Jim O’Toole is politics editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

On Jan. 10, his fourth day as Pittsburgh’s new mayor, Bill Peduto told a left-leaning crowd that his very arrival heralded a new dawn. “There has become a chasm, a canyon, between the haves and the have-nots,” he said. “Tuesday, Pittsburgh changed from an old boys’ network city to a progressive city.”

That may have been premature, and a bit self-congratulatory, but it was not too far off the mark. The city has changed, but in recovering from the steel bust and the crackup of the old order, the old boys’ club that steered the city through the bad times has faded. Gone are the days when a small group of white men could sit in the Duquesne Club downtown and hash out the city’s future; the industrial labor unions that for years dominated urban machine politics here have a less privileged seat at the table. Pittsburgh’s political world today is much more multipolar, with new groups competing for the resources of a government that continues to struggle financially despite the region’s overall economic turnaround.


The newer political players include most prominently the powerful “eds and meds” community—the universities and hospitals that long ago surpassed manufacturing as the region’s largest employers. Service unions have taken a place alongside the city’s traditional labor establishment, while brainy high-tech entrepreneurs, foundation executives and neighborhood groups vying for development dollars all jostle for position as they press the new city administration to back their priorities.

As for party politics, Pittsburgh is still an overwhelmingly Democratic town. The city hasn’t elected a Republican as mayor or even as a council member since before the Depression. Its Democratic Party still has an active structure of ward and committee officers. But the party’s clout has waned over the last generation, as have the influences of the industrial unions, the Roman Catholic Church and other large organizations that once provided an unchallenged and seemingly unchanging civic structure.

The city’s political shifts reflect the dramatic demographic changes of an old city getting younger—and helped produce it. Peduto, an enthusiastic 49-year-old former councilman who tweets almost as much as Cory Booker, ran on appeals to “the new Pittsburgh.” He embraced a trendy, bottom-up, community-based approach to development, in contrast to rule of power brokers that have characterized much of the city’s history. At the same time, he has forged alliances with the city’s large foundation community, whose resources are the heritage of the 19th-century fortunes of the industrialists who once made it the Steel City.

Peduto won an overwhelming general-election victory, with 84 percent of the vote, against Josh Wander, a Republican whose previous claim to fame came from starring in an episode of “Doomsday Preppers.” Wander’s assessment of his chances were reflected in the fact that he spent much of the fall campaign working on a private security contract in Israel.

It was the Democratic primary that really mattered, and here, the city’s changing demographics clearly helped Peduto’s victory, but they didn’t make it a sure thing. His predecessor, Luke Ravenstahl, elected at the ripe young age of 26, had seen his popularity erode during his seven years in office. But he retained the support of much of the city’s business and development community and would have been a formidable contender if he hadn’t rocked Pittsburgh’s political world with a last-minute decision not to seek re-election. Peduto’s chief rival in the sharply contested four-way primary was a more traditional Democrat, former state Auditor General Jack Wagner, who actually led in one poll before Peduto surged ahead to a double-digit victory.

The succession of Democratic landslides in the city contrasts with a strong Republican tide in the surrounding area. Pittsburgh was once the figurative capital of a reliably Democratic region. Increasingly, along with its surrounding county, Allegheny, it’s becoming more and more a Democratic island in a Republican sea.

That trend began with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. For the decades after that, those outlying counties, such as Westmoreland County, a mix of older industrial towns and newer, more affluent suburbs to Pittsburgh’s east, continued to vote Democratic in local and congressional elections, but trended Republican in statewide and national contests. More recent results suggest they’re not Reagan Democrats anymore—they’re Republicans.

The congressional seat that includes the city is held by Democratic Rep. Mike Doyle, who was first elected in 1994 to replace Republican Rick Santorum, who had gone on to serve in the Senate. Doyle’s district inherited the city when it was combined with another heavily Democratic district in the round of redistricting following the 2000 Census. It’s now the only Democratic-held congressional district west of the Susquehanna River, which bisects the state from its northern tier to the Maryland border. President Obama won the state easily twice, by 10 points in 2008 and by a still comfortable five points in 2012. But his margins were built mainly on his votes in the east. In both years, the 14th was the only western Pennsylvania district that went his way.

For decades, Pittsburgh’s population was one of the oldest in the country. Chris Briem, a University of Pittsburgh economist and expert on the region’s demographics, noted late last year, however, that new Census estimates show that for the first time in recent memory, the proportion of the city’s population aged 65 or older was less than for the nation as a whole. Briem’s statistics show that those older residents, born when heavy manufacturing was the heart of the city’s economy, are on average less well educated than their peers across the country. Now, in an economy driven by educational and medical institutions, the younger cohorts of the city’s workforce are among the most educated in the country. According to 2010 Census estimates, for the younger portion of its workforce, those aged 25-34, Pittsburgh was tied with Washington D.C., and ahead of Boston and New York, in the proportion of its workforce holding graduate professional degrees. “It’s not just that we’ve evolved; we’ve gone from one extreme to another, to one of the most highly educated work forces in the nation,” Briem told me. “I have to believe that has some impact on politics.”

