This is WESA Politics, a weekly newsletter by Chris Potter providing analysis about Pittsburgh and state politics. Sign up here to get it every Thursday afternoon.
It’s tempting sometimes to see special elections as harbingers of races to come — if only because those races often take place when there isn’t much else for pundits to talk about. And when Allegheny County Democrats shellacked Republicans in three state House special elections Tuesday night, it was maybe not the greatest of omens for GOP county executive candidate Joe Rockey’s campaign launch the next day.
On the other hand, Rockey’s campaign kickoff probably attracted more high-profile Republican support to his Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown hotel meeting room than did all three of Tuesday’s GOP candidates combined. And that’s reason enough to be careful about drawing conclusions about what any of it means.
All three races took place in heavily Democratic districts, so victory was all but assured. But Dems, who stood to gain control of the state House for the first time in 12 years if they swept the races, took no chances. Elected officials from around the state posted photos of themselves knocking doors in the districts. (They included Pennsylvania House member Malcolm Kenyatta, who spent a lot of 2022 on the road helping Dems around the state. That prompted speculation as long ago as last summer that he was building goodwill for a statewide run … and sure enough, his hometown paper reported last month he’s laying groundwork for a run as auditor general next year.)
And while Democrats did not take their victory for granted on Tuesday … Republicans seemingly took it for granted that they were going to lose. The local Republican committee gamely boosted their candidates in blast emails, but there was little other outward sign of financial or other support.
The outcome was unsurprising. Unofficial results show Democrats Joe McAndrew and Matt Gergely posting three-to-one margins of victory in their bids to replace the late Tony DeLuca and Austin Davis respectively; Abigail Salisbury won her race to replace Summer Lee in the state House by an eight-to-one margin. An analysis by the liberal DailyKos calculates that Democrats improved their performance from the 2020 Presidential race in these districts by between 13 and 32 percentage points.
What do Democrats get out of it? If nothing else, control of the House means they’re assured of being able to thwart any GOP initiative they don’t like, much as Republicans have been doing to them for the past few years. What they achieve beyond that remains to be seen.
An early question for Democrats will be whether to replace the current speaker, Mark Rozzi, with their caucus leader Joanna McClinton, who would be the chamber’s first Black female speaker. That would be a bit of compensation for the fact that as a result of Tuesday’s elections, Allegheny County’s delegation has become somewhat less diverse now that Davis and Lee, who are both Black, were replaced with white candidates. (Though as blogger Sue Kerr reported, Salisbury identifies as bisexual, so change is still taking place.)
And Democrats may have to proceed carefully in other areas. As one told me early this week, “When you have a one-vote margin, any House member can become the most powerful House member in the state.”
For Republicans, meanwhile, maybe the special elections will provide another lesson in how the GOP hobbles itself by shunning mail-in ballots as a Democratic plot.
In all three special elections, more votes had been reported for Democrats by 8:01 p.m. — when the county posted the bulk of mail-in ballots — than would be counted for their Republican rivals the entire night. In the night’s closest race, for example, Gergely started the evening with 3,284 mail-in votes; two days later, his GOP rival, Don Nevills, has 2,282 votes total.
Instead of knocking doors, in other words, Democrats could have spent Tuesday playing Call of Duty in the basement — and still won.
The mail-in gap has hurt Republicans in more competitive races too, as party leaders seem to be recognizing. The party’s Allegheny County chair, Sam DeMarco, spotted it sooner than most — possibly because he’s seen the carnage up close in a Democratic bastion. After November’s election produced disappointing results for a much-hyped “Red Wave,” DeMarco wrote to followers that “Republican attitudes regarding mail-in voting needs to change.” He said conceding mail-in votes to the other party was like “running a 100-meter race against the Democrats and giving them a 40-meter head start.”
Whether the political calculations of party leaders trickle down to conservative voters remains to be seen. And the rules about mail-in votes are still contested. Earlier this week, the state Supreme Court handed down an opinion that leaves the door open to more confusion in elections to come.
In a long-running legal dispute about provisions for disqualifying mail-in ballots, the court agreed that voters must provide a date on the envelopes that contain their completed ballots. But the justices didn’t decide on how to determine whether the date itself was valid. That’s a question counties may well end up deciding for themselves, with different rules governing ballots dropped into mailboxes a few miles apart.
That uncertainty, by the way, could add to the stakes of the upcoming county executive election. Outgoing County Executive Rich Fitzgerald was a zealous advocate of ballot access during his 12 years in office. And a new county executive — be it Rockey or one of the half-dozen Democrats running — will take Fitzgerald’s place on the county’s three-member Board of Elections. That’s reason enough that nobody should get complacent about the elections to come.
