{"id":26827,"date":"2025-11-06T16:28:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T16:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/26827\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T16:28:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T16:28:07","slug":"election-data-analysis-democrats-do-well-across-pa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/26827\/","title":{"rendered":"Election data analysis: Democrats do well across Pa."},"content":{"rendered":"

This story originally appeared on WESA<\/a>.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

Pennsylvania Democrats are celebrating statewide judicial wins this week \u2014 a salve after a disastrous presidential election year, and reason for the party to hope for better results in the gubernatorial and Congressional midterm races of 2026.\n<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, voters\u00a0retained three state Supreme Court justices<\/a>, who originally ran as Democrats, for additional terms on the bench, and\u00a0two Democrats won vacant seats<\/a>\u00a0on statewide intermediate appellate courts. Even voters in bellwether Erie County decided that the incumbent county executive, a Republican, should be replaced.\n<\/p>\n

Democrats and Republicans sifting through the results both agreed that the retention fight, which featured multi million-dollar spending on both sides of the retention debate, was a driving factor.\n <\/p>\n

Democrats have long argued that Republicans set the tone for that debate<\/a>, transforming a typically overlooked ballot question into a partisan fight. And they say that Republican-aligned billionaires sought to dominate the discussion.\n<\/p>\n

\u201c\u200aThey decided to make this a partisan affair, even though it had never been a partisan affair in the history of Pennsylvania,\u201d said state Democratic Party chair Eugene DePasquale. \u201cWe used that as a rallying cry to say, \u2018Do you want a MAGA billionaire owning the courts, or do you want the people of Pennsylvania to own the courts?\u2019\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Commonwealth Partners, a political action committee largely funded by Pennsylvania\u2019s wealthiest person, Jeff Yass, poured millions into the effort. But Democratic allies, including trial lawyers and unions, still gave millions more for their own pro-retention campaign, said Chris Nicholas, a veteran Republican political consultant and author of the PA Political Digest newsletter.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the \u2018vote yes\u2019 side, the Democrats and their allies spent four times as much money as Republicans in the \u2018vote no\u2019 [campaign],\u201d Nicholas said. \u201cDemocrats have always cared more about judicial races here. That spending advantage allowed them to control the narrative better.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

And in the final days of the campaign, both\u00a0President Donald Trump and Barack Obama<\/a>\u00a0weighed in on the Pennsylvania race, which drew national attention and spending. A campaign spokesperson for Gov. Josh Shapiro, who\u2019s running for reelection next year, said the governor himself \u201craised a significant portion of the [Supreme Court retention] warchest\u201d and campaigned heavily for the justices as he \u201crecognized this as one of the most important races across the country in 2025.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Due to all that attention and spending, higher-than-usual election turnout across the state \u2014 and about 45% of registered voters in Allegheny County \u2014 makes sense to political pollster Berwood Yost, who directs Franklin & Marshall College\u2019s Center for Opinion Research.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThe attention paid to the retention election \u2014 that is part of what drove up turnout,\u201d Yost said. \u201cLet\u2019s face it, if you\u2019re in many localities in Pennsylvania, there isn\u2019t much competition, right? I mean, a Democrat\u2019s gonna win Philly or win Pittsburgh.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

But compared to the presidential election, \u201cthe average change was 15% towards the Democrats,\u201d Yost said. \u201c[Justice] Christine Donohue performed about 15 points better on average in every county than Kamala Harris did.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story originally appeared on WESA.\u00a0 Pennsylvania Democrats are celebrating statewide judicial wins this week \u2014 a salve…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26828,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1383,28,15996,7529,30,29],"class_list":["post-26827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-elections-2025","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-election-results","tag-pennsylvania-elections","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}