It’s a cruel, sick, just world. The only Republican left on the Northampton County Council is Tom Giovanni. After running a cynical campaign of memes and attacks on people not running, he didn’t get to put the County GOP Chair in charge of the courthouse after all. He gets to go back to Council and sit quietly by himself as Tara Zrinski serves as the next County Executive. She worked hard, and she earned it.
The rest of the council may not make Giovanni look so bad though. The new chamber will have 8 Democrats in the 9 seats. It still might not be functional. You see, the 8 Democrats don’t necessarily get along, and might not really vote together. How it looks to break out-
Ken Kraft, Kelly Keegan, Jeff Warren- These three Democrats generally voted together on Council during the current term.
Jason Boulette- He seems pretty normal, has an impressive private sector resume, and doesn’t feel like a bomb thrower.
David Holland- I know he used to work at Gracedale, under the private management company. He ran as a Democrat. Most of the ticket didn’t dislike him. I’m cautiously optimistic.
Lori Vargo Heffner- The current President of Council won a third term. She got the most votes, after finishing third in the primary. She had a block of three Democrats that were not as friendly to the outgoing Executive, and many times voted with the three Republicans. Two of those Republicans and the two other Democrats are gone, and Lori is now on her own. This does not mean you should assume she will lose votes though. She counts to five better than a lot of these folks, regardless of who she brings on to get there. Her history with the incoming Executive is fairly sour too.
Terry Fadem- She basically didn’t engage with the other candidates in this past election and some members think she’s more like Lori than them. Time will tell.
Nadeem Qayyum- Look, I’m not getting into the rabbit hole here, but this is madness. Qayyum apparently told people he’s going to come out as a socialist after he got elected, so he must speak more English than other folks think. I don’t really know him, but if he spends most of the next four years bringing up resolutions for “Medicare for All,” for the county to condemn “genocide in Gaza,” and seeking confrontations with ICE, Democrats are going to lose seats soon.
There’s four ways this can go, as I see it-
The first trio work with two of the three (Boulette, Holland, Fadem) or more, and govern.
Lori Vargo Heffner builds an alliance with Giovanni and Fadem, and picks off Holland or Boulette sometimes, and maybe somehow finds ground with Qayyum?
Boulette, Holland, and Fadem stick together and basically choose which way the council goes.
Democrats just vote 8-1 on everything.
I don’t think counting to 5 will be easy on this council. Trying to do a re-assessment or tax increase will not be easy. Increasing spending will not be easy. Future political campaigns will also become a factor in how council works. I really don’t envy whoever these folks elect President, this will be a tough job.
If you listen to the Branch BERNidians, BROhan Zohan Mamdani taught Democrats the way forward. We need more charismatic candidates like him, candidates who promise to defund Israel and give away a lot of free stuff. As I’ve said before, Mamdani isn’t a good candidate and being like him would lead to 2026 losses for Democrats, under the kindest of conditions, outside of dark blue enclaves. But do we even need to look beyond New York City to illustrate that?
It turns out there were other races on the ballot citywide in New York City. Both Democratic candidates essentially did what Sherrill and Spanberger did in other states, bringing all anti-Trump voters together under their umbrella. Mamdani supporters will be quick to point out they had a three way with Andrew Cuomo in it. These races had independent candidates too. These guys ran against a field that didn’t include a vigilante and the former Governor who once had to say “I’m not a pervert, I’m Italian” on live TV to defend himself as he was getting ready to resign. One could argue they beat actual candidates and not cartoon characters.
Then there’s these races- Borough wide races within New York City. Staten Island is a red place, so ignore that one for a moment. The dude that won there literally got caught having two families when he was in Congress and they still made him President of Staten Island. The rest of the city is the rest of the city. None of the Democrats, even somewhat controversial ones like say Alvin Bragg, got less than 70%. All of them did at least 20% better than Mamdani. None of them ran against a disgraced ex-Governor or a vigilante.
Let’s look beyond New York City again though. It’s too fun.
This is what Allegheny County looked like in the Pennsylvania Judicial retention elections. Two years ago they ran a strong leftist candidate for County Executive and she barely won. Without that argument this time, Allegheny looked like old Allegheny.
