Politics
As of January 2010, there are 248,949 registered voters in Berks County.
- Democratic: 121,828 (48.94%)
- Republican: 92,685 (37.23%)
- Other parties: 34,436 (13.83%)
The first time since 1964 that a Democrat carried Berks in a Presidential election occurred in November 2008, with Barack Obama receiving 53.9% of the vote to John McCain's 44.7%. The other three statewide winners (Rob McCord for Treasurer, Jack Wagner for Auditor General, and Tom Corbett for Attorney General) also carried it. While Republicans have controlled the commissioner majority most of the time and continue to control most county row offices, Democrats have become more competitive in Berks in recent years. In the 2012 Presidential election, although Mitt Romney carried the county by approximately a one-percent margin, 49.7% to 48.7%.
Read more about this topic: Greater Reading Area
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)