MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are debating again tonight.
Now, perhaps that been-there-done-that tone isn't justified this time. Though the candidates have held about 20 debates in the past 15 months, they have not shared a staged debate in more than six weeks.
The senators are facing off at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia tonight after a week of shifting polls and intense sparring.
Randall Miller is a history professor at St. Joseph University. He's been following the Pennsylvania campaign very closely. He joins us now from Philadelphia.
Welcome to the program.
P: Thanks for having me.
NORRIS: What are the issues that Pennsylvania voters seem to care most about?
P: Well, it depends where you are in Pennsylvania. It's a very difficult state to get a read on, because it's really five states in one.
In some ways, it's New York and New Jersey, if you look at the economy, and even the people here. In some ways, it's the Midwest. In some ways, it's Washington, Baltimore or a bit that's rural.
So the issues vary, but if they had to put them under a rubric, I think the economic issues across the state are very important. Now, of course, people everywhere are concerned about the credit crisis. People are concerned about jobs, about higher education. People are concerned about outsourcing - again, depending upon where you are. People are concerned about the cost of health care.
If you bundle all those things together, you get economic issues really being the big driving questions here in Pennsylvania, as they had become in Ohio. So, in that sense, that's been a redefinition of a campaign dictated by events, and the events are of course, the economy is going down the tubes.
NORRIS: Now that we've seen the candidates make a real effort to reach out to blue-collar voters - Hillary Clinton talking about her early experience with guns, Barack Obama going to the bowling alley. What about that large core of suburban voters in Pennsylvania?
P: Well, they're key, actually. I mean, if you do a tally sheet, one could say that Pennsylvania is really more Obama's country than it is Clinton country. Even though the early polls showed that Clinton was ahead, a lot of that was simply name recognition and what have you, and the Clintons are well-liked across Pennsylvania.
But suburban voters have been key in presidential elections, they were key in the election of Ed Rendell, who was actually a Clinton supporter. And in one sense, the way they go will probably determine the outcome of the election. If you actually look at the southeastern part of Pennsylvania, that has about 40 percent of the votes.
You're talking Philadelphia with a significant - but not only African-American population - likely Obama and then the counties around, many of them Republican but they've gone over the Democratic side just to get in on the action for this primary - those are the people that Rendell won when he won the governorship. And they're the same kinds of people that Obama should win which could give him a tremendous advantage here. If he gets enough votes coming out of this area here, in one sense, it almost doesn't make any difference what happens in the rest of the state.
NORRIS: I want to ask you about endorsements and how much they really matter. Senator Obama has picked up endorsements from some of the big papers. He just picked up an endorsement from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Hillary Clinton has some big political guns, Mayor Nutter in Philadelphia; the governor, Ed Rendell. How much do these really matter in the state?
P: Well, that's difficult to say because, again, you have things that are anomalies in areas where one would expect Clinton to do well, because of the profile of the state - ethnic, Catholic, working class, what have you - and she hasn't gotten any endorsements from the papers, which one would have expected. But on the other hand, you have, as you mentioned, major endorsements. But these endorsements give Clinton, in one sense, as a kind of credibility especially in areas that would traditionally be Obama's strengths.
And then there is this factor that there's no way to explain because it's a force of nature, and that is the governor, Ed Rendell, who is not just a supporter, he brings so much energy, he doesn't just say I'm supporting Clinton, he makes phone calls, he rearranges his schedules so he can be on stage with her and it's almost a love fest in some ways.
And this is good for Clinton, because in one sense, it provides not just that energy, but again, a kind of credibility and entree if you will, to groups that might be questioning, you know, her authenticity as much as anything else. And if nothing else you can say about Ed Rendell, our governor, is that he's the most authentic political figure you're going to find in the county today.
NORRIS: Randall Miller, thanks so much for talking to us.
P: It's been my pleasure.
NORRIS: Randall Miller is a history professor at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
