How Democrats pulled a huge PA upset — and what it means
Fluke? New momentum? New direction? What’s next?!
Welcome to a Wednesday morning edition of Progress Report.
I’m writing this from Washington, DC, where I’m huddling with my More Perfect Union colleagues for a semiannual offsite that feels more urgent than any such meeting we’ve had since launching four years ago (and I’ve been to all of them).
The positive is that we are looking at the best conditions for a progressive populist uprising since at least 2008, and now there is much more consciousness around the vast power held by elites and oligarchs, who have come to dominate society and politics exponentially more since the housing bubble crisis. The challenges in getting Democrats to acknowledge it, talk about it, and do something about it.
On that note, there is some rare good election news to discuss so today we will do a deep dive on that, what it means right now, and what it portends for the future, with lots of other cases and numbers thrown in.
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Democrats pulled off a major upset in a special Pennsylvania state senate election on Tuesday, flipping a deep red district in a county that rarely hosts competitive elections.
James Malone, the mayor of the small town of East Petersburg, will represent Senate District 36, based largely in rural Lancaster County, after defeating county commissioner Josh Parson by less than one percentage point. Any margin of victory, however, is a major accomplishment: SD-36 had voted for Donald Trump by 15 points in November and Republicans a 23-point voter registration advantage.
Malone will assume the remaining years in a term initially won by Republican state Sen. Ryan Aument, who ran unopposed in 2022. The pickup inches Democrats closer to breaking even in the state Senate, where they now hold 23 seats to the GOP’s 27. Democrats also retook the one-seat majority in the state House on Tuesday with an easy special election victory in HD-36.
Aument, who left Harrisburg to went to work for new US Sen. Dave McCormick, was a deeply conservative legislator, opposed to abortion and a leader in the movement to limit voting rights, and had always won easy victories during his nearly decade and a half representing Lancaster County.
Parson is also a far-right figure, a military veteran who opposes abortion and defied Covid safety regulations. He was backed by a prominent local far-right activist named Scott Pressler, who was involved in turning out voters for the campaign and raged most of Tuesday night about the results.
His posts caught the attention of Elon Musk over the weekend, but the world’s richest man is focusing his free time on the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, which comes to a head next week.
How Did This Happen?
Musk did play something of a role in the Pennsylvania election, though it wasn’t a helpful one to the Republicans. Malone, running on his experience as a small town mayor, campaigned heavily against Musk’s DOGE initiative and the specter of devastating cuts to the Department of Education and Social Security.
"We've had a constitutional requirement to fix public schools, we've had a lot of derogation and support, and we've had a lot of dismissal and removal of the education system and it's importance," Malone said while campaigning over the weekend. "One of the big things we need to look at on a state level is how we promote and support all our locals and first responders and that we provide legislation that creates kind of a framework so that municipalities can work together."
Education played a particularly large role in the campaign, as public schools have long played a particularly prominent role in rural areas, which has helped to stave off education privatization in swing states like Pennsylvania. Last year, the state Supreme Court ruled that Pennsylvania’s legislature had been underfunding lower income public schools, an issue that continues to roil the state.
Parson himself tried to run on affordability issues, an indicator of just how much that has come to dominate voters’ thoughts and concerns. Consumer confidence continue to plummet amid Trump’s trade war pissing contests, while Musk’s rampage through federal spending is a threat to rural regions, which rely disproportionately on the government.
Democrats were quietly optimistic about what seemed to be a long-shot race for several reasons. Locally, Gov. Josh Shapiro eked out a very narrow victory in the district during his statewide trouncing of state Sen. Doug Mastriano in 2022, suggesting that its ardent GOP support had its limits.
As noted above, economic concerns and the needless disturbance of services people took for granted — and perhaps didn’t associate with the federal government — give struggling Democrats issues to run on. With an older population worried about Social Security and a large town in Lancaster that prizes school funding, Malone was able to avoid culture war fights and focus on bread and butter populism.
The county has seen a precipitous increase in housing costs, with rents rising nearly 20% since 2019. Workers there now have to earn nearly $25 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment, up 12% from 2022. Malone touted plans to increase workforce housing, provide help from first-time homebuyers, and help seniors with property tax relief. He also emphasized the skyrocketing cost of living, which Republicans now own.
That he was able to run as unabashedly pro-choice shows that even in conservative areas, that’s no longer a liability.
Lancaster has also been the site of concerted progressive organizing since Trump’s first victory, a surprising development in a rural area that I reported on all the way back in 2017 (here’s a piece from 2020 on how it culminated in Pennsylvania going blue in that year’s election). That energy persists, especially in the parts of the county that are more college town than conservative enclave, and especially now, when Democrats are desperate to put wins on the board anywhere. The sheer amount of focus on these small elections, both by locals and partisans across the country, can outweigh their individual importance.
The Bigger Picture
Nationally, Democrats have increasingly dominated special and municipal elections during the Trump era, including flipping an even more conservative Iowa district in January. Last year, they took back a New York Congressional district in Long Island (NY-3) that Trump would win by five points in November, and in 2023, won mayoral elections in Jacksonville and Colorado Springs, both of which swung back to Trump in 2024. Democrats also over-performed in special races where they lost, including a deep red legislative district in Oklahoma.
This marks a shift from election cycles past, when Republicans would overperform and often win unexpected special election victories. The reversal isn’t necessarily an indication of national momentum or popularity, but instead a change in the demographics that support each party.
