Democrats maintain narrow majority in Pennsylvania state House amid red wave

Democrats will narrowly maintain control of the Pennsylvania state House — one of the only bright spots for the party after a red wave led by President-elect Donald Trump’s election ushered in GOP wins up and down the ballot.

Democrats will again control the state House with a 102-101 majority, after all incumbents running for reelection on Tuesday won. The Democrats’ “humble majority,” as House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) calls it, often complicated lawmaking over the last two years and will likely do the same in the upcoming legislative session.

The Associated Press called the final state House race and declaring that Democrats would hold onto their narrow majority on Friday morning, after ballot issues in Cambria County delayed results.

“This was a tough election, but our incumbents proved they have the confidence of their constituents,” said Madeline Zann, the executive director of House Democrats’ campaign arm. “This majority is the people’s majority because voters trust them to deliver results.”

In the end, Democrats’ majority came down to Rep. Frank Burns (D., Cambria), who was reelected to a ninth term to represent Johnstown in the reddening county 80 miles east of Pittsburgh. He is the last of the Blue Dog Democrats in the state House, is anti-abortion and pro-Second Amendment, and often blocked social-issue bills or required Democrats to find Republicans in the collar counties who would support them.

Burns ran a Trump-style campaign himself, including attack ads that claimed his GOP opponent wanted to bring in 100 Afghan families into Johnstown and give them jobs held by locals, spend more on public housing, and thus make the community less safe — a mirror to Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-refugee rhetoric.

Democrats surprised the state in 2022 when they flipped the state House for the first time in 12 years with a narrow majority. Officials expected the state’s new redistricted maps, which gave Republicans a slight edge over Democrats, to make races more competitive, but didn’t expect Democrats to flip the chamber so soon.

House Democrats currently control the lower chamber by only one vote, and at times have had to lean on moderate Republicans from Bucks County to pass bills when they couldn’t get their whole membership to support them. Lawmaking halted on multiple occasions throughout the two-year legislative session because of more than a half-dozen resignations that put Democrats under their numeric majority.

Only about 10 races statewide were competitive in this year’s election. Republicans targeted seats held by vulnerable Democrats in other parts of the state that are leaning redder, such as Burns, who held onto his seat by approximately 1,000 votes in a county that Trump won by 35 percentage points.

Meanwhile, Democrats had hoped to pick up some of the few remaining GOP-held seats in the collar counties — like Rep. Craig Williams’ seat as the last Republican representing parts of Delco or two Lower Bucks seats represented by Republican Reps. K.C. Tomlinson and Joe Hogan — as ones they thought they could flip to maintain and expand their narrow majority. Williams, Tomlinson and Hogan all won reelection.

Republicans also had their eyes on several seats across the state that they thought they could flip, including Rep. Brian Munroe (D., Bucks). House Republicans and a political action committee backed by Jeff Yass poured more than $600,000 in ads in support of GOP-challenger Dan McPhillips. Munroe ultimately won reelection by a small margin.

Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, spent $1 million to help his party retain and expand its state House majority, and he made 20 endorsements across the state in districts Democrats hope to flip or to protect vulnerable incumbents. In his endorsements earlier this fall, Shapiro noted the Democratic priorities he and the slim Democratic majority in the state House — in concert with the GOP-controlled state Senate — had been able to pass, including an increased property tax and rent rebate for seniors, an expanded childcare tax credit, and major investments in public education to respond to a court order requiring officials to create a new school funding system.

In recent years, Democrats have dominated the fast-growing collar counties around Philadelphia, electing Democrats to 31 of the 39 districts in Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware and Chester Counties.

Bucks remains an outlier in the increasingly blue Philadelphia suburbs, as the only collar county with a GOP voter registration advantage. For this reason, many of the competitive House races are in Bucks County, and Republicans represent more districts in Bucks than in any other collar county.

This is a developing story and will be updated.