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Animation by Kate Dehler for POLITICO | | Hershey, Pa., has been the capital of American confection for decades. It’s also been a center of conservatism: Milton Hershey himself was a staunch Republican, and according to local historian Lou Paioletti, back in the day “there was an unwritten expectation that the chocolate company workers be registered Republican.” But chocolate isn’t the only game in town anymore. Health care has become a major sector in Derry Township, with Penn State Health’s Hershey Medical Center and College of Medicine becoming the top private employer in Dauphin County. New proposals for developments — medical offices, single-family homes, condos — are springing up to keep pace with all the expansion. “With all this growth comes changed demographics — and shifting political dynamics,” writes Charles McElwee in this week’s Friday Read. From 2010 to 2022, as Penn State Health grew, so did the number of registered Democrats in Derry Township, jumping 19 percent — nearly even with Republicans. That’s due in part to the general leftward shift among health care professionals, a formerly Republican constituency that has become reliably Democratic, especially since the Covid pandemic, a time when many doctors got the impression that the GOP is hostile to science. Now, the party’s anti-expert reputation is combining with shifts in industry to create a worrying situation for the GOP ahead of 2024. “In a battleground state where candidates prevail with razor-thin winning margins, the changing voter composition of small and mid-sized suburban communities like Derry Township will shape the outcome of future Pennsylvania elections,” McElwee writes, “including next year’s presidential race.” Read the story.
| | | |  | “Henry, I’ll take a drug test when you take an IQ test.” Can you guess who said this about South Carolina Republican Henry McMaster in 1986? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**
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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell walks to the Senate chamber at the U.S. Capitol Sept. 6, 2023. | Photos by Francis Chung/POLITICO | Is Mitch McConnell OK? … Sen. Mitch McConnell has never been the chattiest friend of the press. But following two agonizing episodes in which the majority leader froze up in front of reporters, his reticence has taken on a grave new weight — particularly amid criticisms of America’s gerontocracy. And while a Capitol physician has denied armchair diagnoses — seizures, mini-strokes, after-effects of a concussion — we still haven’t got a straight answer to that question: Is Mitch McConnell OK? POLITICO’s Ian Ward joined a tense scrum of reporters on the Hill to find out.
| | | |  | Mei Xiang, Tian Tian and Xiao Qi Ji, the last three of the National Zoo’s giant pandas, are being repatriated to China. But their departure is more than a story about an iconic tourist attraction at the Washington park — it’s the latest twist in a 51-year geopolitical history. The basics (from Capital City columnist Michael Schaffer): - Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, the zoo’s original Pandas, arrived in 1972 as a gift from Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai at the time of Richard Nixon’s opening to China. - The zoo’s most popular attraction, the bears quickly became a symbol of the park and of the nation’s capital more broadly, even depicted on farecards for the city’s new Metrorail system. - Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling never successfully bred. So after they died in the 1990s, officials had to go back to the Chinese government in search of replacements. But by then, it wasn’t a matter of “panda diplomacy” gifts. It was about cold, hard cash. - Under the contracts governing subsequent pandas, the zoo borrows the bears for a fixed period of time (and a hefty price). After that, they go home — and so do any cubs they’ve managed to have. - Amid chilly relations between Washington and Beijing, the current contract lapsed. With the bears due to leave by December 7, the zoo is planning a nine-day send-off celebration starting Sept. 23. - A new lease might be a tough sell, politically. One bill introduced in Congress last year took aim at the provision requiring borrowed bears’ U.S.-born offspring to remain Chinese property. | | | | 
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So-called "horse race journalism" is over, at least for the primary season — and it's all because of Donald Trump, writes media critic Jack Shafer. | Benoit Photo/AP Photo | The Horse Race Is Over … Media critics have been salivating for an end to so-called horse race journalism in politics for a generation or two — criticizing reporters for treating campaigns like sports, reducing politics to a kind of game rather than analyzing substantive issues. Well, this year, they got their wish — only it was granted by an unexpected benefactor. “Donald Trump commands such a dominant position that it makes more sense to rely on the metaphors of weather to portray the campaign as a hurricane or avalanche rather than a sporting event,” writes POLITICO’s Jack Shafer. That says as much about the GOP as it does about the media.
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POLITICO illustration/Photos by AP; Getty Images | The Presidential Candidates’ Favorite Songs … The 2024 presidential candidates are busy pitching themselves on TV, at campaign stops and across reams of newsprint. But we wanted to get to know the real people behind the brands, so we asked the candidates that most intimate of questions: What are your top 20 songs? Turns out some of them have pretty good taste. Can you guess who loves Springsteen, who’s a Swiftie and who picked not one, but two Imagine Dragons songs?
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POLITICO illustration/Photos by iStock | Why Is Ron DeSantis Texting You? … Once seen as the only viable Trump alternative, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been battered by campaign staff shake-ups, an emerging narrative that he’s too awkward to lead and a failure not just to gain on the former president, but to peel away support from the rest of the GOP primary field. That’s despite massive investment in outreach and research from his favorite super PAC, Never Back Down, which made advertising pushes that haven’t generated the expected returns. But they say they’ve learned from their springtime experimenting and they’ve got another trick to try: Bypass TV, radio and even the internet, and go straight into voters’ phones — with text messages from a DeSantis A.I.
| | | **Who Dissed answer: That would be his Democratic opponent, Fritz Hollings, a senator with an ear for zingers whom McMaster had challenged to take a drug test amid the tough-on-crime posturing of the Reagan era. Perhaps due in part to his memorable retort, Hollings won reelection. McMaster later became governor of South Carolina in 2017. politicoweekend@email.politico.com | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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