Democrats have purposely (if mistakenly) focused on more highly educated voters who are constantly engaged in the nuances of politics, vote by mail, and have time to volunteer and vote on odd dates that aren’t marked Election Day on many calendars. The Republican base has shifted to more working class voters, who tend to be less engaged in the nuances of local politics and have less flexible working hours to go cast votes.
This has been an ongoing issue in Pennsylvania, as Republicans have continued to end dropbox and limit mail voting. There were all kinds of lawsuits around vote collection and vote counting last year, and in this election, Democrats took advantage, building just enough of a lead in the early voting that Republicans could not overcome it on a single election day.
As of last Friday, Democratic voters had submitted 56% of early ballots, while Republicans had cast 34%. That’s almost a total inverse of the county voter registration, which has 53% of voters aligned with the GOP and 30% signed up as Democrats. Another 17% of voters are registered independents.
The combination of a more educated Democratic coalition, blowback against the administration’s daily chaos, and more parochial issues are also causing increasing concern in Florida, where there are two special Congressional elections next week that are not going as swimmingly as Republicans anticipated.
The party is particularly concerned about the special election in FL-6, where the odious state Sen. Randy Fine is badly trailing in fundraising and momentum. His Democratic opponent, an awkward teacher named Josh Weil, has raised an enormous $9.3 million for the race, whereas Fine hasn’t even cracked $1 million. Republican leaders in Congress have been trying to intervene on Fine’s behalf, while Fine has been begging lobbyists for cash and had to loan his campaign money from his own bank account.
A new nonpartisan poll finds the race within the margin of error, with Fine holding a 48% to 44% lead in a district that went for Trump by 30 points in November.
Fine is one of the nation’s leading bigots and mean-spirited trolls. He led the way in the campaign to ban gender-affirming care, likening life-saving treatment to the inhumane and deadly “experiments” that Dr. Josef Mengele inflicted on prisoners at Auschwitz.
Fine, who is Jewish, is known for weaponizing antisemitism in his own increasingly violent public campaigns. Since the October 7th terrorist attack in Israel, he has fomented anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim hatred with reckless glee, celebrating the mass deaths of children with frequent tirades on Twitter and attacks on local activists. He has been suspended from Twitter on several occasions — no small accomplishment on a website run by an antisemite and overrun with vile hate speech. Fine has been a leading voice in the destruction of public colleges in Florida, as well.
He also is a coward who hides under his desk when served legal papers and blocked me — a fellow Jew — on Twitter after I criticized him for being such a bigot in 2023.
Fine famously endorsed Donald Trump over Gov. Ron DeSantis during the 2024 GOP primary, an indignity that began DeSantis’s unraveling in Florida. The governor, who is also a terrible person, delighted in kicking Fine during a press conference yesterday, blaming him personally for struggling in this election and predicting that he will underperform.
“It’s almost impossible for someone with an ‘R’ by their name to lose that district. So I would anticipate (the) Republican candidate is still going to be successful,” DeSantis said. “Do I think that they will get even close to the margins that that I received or President Trump received? No. Is that a reflection on the President? Absolutely not. It’s a reflection of the candidate that’s running in that race.”
It’s true: the political bent of the district means that Fine will likely still win the special election next week, but his struggle indicates that there are limits to just how personally revolting a candidate can be, at least without any grassroots energy behind them. And Fine is seriously revolting — the only reason to vote for him is that it’d mean that he would be hundreds of miles away for most of the year.
What’s still missing for Democrats, though, is any sense of platform or trustworthiness. New polls have their national approval rating as low as -29, whereas Trump is just about even. Local special elections can often be won by personally likable candidates and influxes of cash that can go a long way, especially in cheaper media markets, but there is a ceiling on how much voters are willing to turn out for a resistance movement that empowers a party that has done little resisting and provided no cohesive alternate vision, especially after four mostly inept years in charge.
Still, that dissatisfaction is perhaps the most positive sign for Democrats, because it indicates both significant engagement and a base that will no longer be satisfied by performative opposition. Focus from highly informed voters tends to mean more donations for lawmakers and candidates who take an active stance, and it often leads to disproportionate turnout for supporters of primary challengers in lower turnout elections. It’s precisely how a new cohort of progressive populist Democrats won office in 2018, and the demand for change within the party now far outstrips dissatisfaction during the first #resist era.
Campaigns like Malone’s are also positive models because he didn’t focus on Trump beyond the devastating impact of his policies on people’s financial wellbeing and economic security. Much work remains to brew anger at his immigration and social policies, and the idea of attacking him as morally abhorrent has now been proven to be ineffective. Malone was able to make an affirmative case for government as a positive force in people’s lives, both as a provider of services and a body that evens the playing field for working people.
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Let’s hope so JZ. I live in Texas, a state Republicans have won for many years. I can tell you many people are NOT liking what is happening in DC. If they go after more earned benefits, the Republicans down here will turn on the DC Republicans! We shall see!
Always think we should hesitate to draw conclusions about state legislative races, they are driven a bit more by local/state concerns rather than national politics. Still, this does sound promising. "It's the economy and immigration stupid" might be the new rallying cry, with a renewed effort to pass real social insurance programs to provide economic security to the working and middle classes alike. Thanks for the great reporting on this race!