This is my favorite map, because it was put out by Republicans as some sort of evidence that Mikie Sherrill stole the election. I shit you not. I also love this because the terminally online leftists spent months saying Sherrill was a terrible candidate. You know what, I didn’t think she was great as a candidate either (she’ll be a very good governor), but for totally different reasons than they had. Sherrill moved the entire state and never had to answer a question about “globalizing the intifada” one time. People seem to like it when you’re not an obnoxious child.
Basically, Mamdani was a good enough candidate for New York City. He was not a blueprint for the nation, he was not some force of nature. He was just a guy. He beat two strange birds in a very Democratic place. About 30% of people who should have been his voters said “no thanks.” That’s the lesson you should be taking from him.
Turnout was really high in this year’s election. Here in Northampton and Lehigh Counties we topped 90,000 voters for the first time in a municipal election. While Donald Trump carried the 7th Congressional district last year, this year high turnout was really bad for Republicans. Democrats won by damn near 20% in both Executive races and won every other county office too, in addition to winning every blue and contested municipal race too. Two years ago we were talking about 70-75,000 voters in each county. Democrats wildly seemed to over perform with the additional voters, whether they were Democrats or independents. Virtually all Democrats voted Democratic, and the margins among independents were wildly beyond the norm (at least from the most complete evidence we have, which was over performance beyond registration in the mail). Why was higher turnout pretty good for Joe Biden, bad for Kamala Harris, and amazing for Democrats basically everywhere this year?
For the most part since LBJ left Washington, the only Democrats who have won national elections were generally personally popular at the time (Carter and Biden were both popular when they won and not as popular when re-election time came). In general, midterms and elections where less personally popular Democrats lead the ticket had not been very good. Basically Democrats won elections where they could massively mobilize the electorate behind a charismatic figure, really until Trump became a political force. From 2017 forward, Democrats have actually done very well in lower turnout elections that they used to lose. Democrats have done remarkably well in special elections. Democrats are winning odd number year Governor races (Virginia, New Jersey, Kentucky, and Louisiana) at an 80% clip in the Trump years. Democrats won a landslide in 2018 and lost just single-digit seats in Joe Biden’s midterm. Democrats are doing really well in elections where only people who are super engaged and really care how government operates are voting. They’re doing less well in electorates with lower education levels and where voters are largely motivated by large scale cultural issues, and less by “how things will run.”
Even in 2024 we saw signs of this. Harris became the first Democrat to carry college educated white men for President in my lifetime. She did see declines among Black men and Latinos, but once you account for education levels, that is entirely confined to voters who had a high school education or less. The most important data point for guessing how a voter will vote is becoming education. Someone with a graduate degree is probably voting Democratic, regardless of race. Increasingly a high school educated (male in particular, but really in most female groups too) voter is probably not voting Democratic.
This is not about “smart vs. stupid,” which would be a lazy and overly simplistic way to break it down. This actually comes down to how important government *seems* to be in your every day life. Many people in jobs that require some sort of advanced degree, or in fields where a college degree is mandatory for entrance (You could think of this as doctors and lawyers, but I’d argue this gets down to some more traditionally blue collar jobs like nurses and teachers) either interact directly with or deal with regulatory decisions by the government. Almost everything in education, from busing and school lunch regulations, to minimum competency standards for teachers, to spending at research institutions involves the government. Everything in a lawyers world involves the government, from the courts they argue in to the laws they argue about, to the court system and it’s services for those involved in it, to their own ability to practice law, it’s set by the government. Even in the health care field, the government is involved in everything from minimum competency for doctors and nurses, to insurance companies and what they must cover, to research and development dollars that fund development of the drugs they use to save lives. People in fields that legally require a degree, or for that matter practically demand you have a certain level of education, interact with the government a lot. Some of the smartest people I know work as bartenders, or in retail, or in a trade- they’re savvy and they often times do pretty well at making money. The government is less ever present in their jobs, and many of them feel as though the government is a hinderance. Find me a bartender that loves when LCB comes around. Find me a guy that paves driveways that thinks the government helps their lives. Friends of mine who lay concrete frankly think the government takes their tax money too much, and gives them way less in return than they deserve. Many of these people don’t have overly positive interactions with the government at the times that they have to interact with it, and they’re not huge fans.
