Close races put Pennsylvania House majority control in limbo as Democrats take 1-seat lead
(link) https://www.post-gazette.com/news/election2022/2022/11/10/midterms-2022-elections-pa-house-majority-democrats-republicans-swing-districts-races/stories/202211100112
Both of the seats are held by Republicans in the General Assembly session that ends later this month. It may be weeks before county elections officials finish vote counting to determine winners.
Democratic leaders expressed confidence Wednesday they had wrested back majority control of the House for the first time in 12 years. But two of their successful re-election candidates also won races this week for Congress and lieutenant governor, while a third died in early October.
All three are from Allegheny County. Summer Lee, who won the race for the U.S. House 12th District also ran unopposed in her state House 34th District race. Austin Davis, the lieutenant governor-elect, ran unopposed in his state House 35th District race, and Anthony DeLuca, who died in early October but whose name was still on the ballot because they already had been printed, won his seat against Green Party candidate Queonia Livingston.
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What a nice gift for Governor-elect Shapiro!
Thanks to all Pennsylvania Democrats - we are the best.
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1:41 PM · Nov 9, 2022
Am hoping this will come to fruition. We so need this here to send a message.
The redistricting after the census for the state legislature that went on behind the scenes and was little talked about, shows the big difference from 2010. In 2010, the map was gerrymandered under a GOP governor, GOP legislature, and GOP-majority state Supreme Court. Even when the old map was challenged in court, it was only modified around the fringes but still severely gerrymandered with its final 2012 version.
THIS go-around, we had a Democratic governor and (D)-majority state Supreme Court and they were able to get the crap 2012 map closer to fair districts in 2021. It was expected that Democrats would pick up some long-denied seats to reflect our still-majority registration advantage, but the prevailing "Dems-suck and are unenthusiastic" media narrative pretty much pooh-poohed any possibility of us taking control of what became a large number of swing seats, instead implying they would remain in GOP hands. This was basically the media buying into the nonsense that "land votes" and actual people living there are just ancillary because "red swaths" were assumed to represents millions of GOP votes and not the actual thousands of dairy cows or elk.
I.e., the "red mirage" thinking that has been infused in the media, masked the reality on the ground.
until I started getting primary election materials and newsletters from a Rep. I had never heard of. I've literally lived in the same district (with various Reps during that time, and after a couple residence moves) for almost 30 years, and suddenly boom! I'm literally a block from the new line and scraped into an adjacent district.
The incumbent, a (D), ended up getting primaried this past spring, so we are all starting from scratch.
The gerrymandered state legislative seats, even when challenged and slightly modified in 2012, were still an egregious gerrymander thanks to the trifecta the GOP had in state government (including the judiciary). We are finally getting the benefit of "fair districts" by having some "say" thanks to a (D) governor and (D)-majority state Supreme Court during a census period.
As an interesting note - one of the seats moved to the east ended up in Lancaster County so Lancaster was able to now have 2 (D)s coming out of the county (including a new one from the city proper).
There was barely time to notify anyone about the district map changes, precinct polling, etc., because it didn't become official until just before the election. For all I know they're still fighting it, not that it matters anymore.
