On the day before Pennsylvania voters chose between incumbent Republican Gov. Tom Corbett and Democratic challenger Tom Wolf in November 2014, Corbett came to Lititz and spent part of his time talking about a title that no ballot could take away: grandfather.
The campaign stop, held Nov. 3, 2014, was one of the final pushes of a close-watched race. But the moment that drew the warmest response from the crowd was not about taxes or budgets. It was about family.
Three grandsons in four years
“As you know when I ran four years ago, Sue and I did not have any grandchildren,” Corbett told the Lititz crowd. By the time of the 2014 race, he and first lady Susan Corbett had three grandsons.
The oldest, Liam, then 3, had been adopted by the Corbetts’ daughter, Kate, as “a little two-day-old baby boy” whose birth mother had placed him for adoption. Corbett praised that decision in front of the audience. “She didn’t choose the other option, she chose life,” he said, drawing applause.
The couple’s son had welcomed identical twin boys, Elliot and Theodore, just six weeks before the Lititz stop. Susan Corbett had shared photos of all three boys in Halloween costumes on her Facebook page only days earlier.
A rare personal moment
Corbett, often described as a reserved campaigner, offered the crowd a look at how he coped with the stress of a statewide race.
“If ever I need to put a smile on my face, or Sue’s face, I just reach into my pocket and pull out my cell phone and look at that picture of Liam, and watch how big he’s getting,” he said.
He even had a nickname for the boy. Liam, Corbett explained, was “four-by-four” because he was over 40 inches tall and over 40 pounds.
“About the future of Pennsylvania”
The governor used the family story to frame the stakes of the election as he saw them.
“In my mind, and particularly for a second term, this isn’t about re-election,” Corbett said. “It is about the future of Pennsylvania. It is about our children and our grandchildren.”
After the rally, LititzDailyNews.com asked the governor what concerned him, as a grandfather, about a possible Wolf administration. Corbett pointed to economic policy. He said he worried about “the environment of tax and spend” he believed Wolf would create, and about the effect on businesses deciding whether to come to Pennsylvania or stay. He also cited “the cost to the taxpayers of Pennsylvania.”
Why Lititz mattered
Lancaster County has long been one of the most reliably Republican parts of the state, and both campaigns knew turnout there could shape the statewide margin. A final-day appearance in a community like Lititz was a chance for the incumbent to energize supporters who would be voting the next morning.
The stop was part of a broader closing tour as Corbett tried to make up ground against Wolf, a York County businessman who had led in public polling for much of the fall. Corbett had also visited Lititz on an earlier stop during the campaign, appearing before local supporters to make his case for a second term.
What happened next
Wolf won the Nov. 4, 2014 election, making Corbett the first Pennsylvania governor since the state allowed governors to seek consecutive terms to lose a re-election bid. Wolf took office in January 2015.
For the crowd in Lititz, though, the lasting image of that final campaign day was a governor holding up his phone to show off a picture of a smiling 3-year-old.
This story was originally reported by Lynn Rebuck for LititzDailyNews.com in November 2014 and has been updated for our archive.