It would be a mistake to think this is the only factor. I know plenty of professors who have a negative point of view of the government, even if they do interact with it a lot. God knows that can be true of teachers, nurses, doctors, and lawyers too. The thing is, again, they’re in fields that there is no choice but to care about what the government does, it impacts their every day life. Of course they’re going to vote more, and they’re going to be motivated to do so even in relatively “minor” (bullshit term) elections, because many of them care about the consequences. Now, add on that people with college degrees and even more so graduate degrees are increasingly voting Democratic, and what you have is a world in which Democrats are winning the voters with the highest engagement in the political system. This is helping them in “low turnout” elections. It’s also helping them even when turnout goes up in those elections, because the additional people who show up are much more alike to their voters than the GOP’s current base.
This doesn’t mean Democrats are going to win every non-Presidential election moving forward, or that their electoral problems in rural America will take care of themselves (less of their voters live there), or that they can’t win Presidential elections anymore. In 2020, Joe Biden won as a really old white man, who leaned into identity politics quite a bit, but was generally viewed as a moderate. That’s probably a pretty good place for a Presidential candidate to be if they want to win, but it’s a really hard space to occupy. There is no candidate for 2028 that really makes it to that spot. For what it’s worth, I think Biden might have reached peak saturation for Democratic voters running at least somewhat under the Obama paradigm. Any more voters we may find will cause us to turn off an equal number of people and turn them out for Republicans. We probably have to offer someone for President who is not a generic Democrat. I’m not suggesting this as a midterm strategy, or even as a regular strategy to win seats in the Senate, the House, or Governor’s mansions. What I mean is that maybe giving our base everything they can ever dream of has a ceiling in a national election, where a lot of voters have varying degrees of animus towards the government. The base Democratic voter may not be moving forward more “like” the median voter in a Presidential race than a Republican base voter. It’s too early to say that with absolute certainty, I’d like to see how things look after Trump is gone. It does seem though that Democrats are becoming the party of the engaged, and that is quite a change from even a few decades back.
Happy Saturday, friends… and enemies too! You see, I have a very, very good idea of my audience on this blog, and well, that impacts what I write here. I’d love to write my thoughts on the Sixers, or next year’s Foo Fighters tour, or the Phillies off-season. I write about how Bernie Sanders sucks and what’s wrong with Ryan Crosswell and Bob Brooks, and you read it though. Yesterday, I talked about how the Allentown crew put self preservation over what’s right, and you read it. You know who you are. A couple thousand hits in the immediate hours after can be confusing, but I still know who most of these readers are. Readers in Arlington, in Washington, in Philadelphia, in Rockville, in Ashburn, in Brooklyn, in White Plains, in Allentown, in Bangor (ok, this one slightly confuses me), in Easton, in McKeesport, in Bethlehem, in Princeton, in Camp Hill, in Braddock, in Phillipsburg, in Hazleton, in Harrisburg… shit, I’m going to be honest, some of you read this so much that I actually am like 99% I know who each of you are. I know who my daily reader from Nazareth is. I also know why you read this, because I pretty much know who you are. And look, that’s great. I write this so someone reads it. I don’t write it to read myself.
Most of you reading this enjoy it. Some of you (hey opposition researchers!) send me into to post here. When I’m reasonably sure it’s true, I post it. Some of you wonder why, and even are critical of me doing it, as if Rich Wilkins not posting something a.) makes it untrue, b.) means it won’t get out. It is a uniquely poor trait of Pennsylvania politicos, more so than any of the other states I’ve been in, that we think we can keep secrets. We can’t. I’m not on any of the campaigns right now, I’m not paying for this stuff, it’s so easy to find that any idiot could do it. Which gets to my other point here- most of you enjoy reading this blog, but yesterday the smoke coming from Allentown looked like a mushroom cloud. One subject was sending the post around complaining, one actually complained to me personally (one talked to me and we actually joked about it, but I’ll leave that for another time), and one is probably already reading this and fuming. I could hear the words that I’m sure came out of one of their mouths- “Rich is a nobody anyway and no one cares what he says.”- while literally talking about what I wrote. Hey, I like irony. The truth is, there’s lots more to come on Crooksy and others. I already have some of it. I’ll print it when I want to. Assuming I want to. And you should be glad I do. If I’ve found all this on a zero dollar budget, don’t you think Ryan Mackenzie has this and more (he does)? At least by me writing it, you know about it now, not when it’s hitting you in the face.
