In recent years, Lehigh County is a different place than it used to be. Even as late as my college years, Lehigh County was considered harder for Democrats to win than Northampton. Boy, that’s changed. Beginning with Don Cunningham and carrying through Tom Mueller and Phil Armstrong, the GOP has been kept out of the County Executive’s seat for 20 years. Something tells me Roger Maclean isn’t the guy to stop that trend, but let’s hold that thought a second.

Right now, Lehigh County turnout looks fairly similar to Northampton County turnout. Likely Election Day voters plus those who have already returned a vote-by-mail ballot come out to 76,788 voters. Democrats hold the edge, 36,677 to 33,170. That’s not an overwhelming blowout. The 6,941 independent and third party voters we are expecting could easily tip this election either way. There are 8,253 vote-by-mail ballots still out though, and Democrats hold an edge of they lean towards the Democrats by 2,487. Basically, this is a mirror image of Northampton County, with Democrats holding an edge of around 3,500 votes and looking to gain through the remaining vote-by-mail ballots. Republicans either need to win a landslide with independent and third party voters, get an unusual number of Democrats to cross over, or need to turn out a lot of unlikely Election Day voters. None of this seems highly likely, but it is notable that the Lehigh County GOP may be in no worse of shape than their Northampton County brethren.

Roger Maclean, like Tom Giovanni, is a former Democrat. I find neither to be overly exciting, but I’m also not ready to say they’re the craziest people the GOP could have ran. Giovanni made his switch many years ago though, and has had time to prove himself to his party’s voters. Maclean basically made his move last week. Will a few thousand unlikely Republican voters make the trip to the polls today to vote for him? I highly doubt it. Will Maclean pull over a substantial number of Democratic voters? That’s probably his hope, but I doubt it happens in this environment. He’s had to straddle appeasing his MAGA base and appealing to moderates this whole race, and that’s going to make this really hard. For Maclean to win this, he’ll probably need a high number of crossover voters and need a blowout with independents. He just didn’t run the kind of campaign that probably does that. Northampton County’s GOP might hold human sacrifices in the Slate Belt somewhere and Lehigh’s version holds witch trials in Schnecksville or something. I’m basically saying their leadership isn’t allowing a whole lot of sanity from their ranks, and that makes it very hard to win these off year races.

There is one more way to look at this race though, and that’s to look at it compared to recent past elections. In 2023, 75,127 people cast a ballot. 51,622 of them voted on Election Day, while 23,123 voted by mail. The Democrats won every statewide judicial race in the County by *at least* 4,999 votes, they swept the Commissioner at-large seats 4-0 with a 4,500 vote margin from their 4th candidate to the GOP’s first, and won both County row office races by more than 8%. They were considerably more competitive in 2021. That year, 74,108 people voted overall, with 51,183 voting on Election Day and 22,214 voting by mail. Those numbers are not wildly different than 2023. The GOP actually won two of the four statewide Judicial seats in the county. They won 2 of the 3 seats on the Court of Common Pleas. They lost the Executive race by only 2,618 votes, a margin that was close enough that Phil Armstrong at one point was conceding that he lost the race. Republicans won 3 of the 5 Commissioner district seats up that year. This at least has to make you stop and pause for a second. It’s not like Glenn Eckhart, who lost a couple of Controller races, is Pat Toomey or Charlie Dent. He almost won though. The turnout wasn’t really much different than 2023, or what I’m predicting today. One has to think then that it was simply who voted in 2021, as opposed to 2023. School board results in Parkland, East Penn, and Southern Lehigh swung pretty hard from 2021 to 2023, so either the voters really changed their mind or they were different voters. Maybe today we’ll answer that. Signs aren’t great for the GOP though. There are already more ballots returned than there were in 2021 or 2023. They’re probably going to get crushed in the mail. They’re down more than 9,700 on registration, not quite as bad as Northampton, but probably too much to take.

My guess is that Democrats win the Executive seat and the GOP wins the Judge seat. Patricia Mulqueen has a record that probably pulls over some Democrats to vote for her, Lehigh County voters do tend to cross lines in judge races. Josh Siegel outspent Roger Maclean by a 10:1 margin and certainly isn’t a heretic to Democratic voters. I think Siegel wins this race by 4-5,000 votes, with independents generally breaking the Democrats way in Lehigh County. What I would watch for, interestingly, is Allentown. Matt Tuerk won the primary by a landslide and the general election never came to fruition then. Will voters show up? Will Latinos continue to slide away from Democrats? How much of that retired Mack Trucks base of white voters will show up for Maclean, who really should be their kind of candidate on paper? If Allentown looks like normal, and Siegel simply holds what he should in the larger suburban towns, this won’t be a nail biter. If a good chunk of the remaining vote-by-mail comes in, Siegel could win this going away.