🗳️ Unpacking the Senate recount | PA 2024 Newsletter

In this edition:

— Sean Collins Walsh, Katie Bernard, Anna Orso, Gillian McGoldrick, Layla A. Jones, Oona Goodin-Smith, pa2024@inquirer.com

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We now turn to politics reporters Sean Collins Walsh and Katie Bernard for a look at the state of Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race — now headed to a recount — and when we may learn the results:

🗓️ For some, including Republican Dave McCormick and the Associated Press, Pennsylvania’s razor-thin U.S. Senate race ended last week. For others, including reporters like us covering the litigation and recount proceedings, it’s starting to feel like it may never end.

Here’s where things stand: McCormick was declared the winner by the AP and, after some hesitation, was even invited by Senate Democratic leadership to attend the august body’s version of freshman orientation. But the narrow margin of the race — less than .5% — on Wednesday triggered Pennsylvania’s automatic recount process, and three-term incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey isn’t giving up hope.

Now, instead of duking it out with campaign rallies and TV ads, the candidates’ lawyers are duking it out in courtrooms and county boards of elections across the state. Roughly 80,000 ballots had not been counted as of Wednesday evening, but they’re primarily provisional ballots and remaining mail ballots that may be rejected.

Attorneys for each side are fighting intensely over what should and should not invalidate a ballot and they’re reigniting longstanding fights over the fate of mail ballots that lack a date or are incorrectly dated.

Despite the recount being called, it remains an uphill battle for Casey, who still trailed by more than 25,000 votes as of Thursday afternoon. He would need overwhelming success both in ensuring remaining ballots are counted, and that those voters picked him.

When will it all end? Counties must start the recount by Wednesday, and they’ll have until the following Tuesday to complete it before certifying the results of the election.

🦃 That means it may be nearly Thanksgiving before this race is put to bed.

📣 In the final days before the election, Vice President Kamala Harris warned that Donald Trump would rule the country like a dictator, but for many voters, the argument fell flat. “He’s good and bad. People say he’s a dictator. I believe that. I consider him like Hitler,” one said. “But I voted for the man.”

💸 One of the only bright spots for Pennsylvania Democrats in this election, state House Dems narrowly maintained control of the chamber last week — and spent $18 million getting there.

🌟 Billionaire Elon Musk’s “Tony Stark” energy helped excite Pennsylvanians to vote for Trump. Now, Republicans are chasing his rising star power.

🚞 Trump improved on his 2020 performance across the state, but his most dramatic gains this year were in the Northeast Pennsylvania communities near President Joe Biden’s hometown, where voters in postindustrial cities and Pocono Mountains towns gave Trump the edge he needed to secure the Keystone State and the White House.

💵 In Pennsylvania, economic anxieties and shifting sociocultural sentiments fueled Trump voters to turn out, even if the data didn’t reflect negative ideas about the economy. As one professor put it, “inflation is more costly, politically speaking, than we thought.”

🔵 As the dust settles on a red wave election and a nationwide Democratic reckoning is underway, some Philly Democrats are questioning the effectiveness of the Democratic City Committee’s longtime party chair. But Bob Brady says he isn’t going anywhere.

⛪ As Trump promises a second term driven by an intense escalation in enforcement, including the mass deportations of millions of people, Philadelphia churches and faith leaders are bracing to once again place themselves between immigrants and the government.

❓Many people in the Haitian community in Charleroi — the tiny Pennsylvania borough thrust into the spotlight after Trump made false claims about its Haitian immigrant population in September — say they are uneasy about the future. But, they also say there’s not much they can do other than watch and wait. “It’s the result of the election … and there’s nothing they can do about it.”

📋 From imposing tariffs to replacing civil service employees with his allies, here are five of Trump’s top campaign promises, explained.

🪑 Pennsylvania Republicans last week flipped two longtime Democratic-held U.S. House seats in the Lehigh Valley and Northeast Pennsylvania. Meet the Keystone State’s two new GOP members of Congress.

📰 It wasn’t always this way: For nearly a century, Republicans ruled Philadelphia. Then came the “New Deal Democrats.”

The claim: This week, Elon Musk said on X: “The Democratic Party senate candidate in Pennsylvania is trying to change the outcome of the election by counting NON-CITIZEN votes, which is illegal. That has been their goal all along. They are just flat-out openly doing crime now.”

The check: ❌ False.

Democrats have made arguments to local boards of election asking them to re-review provisional ballots that were rejected because they believe some voters may actually be registered and believe others were improperly removed from the voter rolls.

There is no evidence that these ballots were cast by noncitizens — and it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. And the process of lodging challenges to decisions on provisional ballots is also not illegal.