Look, I’m not your boss. I’m not your dad. I’m not your Governor. I give you information, if you don’t care about that, it’s fine. If you’re fine with racism, fine. If you’re fine with extremism, fine. If you’re fine with political violence, that’s not fine, but you can be. If you’re fine with being untrustworthy, fine. Look, if you think Kaepernick was an ass for kneeling during the national anthem, that’s your choice. Bob Brooks agrees with you. Just own that though. Don’t claim he’s changed, because now he’s telling you he did because it’s good politics. Don’t claim it was “just a messy divorce,” when he didn’t pay his mother-in-law back one penny for over 14 years before she sued him. She had him sign a contract after four years of not being paid, and he still didn’t pay her. Just own it. If you’re fine with this because the guy’s union gave you a few bucks for your re-election, I actually totally get it. Just be real with yourself. He doesn’t dispute that he got sued and lost, hell he appealed it and lost. He doesn’t claim he didn’t post racist and extremist memes, he just says that was then. Hell, Ryan Crosswell at least tries to claim he wasn’t “really” a Republican, even though he re-registered in multiple states, and that he only worked on non-competes, not union busting as a private lawyer. Crooksy pretty much admits everything. Or just says it doesn’t matter.
Blogs aren’t the real world. This blog will not move voters next year. Maybe a few of you won’t vote for one candidate or another over something I show, but my audience is in the thousands, and as I stated above, you live in lots of different districts. Basically 90% of you are here reading for politics. A few of you are here reading about the other topics, and you’re my favorites. Most of what I write on this blog is for my audience’s interest though, a bunch of politicos. Sometimes it really reaches a broader audience, of politicos who never met me before. That’s great. This blog can only serve as a guide to how to win an election, it’s not going to get it done on it’s own. That takes money and mass communication with voters. That is not happening here on this page.
No, this isn’t a real person, really for real here.
A socialist was elected Mayor of New York City. That’s really not shocking. Trump had 69% disapproval amongst NYC voters yesterday, and the only other real option was Andrew Cuomo. I don’t need to add to that. 50.4% selecting Zohran Mamdani given that Donald Trump was backing Andrew Cuomo and the other guy was a vigilante, is not all that impressive. If Mamdani wasn’t a socialist and didn’t make it clear he doesn’t like Jewish people, he’d probably have reached 69%. The fact that he didn’t means a lot of anti-Trump voters couldn’t come around to backing him. In fact, only a little better than 7 in 10 anti-Trump voters selected him, and I assume the rest probably voted for Cuomo. When you think about it that way, it’s not so wildly impressive.
Ok, here’s the small reality check, if you need one. Yesterday definitely suggested 2026 could be a really good year for Democrats. Joe Emrick might finally lose. We should beat Ryan Mackenzie if we nominate the right candidate. Let’s go back to the Mamdani example for a moment, and treat him as charitably as we can. Let’s assume he’d still get 7 in 10 anti-Trump voters in the Lehigh Valley and everywhere, even though most of the places we are going to discuss are less liberal than the Big Apple. 55% of New Jersey voters didn’t approve of Trump. If Mamdani got the same 73% of the anti-Trump vote there, he would be at 40.15%. Mikie Sherrill got 56.3% in the actual New Jersey race, or a bit more than 100% of those votes. How about in Virginia, where 56% of voters didn’t approve of Trump? That comes out to 40.88%. Abigail Spanberger got 57.2%, or also just north of 100% of anti-Trump voters. Sherrill and Spanberger got about 102% of the anti-Trump vote and Mamdani got 73%. More of the country will have Trump’s negatives in the 50’s and maybe low 60’s next year, as opposed to New York City’s 69%. Since Mamdani literally got a bare majority of the vote with Trump at 69% disapproval, you would basically need Trump’s actual disapproval to be at 68% in any district to be able to win with a candidate like Mamdani. That’s not going to be the case in any competitive race. For argument’s sake, California had Trump’s disapproval at 63% last night. If Mamdani got that same 73% of anti-Trump vote in California, he’d be at 45.99%. There are going to be a lot of races on the board in California next year. A socialist candidate viewed as friendly to Hamas/oppositional to Israel, like Mamdani, would probably lose in many California seats. For what it’s worth, Proposition 50, the re-districting question, got 63.9% of the vote, or roughly 101% of anti-Trump votes.
