A pair of key endorsements this weekend gave a notable boost to Allegheny County Treasurer John Weinstein’s campaign to be the region’s next top local official. But the results also suggested that local long-term political winds are changing — and not necessarily in a favorable direction for Weinstein or for Democrats who skew more conservative.
On Friday, Weinstein was backed by the Allegheny-Fayette Central Labor Council, an umbrella group of local unions. The bar for such an endorsement is high: Candidates must receive two-thirds of the vote of local labor leaders, and Weinstein’s rivals include state Rep. Sara Innamorato and City Controller Michael Lamb, both of whom also have strong ties to labor.
Weinstein’s campaign said he was “humbly honored & thrilled to be the overwhelmingly ENDORSED CANDIDATE for Allegheny County Executive.”
The unions also backed the re-election of longtime District Attorney Stephen Zappala, a longtime Weinstein ally, over challenger Matt Dugan. And they supported Joanna Doven’s bid to topple incumbent County Councilor Bethany Hallam — a move that Doven’s campaign noted made her “the only candidate this cycle to beat an incumbent for the endorsement.”
The council also endorsed Pittsburgh City Councilor Anthony Coghill for Weinstein’s old job as county treasurer — a post that Coghill had declared an interest in only a week before, and that is also being sought by Erica Rocchi Brusselars.
But Hallam seemed sanguine about the labor result when the Allegheny County Democratic Committee (ACDC) met on Sunday. “I didn’t get any votes” from labor leaders when she sought the council’s endorsement four years ago, she said. (Hallam was then running against a longtime United Steelworkers official, the late John DeFazio.)
And although Weinstein won the backing of county party leaders on Sunday, there were signs the party’s direction is shifting.
The ACDC is made up of committee members elected from each voting precinct in the county — local officers who are meant to act as the party’s footsoldiers. The endorsement is not binding on voters, but it represents a seal of approval by party leaders, whose favored candidates appear on “slate cards” handed out at polls on primary day.
On Sunday, 1,410 of nearly 1,900 eligible committee members cast votes: That’s a turnout rate of nearly 75 percent, among the highest that many committee veterans could recall. When the ballots were counted, in an excruciating process that took nearly four hours, Weinstein had won 545 of them — enough to earn the party’s endorsement with 39 percent of the vote.
But Innamorato finished a strong second with 457 votes, roughly one-third of those cast. Lamb finished with 391 votes, and attorney David Fawcett with 17.
And Weinstein's win seems not to have fazed some of his rivals, at least not so far.
In a statement after the vote, Lamb’s campaign said, “We are still in this fight,” and added Lamb was “disappointed that the Allegheny County Democratic Committee has endorsed a candidate whose campaign is propped up by a handful of Republican donors. … We need someone who will be a fearless, independent, and honest leader.”
Weinstein’s campaign-finance disclosures from 2022 show that while he is backed heavily by building-trades unions, he’s also received support from prominent Republicans that include William Lieberman, a businessman with Republican ties, and John Verbanac, who has Republican roots (and previously had ties to Pittsburgh mayors Bob O’Connor and Luke Ravenstahl). They also include Nick Varischetti, whose long ties to Harrisburg Republicans include a political consulting partnership with former President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati.
Each of the three men gave Weinstein $10,000 late last year.
In other races, meanwhile, county Democrats took a sharply different path than union leaders had just two days before. Dugan bested Zappala among committee members 820 to 578; Doven, who stood beside Weinstein at a “rope line” greeting committee members before they cast their ballots, lost to Hallam by a similar margin: 819 to 553.
Much like Weinstein, Zappala and Doven drew only about 40 percent of the committee vote. But they met with worse results because they weren’t facing split opposition.
(In other notable races, the committee also endorsed Patrick Sweeney for Common Pleas Court Judge, Corey O’Connor for a full term as county controller, Rachael Heisler for city controller, and Pittsburgh City Council incumbents Barbara Warwick and Deborah Gross. Brusselars won the county treasurer endorsement but had no opposition because Coghill launched his bid after the deadline for seeking it.)
In previous cycles, committee members have been accused of skewing more conservative than many of the rank-and-file voters they represent. But change was in the air Sunday.
The Democratic endorsement vote often has a festive atmosphere, with campaigns making a final pitch at committee members as they walk in to vote by offering pastries, hot dogs, tote bags, and other giveaways. (Dugan’s offerings may have been this year's most popular, augmented as they were by professionally mixed cocktails.)
But the tables also included an effort to create a new “Allegheny Progressives” caucus within the party, with organizers espousing its mission to “support progressive candidates through fundraising, petitioning, canvassing, endorsing and voting. And as a result of party leadership elections last year, there were new faces in the crowd, including committee members who ran to shake up the party. Among the first-time attendees was veteran performance artist Phat Man Dee, who had been appointed to a vacant committee seat this past winter.
“I didn’t know it was such a carnival,” she said.
