One of the ironies about the Allegheny County Council race between incumbent Democrat Bethany Hallam and challenger Joanna Doven is this:
Hallam’s critics accuse her of being bombastic and confrontational — council foe Bob Macey accused her of instilling “a little bit of mayhem” this week — but it’s Doven who’s throwing the elbows.
Yes, Hallam did direct a vulgar anatomical reference at a Common Pleas Court judgethis past winter. On the other hand, last week Doven held a press conference to accuse her rival of being a drug dealer … without evidence to back it up.
So there’s plenty of mayhem to go around. But in this race — and in some others, as we’ll see — there hasn’t been quite as much as you might have expected.
In fact, at a North Hills candidate forum on Wednesday, Hallam barely bothered to rise to her own defense.
Hallam serves on the county’s elections board, and as she has from the outset of her campaign, Doven faulted her for voting not to certify the results from a handful of county precincts that were challenged by conservatives last fall.
There were no race outcomes at stake in that move: The challenges were scattershot and seemed driven mostly by where like-minded people lived, rather than by any specific concerns about impropriety. But after that whole attacking-the-U.S.-Capitol thing, Democrats get jumpy when Republicans question election outcomes. Hence’s Doven accusation: “Bethany, you gave a path to the MAGA crowd for 2024 when you voted not to certify nine precincts.”
Hallam’s vote has troubled even some of her allies. But she has a defense for it: While the election board’s solicitor argued that the challenges were fatally flawed and that the board could certify, state law generally requires that when results are being appealed, “the county board shall suspend any official certification of the votes cast in such election districts.”
On Wednesday night, however, Hallam shrugged off a chance to rebut. “I don’t need to respond to a bad-faith attack,” she said. “We can go on to the next question.”
Which is hardly in keeping with Hallam’s brand as a provocateur. But then with the exception of Doven’s attacks and those of D.A. candidate Matt Dugan, it’s actually been a mostly restrained campaign up and down the ballot … at least for the past few weeks.
Sure, in the marquee county executive race, candidates bandied allegations of ethics lapses back and forth late last month, but that’s simmered down a bit since then. At a forum of county executive candidates earlier this week, about the sharpest exchange involved Theresa Colaizzi accusing Sara Innamorato of engineering an effort to challenge her petition to get on the ballot. (The challenge was filed by an Innamorato supporter.)
No one expects that to last. And at least one development could change the volume of these races, if not their tone: the entry of outgoing County Executive Rich Fitzgerald into the arena.
Fitzgerald, the term-limited 12-year incumbent, never had an obvious successor, and he has largely been in the background so far this election cycle. But he endorsed Doven at a Wednesday-morning press conference, hailing her “ability to get things done … We need people who can positively get things done as I move on.”
Fitzgerald also made clear that Hallam, a boisterous foe, was in his sights. “Over these last four years, there has been a county councilperson who has been quite frankly destructive to what we need to do in Allegheny County,” he said. Citing that board of elections vote, Fitzgerald said Hallam had “in many ways been a damage to democracy.”
It’s an open question about how much anyone’s endorsement really matters in an election, at least as far as voters are concerned. Fitzgerald is warmly regarded by a sizable majority of Democrats, but then last year he was a vocal supporter of Congressional candidate Steve Irwin … who ended up losing to Summer Lee even with Fitzgerald’s help.
But Fitzgerald may have more room to make a difference in a county race. For one thing, he’s sitting on $2.2 million in unspent campaign funds and a phone full of numbers from people who can give him more … with no campaign of his own to spend it on, and no campaign-finance limits on what he could spend to help someone else.
Asked what form his support for Doven would take — TV ads? contributions? — Fitzgerald hedged a bit.
“Campaigns come with those type of things, and there have been fundraisers” to help candidates he backs, he said. “I’m glad to financially support candidates that I get behind. I’m passionate about this place.”
The common denominator here is Fitzgerald seeking to preserve the kind of Democratic establishment he played a huge part in creating: more socially liberal and more committed to diversity than the leadership it replaced, with a foot planted in both the labor movement and the business community — but far more moderate than the movement that elected Lee.
And Fitzgerald isn’t done. He’s all but certain to endorse Michael Lamb for his seat in the days ahead. (In fact, some reporters showed up at Wednesday’s gathering expecting that to be the endorsement he announced.) The two men are not close, but if Fitzgerald wants to preserve that legacy, he has no other options at the top of the field: There is no love lost between he and Weinstein, and Innamorato and Lee considered each other “sister reps” when they were in the state House.
Asked Wednesday about the likelihood of an endorsement in that marquee race, Fitzgerald said, “All I can say is, ‘Stay tuned.’”
Which is good advice for everyone, with less than a month to go before May 16.