Here in the Lehigh Valley, Nadeem Qayyum won a seat on the Northampton County Council. Let me be clear, I didn’t support him. I waited until after the election to say this because it’s not my place, but Qayyum told members of the Lehigh Valley Labor Council in an endorsement interview that he planned to announce after he was elected that he was the first socialist elected in Northampton County. Even Nadeem knew he had to hide some things. Even as Nadeem lied about being a socialist, he still only got 85.25% of what Tara Zrinski received with the same voters. We know even less about Theresa Fadem. Never the less, they won in spite of plenty of other problems. All of the Democrats beat all of the Republicans though, and by a lot (almost 10,000 votes out of 91,000 votes cast). I’ll get deeper into this later, but the key to the Democratic victory *appears* to not just be vote-by-mail, which was up by close to 5,000 votes in the end, but actually the Election Day surge of anti-Trump voters. Election Day voting was up by 14,000 votes from 2023 to 2025. It’s rather clear by the margins that these people were voting for Democrats, and Democrats only.
So what does all of this mean here? Let’s assume for a second that Tara Zrinski and Josh Siegel got an even 100% of the anti-Trump votes last night in the County Executive races. That’s 59.38% in Northampton County and 60.61% in Lehigh County. A Mamdani-like candidate would get 43.35% in Northampton County and 44.25% in Lehigh County. That’s also assuming next year’s electorate is exactly like this year’s, and well, look at the 2022 numbers (which probably won’t be exact either, but still much closer) in Northampton and Lehigh. You go from just shy of 187,000 votes in the two counties to well over 260,000. The GOP, even if they’re doing awful, will do a little better than this year, and I’m not including Carbon, which actually voted NO on retention for the Supreme Court Judges last night, so Trump may still be in the positive there. I’ll go with the average in Northampton and Lehigh County though today, 60% anti-Trump voters. That’s 43.8%.
Where am I going with this? Well first off, Mark Pinsley basically has the same policy views as Mamdani (I don’t consider him to be as bad of a guy), so nominating him is very likely to end in a loss. Then there’s Bob Brooks, a guy who has deep flaws that cut across party lines, and has the same consultants as Mamdani, and is supported by Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, a large cadre of the Mamdani supporters on the national level. Assuming Democrats can stomach the racism and other issues, he doesn’t deteriorate further than Mamdani’s share of the anti-Trump vote, Brooks is probably not doing much better than 44% because his policies and rhetoric is Mamdani’s rhetoric. I’m sure he’ll try to distance himself, like say John Fetterman, but does anyone want to send another version of Shrek to Congress. And what if he does fool people into thinking he’s not a bad guy, like Fetterman? Maybe he gets the more like 85% of the anti-Trump vote and gets to 51.15%, not factoring in Carbon and increased Republican turnout? He still probably narrowly loses. Candidates like Bob Brooks are gigantic risks to maybe lose a winnable race, or be the next John Fetterman. He should be DOA in the PA-7 Democratic Primary, and any efforts to push him by the state Democratic Party are emphatically stupid. We don’t need the Harrisburg insiders pushing their candidate.
As for Ryan Crosswell? Maybe he could win a general election running as a union busting, Trump Democrat. Why would you want that?
Candidates like Zohran Mamdani are fine for New York City. I wish he had lost, and I think the result was bad for New York, but they chose him. Candidates like Zohran Mamdani are not going to win us seats like NJ-7 or PA-7. Candidates like Mamdani wouldn’t represent upgrades in state legislative races in the Lehigh Valley either. We need to reject these folks. Failure to do so will not be unlike Tea Party Republicans nominating the “witch lady” for Delaware Senate in 2020, but they also have the longterm impact the Tea Party had on the GOP as well. I don’t want the Democratic Party to simply be a liberal flip side of the Trump coin. It won’t win, and it’s bad for America.
