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Five thoughts on the Pennsylvania primary

Five thoughts on Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary results:

-- It was a bad night for Montgomery County
When the jockeying began, Allyson Schwartz was supposed to be the favorite to win the Democratic nomination for governor. Marjorie Margolies, a former Congresswoman who is mother-in-law to Chelsea Clinton and had Bill and Hillary in her corner, was supposed to be the favorite to replace Schwartz in Congress. But both lost – Schwartz to Tom Wolf, Margolies to Philadelphia's Brendan Boyle – and neither race was very close.

MontCo, the third most populous county in the state and second richest, now faces the prospect of going into 2014 without any home turf representation in Congress or on top of the gubernatorial ticket.

-- Coming soon: an all-male Pennsylvania delegation
Schwartz was the only woman in Congress from either Pennsylvania or New Jersey. Now she's on her way out, and two women who ran to replace her – Margolies and Val Arkoosh – both fell short. So did Shaughnessy Naughton, who ran in the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania's 8th district. Out of 20 House and Senate seats, it appears there won't be any women included starting next year.

-- Strouse – Murphy redux?
National Democrats were behind Kevin Strouse in Pennsylvania's 8th district, which includes parts of Montgomery County and all of Bucks. There's a line of thinking that says the ex-Army Ranger presents the rugged profile needed to win over independent voters in the moderate district. After all, when Democrats last beat the incumbent, Mike Fitzpatrick, it was by running Patrick Murphy, an affable former soldier.

But Fitzpatrick came back to beat Murphy in 2010 and has proven more resilient in his second stint in Congress.

Another line of thinking – one embraced by former Gov. Ed Rendell – holds that it would take a woman to beat Fitzpatrick. His logic is that the district's men have shown that they are always going to tilt Republican, so the best chance for a Democrat to win is by peeling off independent and GOP women. That's why Rendell endorsed Naughton, a businesswoman who challenged Strouse.

"If Patrick Murphy couldn't beat Fitzpatrick, only a woman has a chance," Rendell told me last week, after he made the endorsement, but while still praising Strouse as a strong candidate.

Republicans seemed happy to turn the "war on women" theme against Democrats Tuesday night. Immediately after Strouse won, a GOP operative wrote a Tweet about how national Democrats who backed Strouse had helped "squash the candidacy" of a local woman.

While Strouse can be happy with a victory Tuesday in his first-ever campaign, the razor-thin margin didn't signal great strength.

We're about to see if his second-ever campaign can prove Rendell wrong.

-- Can Corbett cancel out Obama?
Most analysts are predicting a great year for Republican Congressional candidates across the nation, largely because of President Obama's sagging poll numbers. But in Pennsylvania, there's another unpopular executive – Gov. Corbett -- and he's actually on the ballot. Democrats sounded motivated Tuesday to bring him down. No matter whom they backed in the primary, Democratic voters interviewed by the Inquirer repeatedly stressed the importance (to them) of defeating the governor.

"The Democrats were so anxious to beat Tom Corbett," that many of them jumped on the Wolf bandwagon the moment he came out with his TV ad campaign, former Democratic Congressman Joe Hoeffel told my colleague Michael Matza.

Could that motivation help blunt the fading support for Obama? Democrats hope so, though history says the second midterm is usually a bad one for the president's party.

-- Philadelphia gains
In a four-way primary in PA13, you had Daylin Leach, Margolies and Arkoosh all hailing from Montgomery County, and State Rep. Brendan Boyle from Philly. The results show how geography helped him.

Boyle won nearly 70 percent of the vote in the Philadelphia portion of the district -- which has around 60,000 more registered Democrats than the MontCo portion -- and stayed close enough in MontCo, where he took 16 percent.

Put it together, and Boyle ran away with the race, and, in a safe Democratic district, will be the heavy favorite in the fall. If he wins, the district's demographics mean he could hold the seat for a long, long time, giving Philadelphia a third hometown voice in Congress, to go along with Bob Brady and Chaka Fattah.

He'll face Republican Dee Adcock, a businessman who also ran in 2010.

You can follow Tamari on Twitter or email him at jtamari@phillynews.com.