At least anecdotally, there’s some evidence that that’s the case, if measured by the social attitudes associated with a younger population. Three of the five city council members elected in the fall were women. In all, four of the nine-member panel are now women, a high-water mark for female representation on the city’s legislature. And when the council organized for its new session, Bruce Kraus, its first openly gay member, was elected president, making him first in line to become mayor if a vacancy were to occur. This milestone of sorts was attended by relatively little comment and essentially no controversy. “When he was elected to council [in 2008], the headline was, ‘first openly gay council member elected.’ When he became president it was, ‘Kraus elected president,’” Peduto told me. “There’s been a shift in the culture, an acceptance … the city has shifted to a more progressive stance on social issues.”

Whether the social and economic changes drove or were driven by politics might be a chicken-or-the-egg question, but even most politicians credit the city’s new intellectual infrastructure for the fact that it has done relatively well in the years immediately before and since the financial crisis.

To be sure, the political establishment recognized and, at least at the margins, nurtured the vision of a high-tech economy in the wake of the steel industry’s devastation. At a time when earmarks were still a badge of political honor, figures such as the late Sen. Arlen Specter and Rep. John Murtha, from nearby Johnstown, steered millions of federal dollars to the city’s various research coffers from their powerful perches on the Senate and House Appropriations committees. Former Mayor Tom Murphy points to his role in steering state pension funds to seed high-tech investments in the region. But, referring to a former Carnegie Mellon University president, Murphy said, “Dr. [Richard] Cyert was the one for me who was driving this conversation. He was the first person I heard who said the universities could be the economic drivers for the region.”

Murphy left office amid controversy over his financial stewardship. But while not all of his initiatives to remake the city panned out, he is credited with laying crucial groundwork for the urban amenities that have helped build the city’s newfound buzz. He attracted hundreds of millions in state dollars to build new ballparks, and he was a strong advocate of riverfront rehabilitation, including the creation of miles of bike trails that now line the three rivers. “If you look at the stuff we were doing, the riverfront trails, the ballparks, the whole focus, the urgency was: How do we create jobs, how do we create a great place?” Murphy told me. “How do we build a city [so] that people will say, ‘It’s not near the ocean, not warm, but it’s a great place’? At the time it wasn’t good politics; then it became good politics.”

“Fast forward to 2003,” Peduto says. “You have people like Richard Florida and others talking about this ‘creative class.’ The pioneers were there, [building] not only the economy but the diversity of the city itself. You see it across the board, you see it across the board in the non-profit community, in business, and it’s a much different city.”

The waning power of an old city machine was symbolized by the election of the late Mayor Pete Flaherty who, running as “Nobody’s boy,” triumphed over the Democratic establishment chosen candidate in the 1969 primary. While powerful individual figures, such as the late county Commissioner Tom Foerster, have wielded varying degrees of clout since then, the idea of a monolithic party machine has steadily faded into history.

If the old machine is gone, Murphy argues, the city’s longer-term economic heritage continues to hold sway beyond the old wealth that established the city’s universities, hospitals and foundations. Pittsburgh’s first “Renaissance,” an effort in the 1940s and ‘50s to cleanse the city’s air and water and spur redevelopment, had major successes and major failures. But the cooperative civic culture spurred by the post-World War II alliance between mayor (and later Pennsylvania governor) David L. Lawrence and industrialist Richard King Mellon endured. “We are in many ways spoiled,” Murphy says. “What we have that a lot of cities don’t have is a very successful public-private partnership. The Lawrence model is very much in our DNA.”

As he begins his term, Peduto faces issues that could fray that cooperative cord. One Pittsburgh mayor after another has tried in vain to extract more revenue from the non-profit institutions that are at the center of its turnaround. Ravenstahl, Peduto’s predecessor, was rebuffed on a proposal to tax college tuitions. Peduto inherited a lawsuit, first pursued by Ravenstahl, to challenge the non-profit status of UPMC, the region’s largest health care provider and a now-dominant jobs provider.

The city continues to operate under a form of state receivership that began as Murphy was leaving office. The enforced belt-tightening of that regime has bolstered the city’s immediate financial position—its operating budget is in the black and the city bond rating received a succession of upgrades through the Ravenstahl years—but it still faces the challenge of retiree health costs and unfunded pension liabilities of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Whether Peduto can manage to extract revenue from those “eds and meds” without battering the city’s relationship with them will be one of the main challenges of his administration. If Pittsburgh is ever to become an unqualified success—not just an uplifting reinvention story—he’ll have to find a way to make the city’s books look as good as its rivers.