Red wave in Western Pennsylvania ring counties leaves Allegheny a blue island

A red wave that has been building in Southwestern Pennsylvania for a decade broke loose, washing over the region with a vengeance Tuesday, leaving only Allegheny County reliably blue when the votes were counted.

In statewide judicial races that topped the ballot, Republican candidates who carried the day outpolled Democrats in every county surrounding Allegheny. They held sway in Beaver, Fayette, Washington and Westmoreland counties — once reliable Democratic strongholds — as well as in Armstrong and Butler counties. Allegheny alone went for the Democrats.

While those numbers reflect a changing tide in the region, many say they foreshadow what could be major problems for Democrats in next year’s midterm races.

The most visible evidence of the changing tide regionally was in Westmoreland County. Republican candidates not only swept all row office contests, but they also ousted District Attorney John Peck and Coroner Ken Bacha — two well-respected, longtime Democratic office holders. The election left Commissioner Gina Thrasher-Cerilli as the sole Democratic row officer. County code requires that the three-member board include one member of a minority party.

That sweep followed more than a decade of Republican gains in municipal and county offices as well as party registration in six Southwestern Pennsylvania counties surrounding Allegheny.

Parties realign

In 2011, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Washington and Westmoreland counties had a combined 270,048 Republican voters compared to 390,320 Democrats. A decade later, Republicans have the edge: 365,644 to 297,977.

Paul Adams, a political science professor at the University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg and former Democratic County Committee vice chair, said results like those were long in the making.

“That, as we call it in political science trade, is the realignment of the parties, and it has been going on since the 1980s,” Adams said. “For Westmoreland County, where blue-collar communities are now Republican, this is the completion of the process.”

At the opposite side of the Keystone State, suburban Philadelphia collar counties — once reliable bastions of Republican voters — are trending ever bluer.

But that wasn’t sufficient to stop the red wave that washed through the statewide races as well as many municipal offices. Adams said culture wars that dominated many school board races — where parents were angry over pandemic shutdown restrictions, a state mask mandate and curriculum questions — helped draw out Republican voters.

“Karl Rove linked elections to culture wars back in 2000 and 2004 and showed that it got Republicans out to vote,” Adams said.

Road to 2022

While Donald Trump was rarely mentioned this fall, the former president cast a shadow over many races, said Michelle McFall, a Democratic strategist who has worked on legislative and municipal campaigns in Westmoreland and Allegheny counties. Disputes over masking and vaccine mandates were dog whistles for Trump supporters, she said.

McFall said a low turnout in Philadelphia — the state’s biggest Democratic stronghold, where only 19% of the voters cast ballots — helped skew statewide results to the GOP. Voter turnout in Allegheny County, the state’s other major Democratic bastion, was boosted by a historic election that ushered in Democrat Ed Gainey as Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor. Nonetheless, turnout was four points lower than in neighboring Westmoreland, where Republicans dominated election returns, McFall said.

She predicted Democrats will come out in large numbers next year when the governor’s office and a U.S. Senate seat are on the ballot along with all 17 congressional seats.

Still, they may face a high bar in local areas that are trending red.

Ben Wren, a GOP strategist with Long, Nyquist & Associates in Harrisburg, has watched the change in Western Pennsylvania, where he has worked on campaigns for legislative and local candidates for the past 15 years.

Qualified Republican candidates gave a choice to voters who had grown disenfranchised with the Democrats’ swing to the left on national issues, Wren said. A number of the candidates the party recruited were once Democrats, he said.

The two factors have figured into the party’s success in dominating local and legislative offices in the region surrounding Allegheny County, Wren said.

“A lot of our candidates have gone through the same transformations many voters have gone through with regard to the Democratic Party,” he said.

Charlie Dent, a former Republican congressman from Eastern Pennsylvania who resigned midway through his seventh term in 2018, has been a fixture in Pennsylvania politics since his election to the state House in 1990. He frequently appears on CNN to comment on state and national politics.

He sees the GOP sweep in statewide court races as a referendum on the party in power. Republicans turned the focus to Biden’s performance amid continuing inflationary trends and slipping poll numbers to energize voters. That development, coupled with longstanding trends that have repeatedly shown the party in power losing seats in midterm elections, does not bode well for Democrats in 2022, he said.

The GOP sweep of statewide judicial seats in Pennsylvania was not surprising, Dent said.

“They were good, solid candidates, and they will be terrific jurists. But make no mistake, the national environment was driven by the Democrats’ problems,” Dent said.

Anger over local school board races may have energized some in the base, Dent said, but successful Republican candidates tended to steer clear of Trump’s shadow. He said those who tied themselves too closely to the former president did not always fare well. He pointed to Steve Lynch, the GOP candidate for county executive in Northampton County.

Lynch made headlines for threatening to bring “20 strong men” to a school board meeting to oppose masking advocates and boasted of attending the Jan. 6 protest in Washington, D.C. He lost roundly in his bid to unseat the incumbent Democrat in the Lehigh Valley county that is viewed as one of several Pennsylvania bellwether counties.

Dent pointed to Glenn Youngkin, the Republican businessman who won a hotly contested governor’s race in Virginia. Youngkin sidestepped Trump during the general election campaign without alienating the former president’s base and demonstrated a path to victory for Republicans in 2022.