Eliyahu Gasson | editor-in-chief

The City of Pittsburgh hasn’t had a Republican mayor for 91 years.

The last GOP candidate to run the city was John S. Herron, who served as City Council president before ascending to the mayor’s office after his predecessor, Charles Kline, resigned following a conviction on 49 charges of malfeasance in 1933.

But shortly after, Herron lost the 1933 election to Democrat William McNair.

The Democratic Party has held control of the mayor’s office ever since, not once giving it up to any other political party.

“Pittsburgh is reflective of a national change that happened largely driven by the Great Depression and the stock market crash in 1929,” said Anne Madarasz, chief historian for the Heinz History Center.

Pittsburgh was one of the largest cities in the United States during the Great Depression with a population nearly double what it is today. With a center of industry and a heavily unionized blue-collar workforce, the policies brought by former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal had a great effect on voters who viewed the Democrats as the way out of the hardship of the Great Depression.

“Pittsburgh and cities like Chicago and New York become one of the key voting blocks that ushers in an era of Democratic leadership at the state level, the local level and at the national level,” Madarasz said. “You see mayors of northern urban cities riding the coattails of the policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal into office.”

Demographics also played a role in the Democrats’ new-found success in urban areas like Pittsburgh.

The abundance of industry in northern cities attracted Black people from the southern states during the Great Migration, adding to urban work forces and populations. Black Americans had mostly supported the Republican Party up until the Great Depression — a result of Abraham Lincoln’s success in ending slavery in the U.S.

Robert Lee Van, the editor and publisher of The Pittsburgh Courier, a prominent African-American newspaper, wrote in 1932 urging the paper’s readers to switch their support.

“You had Robert Vann … saying basically, ‘turn Lincoln’s portrait to the wall. It’s time to turn away from the Republicans and turn to the Democrats, who are showing interest and ability to attend to the needs of our community,’” Madarasz said.

Also, the connections immigrants had to the Democratic Party led to their success, according to Steven Conn, a professor of history at Miami University in Ohio.

“When all of those immigrants started to come over to places like Detroit and Chicago and Pittsburgh and they were being incorporated into the political system, it was the Democratic Party that welcomed them,” Conn said to The Duke. “And so that’s one reason why these major old industrial cities have a longstanding tradition of electing Democratic mayors, Democratic city councils and in some places … the Republican Party is more or less dead.”

Conn visited Duquesne on Tuesday as the main speaker for the history department’s annual History Forum Lecture titled “Demystifying Rural America” in which he compares how rural America is perceived with what he said is the reality of American society. He said the idea that rural America is made up of rugged individual noble farmers is a myth that has origins in a “deep suspicion of cities.”

“All through the 19th century, people write about the evils of cities and ‘what are cities even for? Well, they are sources of temptation and corruption.’ And increasingly as the 19th century goes along, and then certainly as the 20th century chugs along, they are sources of all kinds of people,” he said.

More recently, Conn said, the partisan divide between urban and rural communities has its origins in the 1960s and onward. The American ideal of rugged individualism led to a mistrust of the federal government, which has been perceived as an “intrusive force in [rural voters’] lives.”

“So when Democratic Congress start to pass environmental legislation like the Clean Water Act in 1972, all of a sudden that means my pig farm has to be run differently because I can’t now just dump my pig waste into the local river, which I’ve been doing for decades, because the water is so polluted … that makes me angry,” he said.

Former President Ronald Regan encapsulated the mistrust rural voters had toward the federal government, according to Conn.

“I think it was things that people were thinking already,” he said. “Social welfare programs are seen somehow as programs just for Black people. I think there is, in this rural conservatism, a strain of racial hostility we just can’t deny.”

Conn explained that the success of the Democratic Party in urban areas is the necessity of government to make cities work and the higher level of comfort Democratic voters have with the role of the federal government.

“You have municipal garbage pick-up. You have to have a mass transit system. All these things are instruments of government, and I think rural people continue to believe that they are self-sufficient and independent and pioneers and all this other stuff,” he said.

Tony Moreno is the Republican candidate for mayor this year, and it is his second time running after losing to Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey in 2021. But Moreno said he doesn’t see himself fitting into the label.

He was written in by voters as the Republican candidate, but according to reporting done by 90.5 WESA, the Republican Committee of Allegheny County and Moreno have some drama between them.

“It’s the only chance,” Moreno told The Duke about his status as the GOP candidate. “I ran as a Democrat because it’s a one-party city. I didn’t delve into politics. It was a question of ‘how do I get here?’ And I thought, ‘well, if there’s no Republicans running …’”

Moreno said he’s less focused on the partisan aspect of politics and sees himself more as an independent candidate. It was the same when he ran as a Democrat in the 2021 primary.

“In the world of politics, I don’t really fall into a slot. It’s easier for me to be where I’m at now without either party because they both want you to kowtow what they’re trying to present. I’m certainly not a socialist Democrat … and I come over to the Republican side, and I’m not speaking in the terms that they want me to speak. I’m not rah-rah MAGA enough at all,” he said. “Nothing else matters than fixing public safety and public works. Our city needs to be safe and it needs to be clean. That’s the only message I have.”

Moreno’s $4,000 in campaign donations trail far behind Democratic candidate Corey O’Connor’s $270,000 on hand, according to campaign finance reports released near the end of September.

Still, Moreno said it’s about time for the Democratic hold on Grant Street to end, whether he works with the Republican Party or not.

“Let’s just clean this slate here. Everybody’s deals are gonna be wiped off the board and that’s what I’m feeling right now,” he said. “[The Republican Party] want to have a big old party if they win … That’s not the celebration. The celebration is going to be because we’re going to get a chance to see how it really works without those influences …

“Without the old school Democrats from yesteryear sitting in Corey O’Connor’s office telling us how we’re going to continue with the old ways of going forward. It’s all going to be new. That’s the excitement I have.”

Eliyahu Gasson can be reached at gassone@duq.edu