Pa. Supreme Court race between Carolyn Carluccio and Dan McCaffery has turned into a multi-million dollar showdown

HARRISBURG — Outside groups and individual donors have over the last month spent more than $7 million to elect a new justice to Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court.

Campaign finance reports released last week show Republican Carolyn Carluccio and Democrat Dan McCaffery have spent millions on ad buys to fill Pennsylvanians’ mailboxes and airwaves ahead of the Nov. 7 election, in hopes of altering the balance of the state’s highest court. The two are competing to fill an open seat left on the seven-justice bench after the 2022 death of former Chief Justice Max Baer.

The race between Carluccio, the president judge of Montgomery County’s Court of Common Pleas, and McCaffery, a Superior Court judge, has major implications for the future of the state’s court, which is currently a 4-2 Democratic majority but has deadlocked on election issues ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

The results of the top statewide race on the ballot next week will also serve as a pulse check for how each party could fare in the battleground state next year.

Between Sept. 19 and Oct. 23, Carluccio spent $742,000 of her own fundraising and received another $2.3 million in in-kind donations, most of which came from the conservative Commonwealth Leaders Fund for two major $1 million media buys that include attacks on her opponent. This PAC, supported by libertarian billionaire Jeff Yass, has spent more than $4 million so far this year to elect Republican judges to the state’s appellate courts.

McCaffery spent $2 million over the last month, with $300,000 from the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association’s political action committee as his largest contributor. More than a dozen labor unions, mainly from the trades, have spent nearly $280,000 over the last month in support of McCaffery.

Outside groups spent an additional approximate $3 million in independent expenditures, with most of that money going to support McCaffery.

A lot of the race at this point centers around attack ads, which McCaffery and Carluccio both say are misleading or wholly inaccurate.

These ads might be the only way most voters learn about the candidates, too. According to Franklin & Marshall College’s October poll released last week, more than seven in 10 registered voters don’t know enough about McCaffery or Carluccio to form an opinion about them.

Over the last few months, Carluccio has been criticized by Democratic groups for her comments on Pennsylvania’s election laws and her endorsements by two antiabortion groups. For example, Planned Parenthood’s political arm and other left-wing groups have spent millions pushing the “Can’t Trust Carluccio” campaign, which make claims that she removed antiabortion language from her website. (Her campaign removed her resume from her campaign website between the primary and general elections, where she summarized herself as a defender of “all life under the law.”)

“They’ve been targeting me for two months now,” Carluccio told The Inquirer at a campaign event on Monday. “And I’m going to tell you, I’m much stronger than they think I am. The law in our Commonwealth is pretty established in the areas they’re attacking me on. Abortion is not an issue in this race. My opponents have made it an issue.”

McCaffery has faced criticism for political activism that Republican groups say belongs in the state General Assembly instead of the courtroom.

Attack ads have also targeted the judge for receiving inappropriate emails from his brother, former Justice Seamus McCaffery, who was forced to resign from the state Supreme Court in 2014 amid the state’s Porngate scandal in which the former justice was the recipient or sender on more than 230 emails including inappropriate images sent around among the state’s top judicial officials.

One of the Commonwealth Leaders Fund’s latest seven-figure ad buys cites a 2014 Inquirer article that reported Dan McCaffery received pornographic messages on his state government email from his brother, and responded telling him not to send that to his work email. Dan McCaffery said in a recent interview that he didn’t remember receiving the email.

“Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen billionaires and corporate interests spend millions of dollars in negative attack ads because they know what we stand for,” Dan McCaffery said in a video posted Sunday. “We will not let this seat be bought.”

Staff writer Julia Terruso contributed to this article.