In a major judicial election in the Keystone State, Democrats are more focused than Republicans.
In a major judicial election in the Keystone State, Democrats are more focused than Republicans.
Y ou might think that the 2025 elections are mostly being fought on blue turf outside of the true swing states. The gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey are being contested in states Donald Trump lost three times, although Virginia currently has a Republican governor and five Republicans among its eleven house members, and Democrats hold a one-seat majority in each of its two legislative chambers. The mayoral race in New York is in deepest-blue territory. But there’s a big election (really, three of them) this year in the largest and most critical swing state of them all: Pennsylvania. And Democrats have been putting in a lot more effort than Republicans have.
There’s no doubting the pivotal nature of Pennsylvania, or its symbolic importance to Donald Trump, especially after he survived an assassination attempt in Butler and worked a McDonald’s drive-thru in Bucks County. Writers such as Salena Zito have made Pennsylvania an emblem for Trump’s capacity to shatter the “blue wall” of Rust Belt states that the Democrats held at the presidential level from 1992 through 2012. In 2016, 2020, and 2024, it was on the list of three or four closest states won by the presidential victor within the margin that decided the Electoral College. Its senators are, first, an idiosyncratic maverick pro-Israel progressive Democrat, John Fetterman, elected in 2022, and, second, a Bush Republican turned MAGA-friendly Republican, Dave McCormick, elected in 2024. Its Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, has made his own cautious nods toward moderation on a few issues while trying to position himself as a presidential contender. The Keystone State has ten Republicans among its 17 house members, a 27–23 Republican state senate, and a 102–101 Democratic state house. In late March, Democrats narrowly flipped a Republican-held senate seat and easily retained a Democratic-held house seat to hold onto their one-seat majority.
A huge prize is the state supreme court, which is popularly elected for ten-year terms and currently held by a solid 5–2 Democratic majority. That majority has proven consistently problematic for Pennsylvania Republicans. In 2020, among multiple election-law rulings, it made a rogue decision that allowed throwing out the state legislature’s deadline for mail-in ballots. The court could shape not only election law but also potential redistricting challenges in the future.
Next week, three members of that Democratic majority — Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht, all elected in 2015 — face the voters. They are not running against Republican opponents; it’s a yes/no ballot question. The ballot won’t even identify which party they belong to, which presents a challenge in educating voters about not only what a retention election is but also where the candidates’ partisan allegiances lie. Only one statewide Pennsylvania judge has lost a retention election since 1968 (Democrat Russell Nigro, who lost in 2005 amidst public anger over a state government pay raise).
If reelected, Donohue would serve two more years before facing mandatory retirement at age 75, while Dougherty and Wecht would remain on the court for another decade. That means the stakes are high. If any of the three is not retained, his or her seat would remain vacant for the next two years before a partisan election in 2027. As Mike D’Onofrio of Axios notes, Shapiro may be able to fill the vacancies temporarily, but only with two-thirds’ support in the Republican-controlled state senate. In a less polarized time, some horse-trading could have resulted in a temporary Democratic justice, a temporary Republican justice, and some respected centrist justice, but Shapiro’s national ambitions probably preclude a deal that would give Republicans anything. If all three lose, the court would be evenly divided, 2–2, with three empty seats through 2027, until an off-year election is held.
Republicans have had at best mixed success in state supreme court races, with high-profile losses in off-year elections in Wisconsin (including one in April), victories in the 2022 midterms in North Carolina and Ohio, and successful ousters of judges in retention elections in Oklahoma in 2024 and in Illinois in 2020. But in those cases, the GOP had put in the work. This time, while Republican groups are mobilizing turnout, they have been outspent by a wide margin: about $11.3 million has been spent by Democrats and their allies so far, compared with $2.6 million by Republicans and theirs. Shapiro has also been campaigning for the judges, and DNC Chairman Ken Martin was out rallying the phone banks and talking up the race to the press on Monday, while Republicans have not put visible figures on the trail to make a case against them.
The parties aren’t shy about nationalizing the message of this race:
Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin wrote in a statement that “the stakes couldn’t be higher in these judicial retention races, especially in the run-up to winning back the White House in 2028.” Republicans are also talking up the race’s importance, launching an informational website titled Swamp the Vote USA paid for by the Republican National Committee, which tells voters that “President Trump and Republicans need YOU to make a plan to vote NO on retaining Pennsylvania’s radical left Supreme Court justices.”