There’s going to be a lot of ink wasted on what happened yesterday. People are going to try and argue that Sherrill and Spanberger prove that moderate Dems win, which I tend to believe in more purple districts and statewide races. Others are going to argue that Mamdani shows that bold progressives win. It’s quite frankly a stupid argument. What kind of Democrat didn’t win? Are there things to learn about 2026 from the data? Yes. Ultimately what you should take away first and foremost from this is that when your actions, be it a trade war, shutting down the government, cutting people’s health care, or yanking their food stamps, end up making people worried about their next meal, their housing, their job, or their health care, you’re probably going to lose. This isn’t ideological. It’s survival.
Terry Fadem and Nadeem Quyyum had basically no resources, and beat the Republican candidates for County Council by over 13,000 and 9,000 votes each. Tara Zrinski meanwhile ran a hard campaign and earned a record breaking margin and became the first woman elected as Northampton County Executive. Jeremy Clark ran hard for his win on the Northampton County Court of Common Pleas, while Mark Stanziola was largely outspent in Lehigh County where he won easily. Democrats won the Bucks row offices with moderates, while they won state legislative seats in Virginia with all different candidates. There was no one specific type of Democrat that won tonight. Yes, some types won by more. None were really all that close though. And I can’t come up with a competitive race that they really lost. Nothing really mattered.
Running for office is hard, and the fact that this was simply a unanimous decision tonight doesn’t take away from the achievement of running a successful campaign. These people all put their names and reputations on the line in hopes of winning a race, and I salute them for that. With that said, there’s no deeper message in tonight. Donald Trump went too far, and voters reacted. They both gave large percentages of the vote to Democrats, and turned out in greater numbers than we had ever seen before. If you put your name on the ballot as a Democrat tonight in a place Democrats had any chance to win, you won. If you were a Democrat who crossed over, like Pat Dugan in Philadelphia, Ed Ducal in Allentown, or Roger Maclean in Lehigh County, you got your ass kicked. There was no interest in any of that. Even decently liked Republicans lost races tonight in any county or two that was even moderately purple. This was an outright rejection of Trump. Trump will never again be on the ballot, and Republicans haven’t done well trying to be like Trump when he’s not on the ballot too. Make of that what you will. Last night was far more decisive than any previous beating.
I’ve updated my turnout numbers for Pennsylvania tonight. Unless Election Day way overshoots projections, I believe Tara Zrinski and Josh Siegel will be the new Northampton and Lehigh County Executives. Now we wait.
If we’re being honest, my first election nights are such distant memories that I don’t remember everything about them. I remember watching when Bill Clinton was elected President in 1993. I remember my best friend’s dad’s election nights when he ran for Township Supervisor. Of course, I remember 2000. The first time I was involved myself was 2002. I was a freshman in college and interning on the Pennsylvania Democratic Party’s coordinated campaign for Ed Rendell for Governor and Ed O’Brien for Congress. I couldn’t even drink yet, not to mention I was recovering from mono, and basically had to watch in horror as the Democratic Party, especially the candidates I looked up to most (those opposing the Iraq War) fell one by one across the country that night. Anger is a helluva fuel though.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the big ones though. Five years ago tonight was the 2020 Biden-Trump election night, a long, long night in which many of you freaked out and lost your minds. It was covid, vote-by-mail was new in a lot of places, and well, it was competitive. It took until Saturday to finally declare Joe Biden had won, despite a record breaking number of votes, and maybe that is what we should remember from that night. It was supposed to be the most consequential election of our time. It may have been, but how is not as obvious now as many of us thought it would be. Instead it looks like the pause button on the direction of our times, a moment when Democrats didn’t Democrat away the election and for a brief moment the Trump momentum was stopped. It was a brief moment though.
Four years earlier was quite a different story. I wasn’t as shocked Trump won as most people. It also didn’t take days to decide. It was clear by about 11pm that this was not 2012, the math wasn’t foregone, and we were in for a surprise. That hotel room in Elizabeth City was tense as hell. Especially when I was being told I had to be ready for recounts the next morning for Governor and State House.
