Doylestown

It's the first Friday of April, and the tony main drag of this affluent exurb, thirty-five miles northeast of Philadelphia, is lined with people visiting the town's cafes, galleries and bars. Doylestown is the political heart of Bucks County, one of the oldest and most hotly contested swing areas of the state. Three weeks before the state's Democratic primary, Obama and Clinton supporters wave signs on every corner, and seemingly every other person sports a campaign sticker. "Seeing such outward Democratic activism in Doylestown is a little mind-blowing to me," says Jordan Yeager, a local lawyer and Democratic Party organizer.

Doylestown, like much of Bucks County, used to be deeply, proudly, Republican. "In my youth, in central Bucks County, I grew up without knowing any Democrats," James Michener wrote in Report of the County Chairman, his account of volunteering for John F. Kennedy in 1960. "My mother thought there might be some on the edge of town, but she preferred not to speak of them." Things began to change in 1992, when the recession that year pushed Bucks County toward Bill Clinton. In the following years, as the GOP increasingly became identified with the religious right, the county voted for Democrats for President. Yet until recently, Republicans controlled all the levers of local government. "When I moved here five years ago, I was told to register as a Republican because that's the way business is done around here," says Allen McQuarie, an Obama volunteer who came from the nearby town of Holland.

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