🎤 Now we’re passing the mic to politics reporter Anna Orso for a look at the Philly voters who went for Trump in bigger numbers than ever before:

This campaign in many ways felt like it lasted years, but we probably learned more about the Philadelphia electorate in just the past week than we did over the course of the campaign.

We learned that when people are upset about the price of basic human necessities, they might be likely to vote based on that, no matter how many times you knock on their door and tell them the economy is great. We learned that liberal bastions should not be taken for granted by Democrats, and we were reminded that no demographic group is a monolith.

Perhaps the starkest illustration of these lessons is the above map that was created by our colleagues at The Inquirer and shows how every precinct in the city shifted. Like similar maps created of the rest of the country, it is a sea of red.

That’s not what you want to see if you’re a Democrat who thought you had a firm hold on the city where your party holds a 6-1 registration advantage. That advantage was 7-1 earlier this year, and several other trends could be troubling for the Democratic Party:

🔴 Trump garnered nearly 1 in 3 votes in the city’s white working-class neighborhoods, which were once made up of solidly liberal, union-worker Democrats.

🔴 Since 2016, Trump improved 16 percentage points in the city’s majority-Latino neighborhoods, a large swing that far outpaces his growth with other groups.

🔴 Voters without college degrees, who make up a massive portion of this working-class city, are increasingly going for Trump. In precincts where fewer than 40% of residents have a college degree, Trump improved by 10 percentage points compared with 2020.

🔴 Democrats’ gains are largely concentrated among the affluent and highly educated areas of the city. The neighborhoods where Democrats stemmed Trump’s growth the most were areas where poverty rates were lowest.

📊 We have a lot more analysis of how Philadelphians shifted this year. Dive into the numbers.

📈 Stacy Garrity: Riding in the wake of the red wave, incumbent Republican State Treasurer Stacy Garrity received the most votes ever for a Pennsylvania state office last week. With 3,517,327 votes, according to unofficial state results, she beat the record number of votes Gov. Josh Shapiro earned during his 2020 attorney general election, when he garnered more support than Biden in the state. And though the vote total will likely generate interest in Garrity’s candidacy for a higher office in 2028 — like Casey did after serving as treasurer for one term — she was mum on whether she’d use the treasurer’s office as a stepping stone.

📉 State House Republicans: As Republicans rejoiced across Pennsylvania for their many wins last week, there was one group that came up short: state House Republicans. The House GOP will remain in the minority for the next two years, after Democrats secured another narrow majority — even in reddening House districts across the state. So Republican leaders promised to recalibrate, as former House Minority Leader Bryan Cutler (R., Lancaster) pledged to step aside for a new slate of leaders chosen earlier this week. The GOP House caucus will now be led by Rep. Jesse Topper (R., Bedford), who previously chaired the House education committee, and Rep. Martina White (R., Philadelphia) will serve as caucus chair.

What he said: “I love serving as governor, I think I made that clear that I don’t wanna go anywhere. I want to continue this work and continue to build on our success of bringing Republicans and Democrats together.” —Gov. Josh Shapiro at a news conference in York this week, when asked about his new national profile that could make him a 2028 presidential contender.

What he meant: Shapiro is publicly focused on the job at hand. It just so happens that expanding his national image as a moderate Democrat willing to work across the aisle — as Democrats desperately seek new leaders after Harris’ loss — will greatly benefit him if he runs for president in 2028.

And we’ve definitely heard this before. In fact, this was Shapiro’s go-to line before running for reelection for attorney general, as rumors swirled about his pursuit for higher office and the governorship. Once reelected to a second term as AG, he quickly jumped in the race for governor.

🗒️ Have you wondered what covering this presidential election looked like for our reporters on the campaign trail and inside The Inquirer newsroom? See for yourself in this behind-the-scenes mini-documentary, produced by our colleague Gabe Coffey.

➡️ Pennsylvania’s Senate recount. Here’s what you can expect.

➡️ Whether voters retain Democratic Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justices Kevin Dougherty, David Wecht, and Christine Donohue in 2025 — decisions which could affect the 5-2 Democratic majority on the state’s bench.

➡️ Trump’s growing list of key cabinet and administration picks, and how the new Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) — led by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — will operate.

📨 And with that, this newsletter is taking a break. Thank you to you, our readers, for following along as we’ve chronicled the twists and turns of this unprecedented election season — with the great Keystone State at the center of it all. We’ve appreciated all your questions, feedback, and interest.

As we look to the future and what this election’s results may mean for Pennsylvanians, we, The Inquirer politics team, aren’t going anywhere. You can follow all of our reporting at inquirer.com/politics. And if you’ve enjoyed receiving our journalism via email, you can still sign up for free to get our morning newsletter or news alerts sent to your inbox daily. We’ll see you later. 👋