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You may have already trudged through a dozen or more post-mortems on what went wrong for Democrats last month. You might have even encountered pundits offering psychoanalysis to diagnose the party’s challenges. But down at the state legislative level — especially in Allegheny County — the political landscape has barely shifted. Republicans are still in control of the Senate, while Democrats retained a one-seat majority in the 203-member House.
The results mean Pennsylvania will be the only full-time assembly with a divided legislature when the new session begins January 7. Harrisburg lawmakers have already begun drumming up support for hundreds of bills that failed in the last two years. (As a further sign of political stability, almost all of these bills will die again next time, too.)
But in an election that swept away even U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, and in which Republicans captured all three statewide row offices, Democrats say the fact that they didn’t lose ground in the legislature is a win in itself. How did it happen?
Nick Pisciottano, a southwestern Pa. House Democrat who kept a key Senate seat in Democratic hands, believes that addressing economic hardships and fighting to limit corporate power resonated with those who backed President-elect Donald Trump.
“I know there were a bunch of Trump-Pisciottano voters,” said Pisciottano, who won the seat of retiring Sen. Jim Brewster in Pittsburgh’s Mon Valley suburbs. Republicans outspent Democrats by more than $1 million in TV ads to sway voters in the district, but the former state House member beat first-time candidate Jen Dintini, who owns a unionized security firm, by nearly 5%.
“I think Donald Trump strikes that chord when he talks to people and says ‘the system is rigged against you,’ and I think that people inherently feel that,” Pisciottano said. “And I think that only a few Democrats are talking to that anxiety or talking to those issues about ‘how do we make the economy fair and work for everybody?’”
In a campaign ad, Pisciottano tells voters that he passed bills to “protect families from greedy corporations” and that his focus will remain “making Allegheny County more affordable.”
Pisciottano says he, along with state Rep. Rob Matzie (D-Beaver) and U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, found ways to win on similar messaging, focusing on “pocketbook issues.”
“We have been very clear about standing up for economic issues, for working families and middle class families, and a lot of that is relatively unique amongst the Democratic coalition,” Pisciottano said. “Traditionally, that kind of anti-Big Business, anti-corporate monopoly [messaging] has come from the left edge of the party, but I think that that has become a more mainstream position. … Because it’s clear that the economy is not built in a way that benefits the middle class.”
Some political observers say it helped when candidates broke from the national Democratic Party, whose message was hard to separate from the broadly unpopular President Joe Biden platform even after Biden left the ticket.
“[Matzie’s] whole website was about how he disagreed with his own party,” said Republican political consultant Christopher Nicholas. “He knew how to read the tea leaves.”
“Rob Matzie stood up to his party leadership and said NO to broad based tax increases,” reads one ad on Matzie’s site. And a TV spot says he’s “fighting to keep politics out of our classrooms” — a common political football, but one more often used by Republicans. Matzie beat former building trades union member Michael Perich, who was endorsed by the NRA, by 4.5 points.
Nicholas said Democrats shouldn’t get complacent. “I think when Rob Matzie decides to retire, that seat very quickly goes to the Republican side,” he added. He predicted a similar fate for the seat of Johnstown Democratic Rep. Frank Burns, whose race was the last to be decided in the state, in part due to voting system malfunctions. In the end, the conservative Democrat won by less than 3 points against Amy Bradley, fending off the leader of the regional chamber of commerce, landing further to the right of her on refugee resettlement and opposing gun-control bills.
Nicholas allowed that “There are some [that will flip blue] on the Republican side, too.” And there were other, broader factors helping Democrats retain their race in other districts. Arvind Venkat, for example, coasted to a 10 percentage point win in Pittsburgh’s North Hills, where Democratic prospects have improved thanks to redistricting after the 2020 Census and years-long demographic shifts. (It doesn’t hurt that Venkat himself is a prodigious fundraiser and driven campaigner.)
Brittany Crampsie, a Democratic strategist and former state Senate press secretary, said some Pittsburgh-area Dems may have simply convinced some conservative voters that they have their interests in mind.
“The Southwest Pennsylvania Democrats have had a reputation of being slightly more to the right or to the center than Democrats in some places like Philadelphia,” she said. “I think being in tune and ‘voting your district’ is maybe something that gets kind of under-analyzed, too, when we’re spending millions of dollars trying to flip a seat.”
Drawing on economic issues is a page from a familiar playbook, and not just from the Bernie Sanders wing. Western Pennsylvania long fielded Democrats who voted left on labor and economic concerns, sometimes to the exclusion of more progressive social stances. Politicos like longtime Congressman Mike Doyle made a mantra of “voting your district,” prioritizing district needs and sentiments rather than taking an active part in partisan or ideological fights.
And in an election where Republicans “swamped the vote” for federal and statewide races in Pennsylvania, down-ballot state Democrats did not feel the ground fall out from under them.
There probably won’t be a return of the kind of anti-abortion Democrat that used to be common in Western Pennsylvania. And economic populist messages don’t always succeed: Casey lost despite trying to blame rising prices on “greedflation” caused by profit-hungry businesses. But there may be a reason the GOP has taken up such messages: They work.
Chris Potter contributed reporting to this story.