 28 campaign kickoff announcement in Homewood, a predominantly-Black neighborhood.
Watch in the days ahead for Trump to endorse Moreno, and to speak (about himself, of course) at a Moreno campaign rally in Pittsburgh.
White America is in flux, swinging this way and that, “Black Lives Matter” one day, the Proud Boys the next.
So, predicting the White vote is very difficult. Look at the track record over the last 13 years of the big-time professional political experts in the media and the universities.
The experts were wrong on Obama and Clinton in 2008, and Clinton and Trump in 2016. And they did not predict that in 2020 a defeated Trump would still receive some 70 million White votes, which is an indication of the astounding scale and scope of right-wing reaction and political instability in the United States.
An important question to consider here is how many Pittsburgh votes did Trump receive in 2020?
In 2021, the experts predicted the incumbent Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto would win the Democratic primary.
All of this is on the minds of Tony Moreno and the Republican Party’s movers and shakers.
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