Of course there were happier times. 2008 in Harrisburg capped off just a week of happiness after the Phillies won the World Series. The truth is that I didn’t love Harrisburg. Everyone there is go alone to get along, and I’m not. Neither really was our team at HDCC though. We gained seats that year, in spite of the polarization of that Obama electorate and the uphill battle of Bonusgate indictments. No one matched for many years, until the maps were drawn in a much more fair and equitable way.
2012 in New Jersey was less in question, but equally fun. I look back on it differently since the top of our ticket got into legal trouble. I still really liked the people I worked with though. It was an experience I learned a lot from.
Want a weird election night? January 5th, 2020, in Georgia. I was in Cobb County doing a paid canvass for the DSCC. We had no real way to know what would happen the next day in Washington, DC, or that half the country wouldn’t care about it, because that night the biggest story in the country was those Georgia Senate run-offs. And being in Metro Atlanta was amazing. It was as fun as any place in the world could have been during COVID.
Ok, so Super Tuesday of 2020- the best. I had Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Oklahoma as the digital organizer, and we won all three. I called my shot on Massachusetts hours earlier and Anita Dunn (no, she doesn’t know me or anything) told me I was crazy. Well, we put the Elizabeth Warren campaign to a merciful rest that night. I’m proud of that.
The election I’m most proud of was still 2023 though, one of my last ones to date. I only took on Judge Timika Lane that year. Her campaign for Superior Court was always going to be hard, I knew that. We did it though, even if I lost years off of my life from the experience. She’s a great judge and Pennsylvania is better for her service. More importantly, she’s a wonderful friend and I’m grateful to have been a part of it.
Maybe the weirdest was 2022. I was working at a mail firm and most of my work was on the West Coast. So my mornings were quiet and I had no events to really go to. I also live in maybe the most swing place in America, so a rather active campaign was going on around me. It was a weird dichotomy.
I’ve done a couple of Iowa Caucuses. They’re a fun event. Both times, I ended up in a bar with Tim Ryan of Ohio after the event ended. Not just with him, the first time Congressman Rick Nolan and others were along. The second time wasn’t in Des Moines, but Council Bluffs, Iowa with our volunteers. Again, fun times.
I have had more election nights than I can count. And it’s just about time for me to head out to watch results. Enjoy your nights, stay safe friends, and we’ll talk more about this later.
It’s Election Day. New Jersey and Virginia will elect Governors. New York City will elect a Mayor. There are state legislative races in a few states. Pennsylvania elects some judges, and maybe re-elects some too. Here in the Lehigh Valley we have Executive races in both counties and Mayoral races in Allentown and Bethlehem, kind of. Are my interested in all of these races? No. Honestly, some of them are probably over now. Others have my attention. What are they?
Will Mamdani reach 50% in New York City? As much as I hate this, the answer should be yes. He is the Democratic nominee in a city that is heavily Democratic. Also, despite what some folks might think, this is not the New York City of Ed Koch or Rudy Giuliani. It’s a very liberal place, one that is probably being pushed left by Trump. The post-Bloomberg city (which is wildly misinterpreted in many ways) isn’t really looking to moderate. Oh sure, Adams did win four years ago, when he beat a collection of also rans and never was. Mamdani is problematic and offensive to me in many ways. The truth is, he’s not to the residents there. AND his opponent is Andrew Cuomo. I think Cuomo would do a better job as Mayor. No one is begging for his return to power in New York though. If he wanted to vindicate himself, he should have stayed in office and fought during the allegations, every prosecutor but one ran away from the report (and that one got dismissed at the first hearing). He didn’t though, and that implies there was some fire to the smoke. He’s damaged goods. Mamdani hitting 50% or not is the interesting part to me, I don’t buy the late polls showing Cuomo surging into the race. I’d love it if he beat this guy, but that ain’t happening.
How many seats do Democrats pick up in the Virginia legislature? I was told by someone who knows that the Virginia Dems are now playing in districts as red as R+10. They probably won’t win those, but if they’re winning out as far as R+5, it’s a sign that the Republicans are in very bad shape for next year. For geographic context, this would mean Democrats winning in places like the Richmond suburbs or the western exurbs of DC. I’d be surprised, but if it’s true, it’s the canary in the coal mine.
