Democratic election lawyer Chris Deluzio won the race for an open U.S. Senate seat on Tuesday. Defeated a Republican businessman and former township commissioner for a House seat north of Pittsburgh.
Deluzio will represent a district that has largely elected Democratic U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb to Congress for the past two terms. It became vacant for this year’s election when Lamb decided not to run for reelection in what proved to be a futile attempt to secure his party’s nomination for U.S. Senate. Senate.
He defeated Republican candidate Jeremy Shaffer, a former Ross Township commissioner who ran as a pragmatic problem solver.
As a result, Republicans’ hopes of regaining majority control of the United States have been dashed. In January, the House of Representatives.
Deluzio’s campaign biography mentioned his participation in last year’s effort to establish a faculty union at the University of Pittsburgh.
Shaffer has stated that he plans to run for Congress as a “pragmatic, common sense problem solver” who supports term limits and nonpartisan redistricting policies.
Pennsylvania’s delegation has been redistricted twice in recent years, once due to a court challenge and again due to the 2020 census, and the state has lost one seat in Congress this year due to its low population growth.
Democratic U.S. Reps. Matt Cartwright of Scranton and Susan Wild of the Lehigh Valley faced rematches with Republican candidates they narrowly defeated two years ago.
In Pennsylvania’s competitive congressional races, Democrats emphasized their support for abortion rights, while Republicans reminded voters how inflation and other economic issues are affecting their lives.
According to the AP VoteCast, a large survey of more than 3,100 Pennsylvania voters, roughly 8 in 10 believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.
According to the survey, roughly half of the state’s voters believe the economy and jobs are the most pressing issues confronting the country.
The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade also played a role in the majority of voters’ decisions, with roughly 8 in 10 citing it as a factor. Only about a quarter said it was the most important factor, with more of those voters supporting Fetterman.
According to the survey, the majority of voters are confident that ballots will be counted correctly, though nearly one-third are either not too confident or not at all confident.
Republicans in northeastern Pennsylvania hoped that conservative activist and former Trump administration official Jim Bognet would overturn his 3.6-point loss to Cartwright in 2020. A Republican victory in that seat in a region where the GOP has made gains in recent years would be felt in Washington, given that President Joe Biden grew up in Scranton.
Wild’s bid for a third term pitted her against former Lehigh County Commissioner Lisa Scheller, who runs a manufacturing company. Wild, a former city attorney in Allentown, defeated Scheller by 3.7 percentage points two years ago. Redistricting added Republican-leaning Carbon County to the map.
Wild’s campaign claimed Scheller had reduced her workforce in the United States and sent jobs overseas, while Scheller blamed Wild’s support for spending bills under Biden for voters’ economic woes.
Elsewhere in the state, Republican incumbents Guy Reschenthaler south of Pittsburgh and John Joyce in a sprawling district that stretches from Gettysburg to Johnstown faced no opposition this fall.
Democrats in Pittsburgh were concerned about voter confusion because the Republican running against Democratic state Rep. Summer Lee is named Mike Doyle, the same name as the city’s long-serving Democratic congressman, who is retiring at the end of the year. Lee won the election and will be Pennsylvania’s first Black congresswoman.
The version of the state’s congressional district map drawn after the 2010 census was especially favorable to Republicans, yielding a long-lasting 13-5 GOP majority until it was overturned by the state’s Democratic-majority Supreme Court in 2018. The delegation has been evenly split between the two parties since then.
After the Republican-controlled Legislature and Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf failed to reach an agreement on new districts based on 2020 census data, the state Supreme Court chose a map proposed by a group of Democratic Party-aligned voters who sued in 2021 in a 4-3 decision in February.
