Pennsylvania

Josh Shapiro won 60.5% of the vote to 38.2% for the Republican, Stacy Garrity, in a state Donald Trump carried by 1.7 points two years earlier. There was no U.S. Senate race. Republicans held 10 of the 17 U.S. House seats before the election and Democrats hold 11 after it. Every seat that changed hands had been Republican-held. In the First District, Bob Harvie beat Brian Fitzpatrick by 5.7 points. In the Seventh, which Trump carried by 3.2, Bob Brooks beat Ryan Mackenzie by 12.4. In the Eighth, a Trump district by 8.3 points, Paige Cognetti beat Rob Bresnahan by 9.0, and in the Tenth Janelle Stelson beat Scott Perry by 10.4.

Measured against the 2024 presidential vote, the governor’s race moved 24.1 points toward the Democrats. The U.S. House vote, which compares the same office across years, went from R+2.1 in 2024 to D+13.6. The governor’s race drew 5,012,874 votes in our count, 93% of the 2022 total and 71% of the 2024 presidential vote, and most of the drop came on one side. Shapiro drew 89 votes for every 100 Kamala Harris won here. Garrity drew 54 for every 100 of Trump’s.

The race moved almost evenly across the state. The Allentown area moved furthest, 26.7 points, from R+2.6 to D+24.1, and the Pittsburgh area, which casts 20% of the vote, moved 25.7, from R+4.5 to D+21.3. The Philadelphia area, 33% of the vote and already the most Democratic, moved least, 21.8 points, to D+50.8. The smaller metro areas, 28% of the vote, went from R+17.3 to D+6.8, and the small towns and rural counties moved 22.6 points and still voted Republican by 17.3.

Of the 11 counties that voted for Trump in 2024 and for Shapiro this year, Bucks County, in the Philadelphia metro area, is the largest. It moved from R+0.1 to D+25.9 on 305,486 votes. The widest swings came around Scranton: Lackawanna County moved 30.1 points, and Luzerne County, which Trump won by 19.2, went to Shapiro by 9.1. Washington County, in the Pittsburgh area, went from R+25.5 to D+2.6. Shapiro carried Montour, Washington and Lancaster counties, all of which he had lost in 2022, Spotlight PA’s reporters said.¹ Allegheny County, the largest county by votes cast, went from D+20.3 to D+43.9. No county went the other way.

Democrats won the state Senate 26 to 24. They defeated four Republican incumbents and lost one seat of their own in Lancaster County, where Republican Tom Jones beat Sen. James Malone, WHYY reported. Republicans had held the Senate majority since 1978, apart from an interruption in 1993.² Democrats also kept the state House. Our count has them in 113 of its 203 seats and Republicans in 89, and those totals are unofficial until the results are certified. With Shapiro re-elected, Democrats hold both chambers and the governor’s office for the first time since 1993.³ Sen. Maria Collett will be Senate majority leader next session, and Joanna McClinton remains House speaker, Votebeat reported.⁴ An override of a governor’s veto takes two-thirds of all members elected to each chamber, 34 senators and 136 representatives, and no party is near that.⁵

Congressional districts are drawn by a bill that passes both chambers and is signed by the governor, so the whole process now runs through Democrats. State House and Senate districts are drawn by a five-member commission: the four caucus floor leaders or their deputies, and a chair they select or, if they cannot agree, the state Supreme Court selects.⁶ Elections are run by the secretary of the commonwealth, whom the governor appoints and the Senate confirms; Al Schmidt has held the office since Shapiro appointed him in 2023.⁷ Election law is among the things the new majority may change, Votebeat reported: a House bill that died in the Senate last year would have created early in-person voting, required at least two mail-ballot drop boxes in every county and given counties more time to prepare mail ballots for counting.⁴

“We will raise the minimum wage. We will make sure that women have a right to reproductive freedom here in this commonwealth. We will build more housing. We will allow survivors of abuse the ability to confront their abusers in court,” Shapiro told reporters at the governor’s mansion the day after the election, WHYY reported. Budgets have been late every year under divided control, and McClinton said that would end.² Raising the minimum wage is to be the first bill of 2027, Spotlight PA’s reporters said.¹

No mayor, district attorney, school board or judge was on the ballot: Pennsylvania fills judicial, county and local offices in odd-numbered years.⁸ Philadelphia voters approved both city charter questions in unofficial results. One lets the city award contracts of $75,000 to $500,000 to small, local businesses even when their bids are not the lowest, and passed with 78.8%; the other establishes Creative Philadelphia, the city’s arts and culture office, under the Home Rule Charter.⁹ In the suburbs, Democrats ousted every Republican state legislator in Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties, a first, WHYY reported from unofficial results; two Republicans remain in the state House from Bucks County.¹⁰

Republicans kept six of the 10 U.S. House seats they held, the closest of them the 16th, where Mike Kelly won by 7.7 points in a district Trump carried by 22.4, and the 11th, where Lloyd Smucker won by 10.8. In the governor’s race 47 of the state’s 67 counties still voted Republican. The party’s one gain in the state Senate was Jones’s seat in Lancaster County.² Spotlight PA’s reporters counted roughly three Republican state representatives left in southeastern Pennsylvania and a single Republican state senator in Philadelphia and its suburbs.¹

The next Senate seat on the ballot, in 2028, is Democrat John Fetterman’s, in a state that voted R+1.7 for president in 2024 and D+22.4 in this year’s governor’s race. The governor may serve two terms in a row, so Shapiro’s office will be open when it is next on the ballot in 2030.^{5, 11} Writing abortion access into the state constitution, one of the Democrats’ stated aims, takes passage in two legislative sessions back to back and then a referendum, Spotlight PA’s reporters said.¹