What does the red and blue on the map of California look like for Proposition 50? This might not make a lot of sense to you right now, but California moved substantially more red in 2024. Trump did the best of his three runs there. Now, he lost the state handily and particularly got battered in the coastal areas, but he did better. Almost the entirety of the inland areas went for Trump last year and it stretched further towards the coast than normal. Proposition 50 would counteract Republican efforts to gerrymander southern and midwestern red states by re-districting California to eliminate most of the GOP’s seats there. California is one of the biggest delegations the GOP has, even with Texas and Florida gerrymandered. That’s going to end tomorrow, but do they show any life, or are the lights going out there.
Is New Jersey too blue for a MAGA Republican? Setting aside the fact that I think Mikie Sherill has better ideas and excellent experience to be Governor, she didn’t run a great campaign. They tried to run a heavily bio driven campaign, leaning on her credentials as a fighter pilot and woman. That’s so 2018. She’s smart enough and has the right values, but her campaign lacked a North Star, most voters don’t know why and what she wants to do in January. People don’t love over qualified, smart candidates, and let’s be honest, they’re more harsh on women for this. Jack Ciattarelli made clear that he wants to undo the Murphy Administration and he’s the change candidate. Look, that’s easy when you’re the nominee of the party out of power. With that all said, let’s just say he did the mechanics of campaigning better, which is kind of understandable in his second run. He made one gigantic mistake though in so far as I can tell, he took the endorsement of Donald Trump. Trump did way better in New Jersey in 2024, and still lost by 9%. He’d probably lose worse in the 2025 electorate. So even though Ciattarelli may have won “the campaign,” does that matter at all anymore? My guess is no. I’d bet she wins by 3-5%. If she wins by more, maybe literally nothing at all mattered.
Forget the Virginia Governor race unless the result is jaw dropping, who wins the Lt. Governor and Attorney General races? Winsome Earle-Sears missed the memo about the 2024 Election. Part of the reason the “trans issue” popped the way it did against Kamala Harris is she was on video talking about it in a way the public disagreed with. Earle-Sears has run her race on social issues that Virginia voters just aren’t much interested in, and because of that Abigail Spanberger is going to crush her and become Governor. Spanberger wins by at least 7% tonight, and the only real question is if it’s more than 10%. That race wasn’t really interesting, as a good candidate beat a bad one. The fun was in the Lt. Governor and Attorney General races. The Lt. Governor’s race will either elect a Muslim woman, born in India or a gay Republican man. The Republican nominee, John Reid, drew the ire of the state’s Republican Governor, who called on him to drop out when his sexually explicit Tumblr account surfaced in the Spring. Honestly, I’ll pontificate a bit here, Reid should lose for many other reasons, but not that. State Senator Ghazala Hashmi, the Democrat, holds a narrow lead, but doesn’t quite hit 50%. I’m definitely watching that race. That’s an undercard compared to the Attorney General’s race. Incumbent Republican Jason Miyares has been accused of being Trump’s lapdog. Democrat Jay Jones sent texts to a colleague talking about killing the former Republican Speaker of the Virginia House and his kids. Honestly, it’s pretty disgusting. Virginians should not be proud, but I guess they have to choose one of these guys. Of course I’m interested in that.
Are we seeing the future in Pennsylvania? Retention votes were never overly competitive in Pennsylvania. I sincerely hope tomorrow’s is not, because it would basically put us in a permanent state of war over these seats. If this race is close, it suggests that this is our new normal though. I think the permanent campaign is part of why we’re in this national mess. I fear it’s our destiny.
Does anything happen in New Jersey? There’s a lot of folks who will privately tell you nothing will happen in the Garden State’s elections tomorrow. Sherill will win and virtually no seats will switch hands in the legislature. That’s not a bad thing if you’re a Democrat.
Who will win the Lehigh Valley’s County Executive races? As goes PA-7, so goes the nation. A Democratic sweep tomorrow will mean bad things for Ryan Mackenzie next year. Unless we screw it up, and pick a bad candidate.
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.
Apocalypse Vibes 