There is plenty of fodder for Republican-leaning voters to get exercised against the justices. Some of it is collective:
Dougherty, and Wecht each provided essential votes, for example, in the court’s watershed 2018 ruling recognizing that partisan gerrymandering violates the state constitution’s guarantee that “elections shall be free and equal.” That decision so angered Republican legislators in the state that they filed articles of impeachment against the three justices. . . .
Months before the 2022 midterms, the court upheld the portions of Act 77 [the Pennsylvania mail ballot law at issue in 2020] allowing any voter to vote by mail. And days before the 2024 presidential election, the court affirmed a lower court ruling allowing voters to cast a provisional ballot if their mail ballot was disqualified for missing a required privacy envelope. But Donohue, Dougherty, and Wecht were not always aligned in those big decisions about voting rules. Wecht dissented from the 2024 privacy envelope decision, Dougherty dissented from part of the 2020 ruling on undated mail ballots, and Donohue dissented from part of the 2020 ruling that extended the deadline for returning mail ballots.
Some of it pertains to each of the candidates. Consider Dougherty:
Earlier this year, Dougherty authored a decision protecting a lesbian mother’s parental status and, thereby, affirming the state’s recognition of legal parentage for children born through assisted reproduction. Last year, Dougherty wrote the decision that upheld a city’s restriction on the location of gun ranges, calling it “outside the Second Amendment’s unqualified command.” In another 2025 case, Dougherty wrote a majority opinion that overruled a lower court’s decision, allowing a case against a Philadelphia police detective who was charged with tampering with or fabricating physical evidence and public records to go forward. Notably, Dougherty partially dissented from a majority ruling limiting legislative power during the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that a law that allowed the legislature to override a governor’s emergency powers was unconstitutional on its face. Some activists hoping to remove Dougherty from the bench point to his brother, John Dougherty, a former union leader who was convicted on federal charges in 2023.
Then there’s Wecht:
In 2017, he wrote the majority decision that allowed underfunded school districts to challenge Pennsylvania’s school funding system — a case they later won, which led to record spending on education in the commonwealth. He upheld Gov. Tom Wolf’s emergency powers during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
As for Donohue:
Donohue has authored major opinions on voting rights and reproductive access. In 2022, she wrote the opinion upholding Pennsylvania’s no‑excuse mail voting law, rejecting lower court decisions that had struck it down. Last year, Donahue authored the decision that a voter whose mail-in ballot is rejected because of a disqualifying mistake must be given the opportunity to submit a provisional ballot on Election Day. In 2024, she wrote a majority opinion that reversed the Commonwealth Court’s upholding of a 1982 law that banned the use of Medicaid funds for abortion, arguing that it violates the Equal Rights Amendment of the state Constitution. That case is still in the hands of the lower court and could rise back to the Supreme Court.
Polling is sparse, and it suggests that voters aren’t paying terribly close attention. With no other major elections on the ballot, that means that base turnout will be especially important. (Pittsburgh has a mayoral election but no Republican candidate after the incumbent lost in the primary; the city hasn’t had a Republican mayor in 90 years.) A Franklin & Marshall College poll taken between September 24 and October 5 showed a significant split between registered voters and likely voters, as well as a large chunk of undecideds among both. Donohue, the most endangered, leads by four points among registered voters (31 percent to 27 percent), but 43 percent are undecided; she leads by ten points (39 percent to 29 percent) among likely voters, which suggests that at least this poll’s likely-voter screen assumes that Democrats are likelier to turn out than Republicans and registered independents (among whom Donohue is down 21 points). Among registered voters, Wecht is up four points, with 55 percent undecided, and Dougherty is up eleven points, with 51 percent undecided. They lead by 13 and 17 points, respectively, among likely voters, with a shade under 40 percent being undecided.
In other words, given what we can see from the lone public poll and the one-sided money and effort deployed, the likelier outcome is that all three Democrats will win retention. But there is so much uncertainty in the meager poll data that you’d hate to try to draw more definitive conclusions. It’s not an optimistic sign that Pennsylvania voters in the same poll give Donald Trump a job approval rating of 41 percent (“good” or “excellent”), while 59 percent rank his performance as “fair” or “poor,” whereas Shapiro is eleven points above water: 51 percent “good” or “excellent” versus 40 percent “poor” or “fair.”
If Pennsylvania voters keep the Democratic stranglehold on their state’s supreme court, that will be a depressing sign for “red Pennsylvania” — and Republicans will be kicking themselves for not having done more. If Republicans pull off an upset, that will be a sign to start taking seriously talk of a Keystone State realignment.