State Senate District in GOP Hands for Decades Turns Blue
“A Pennsylvania State Senate district that Trump had won by 15 points just flipped blue tonight. This is how it’s done. Run everywhere. Run down ballot. Focus on local elections ASAP - from school board to councils to state legislatures. We build from there.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, March 25, 2025 via X.
These are difficult days for Democrats. Republicans control both Congress and the White House. CNN reported last week that favorability of the Democratic party is at an all-time low. To make things even worse for the Democrats, Democratic members of Congress are hearing from their constituents in districts from California to New Hampshire that they are not doing enough to oppose the Trump agenda.
Into this cloud of gloom, a ray of sunshine for Democrats from a very unlikely place burst onto the political scene yesterday. In a special election for an opening in the Pennsylvania state senate (36th district), Democrats pulled off quite an upset. By roughly five hundred votes, Democrats flipped a state senate seat in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania that President Trump carried by fifteen percentage points back in November. The opening was created when the incumbent state Senator Ryan Aument left to take up a position as state director for the newly elected Republican US Senator Dave McCormick.
To put this Democratic win in perspective, the 36th state senate district has been in Republican hands since 1979.
I need to add a personal note to my reporting here. Last year, I canvassed parts of Lancaster County for the Harris/Walz team and spoke to numerous voters. I can attest to the fact that the political landscape tilts towards the Republicans.
Why then was the Democratic candidate, James Malone, the mayor of East Petersburg Borough, able to pull off such an upset over Josh Parsons, the chairman of the Lancaster County Commission? The first thing to note is that this is a “special election.” The turnout for special elections is almost always much lower than a general election. Party activists are much more prominent in special elections as are interest groups. We need to be wary of seeing special elections as predictors of future events. Sometimes they are and sometimes they are not. Only time will tell if these results are a harbinger or an outlier.
Personalities always figure in politics and this race is certainly no exception. As the Philadelphia Inquirer points out:
Parsons’ political personality has been built, in part, by his leading on culture war issues. He led early efforts to reopen the county early in the COVID-19 pandemic, he objected to a drag queen story hour last year at the local library that was later shut down due to bomb threats, he was featured in a Washington Post story for his attacks on the local newspaper, and more. His control in the Lancaster GOP can also be seen in his ability to get his wife, Christina Parsons, elected to the county Court of Common Pleas in 2023, despite not getting the Lancaster County Bar Association’s recommendation. Parsons also had a public argument late last year with Amber Martin, the county’s GOP treasurer and wife of Lancaster’s state Sen. Scott Martin, in which she described his behavior as “despicable,” LancasterOnline reported.
So, it is fair to say that Parsons was not the best candidate that the Republicans could have nominated. Given the partisan dynamics, a GOP win seemed very likely. However, there were trends working below the surface. As Stella Sexton, Malone’s co-campaign manager, pointed out Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro had done very well in Lancaster County. GOP consultant Patrick Ruffini last week gave a detailed analysis for how Pennsylvania performed in 2024 and concluded that “If there’s anywhere where Kamala Harris held up in the battlegrounds, it was in newly suburbanized areas. In Pennsylvania, that is mostly in the central part of the state, around Harrisburg, York, and Lancaster.”
The one thing that was missing for Republicans was enthusiasm for President Trump. Parsons is a staunch backer of the president and has a history of fighting on the cultural issues that had helped the Republicans in 2024. One would have thought that the Make America Great Again (MAGA) army would have turned out for Parsons. For some reason, they stayed home. They could have just assumed that this was an easy win for team Trump or they could be frustrated or they could be disappointed in President Trump’s performance on economic issues. There is no way of knowing what their motivations might have been. Only future elections will answer this questions.
A lot of credit must go to James Malone for making the decision to enter this race. A case could have been made for Lancaster County Democrats sitting out this race. However, the Democrats in Lancaster County saw an opportunity when others missed it. Most important of all, Team Malone realized that you cannot win unless you run and take your case to the people. As Sexton told the New York Times: “It was hard to get the ball rolling back in January. Democratic donors and potential canvassers were downcast and dispirited after the 2024 election.” But, she said, “we didn’t have time for that.”
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