6 days Ago By Katie Meyer | Spotlight PA
A surprise Democratic win in a Pennsylvania Senate district that heavily voted for President Donald Trump bodes well for the party at large as the 2026 midterms approach. But politicians, operatives, and analysts warned that the special election result in a corner of Lancaster County may not be repeated during a higher-turnout contest — and that Democrats’ struggles with less engaged voters remain a real problem for the party. These divergent takeaways demonstrate how important local dynamics, like a weak GOP candidate, are, in addition to trends like Democratic motivation.
Operatives also told Spotlight PA that national politics always factors into voters’ decisions, and right now it is tumultuous. The special election in March happened just before Trump imposed historically disruptive tariffs that have led to nationwide protests . As longtime Republican political strategist Chris Nicholas put it, “If you're bored with politics, wait a year or two, because it's going to change.
” Local politics matter The Democratic victory in Lancaster was, as Nicholas put it, “a big surprise.” The race was in the 36th state Senate District , which was vacant after longtime GOP lawmaker Ryan Aument left to work for U.S.
Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.
). While the city of Lancaster and its surrounding suburbs have become increasingly friendly to Democrats, the 36th wasn’t considered especially competitive. Located in the northwest of the county, it includes a few small towns that put up Democratic votes, but also a lot of farmland and exurbs.
Trump won it handily in 2024, by 15 points, and it hasn’t elected a Democrat since redistricting moved it to the area in the 1980s. Yet Democrat James Malone, mayor of the borough of East Petersburg, eked out a win over Republican County Commissioner Josh Parsons. With turnout at 29% — by comparison, countywide turnout in the last presidential election was 79% — Malone won by about 530 votes, less than a percentage point.
“Everyone assumed it was going to be business as normal,” said Rob Wolgemuth, a Democratic operative who frequently works in and around Lancaster. “The Republicans were on autopilot, thinking that it was going to be an easy win. They had an established candidate.
The Democrats were trying their best and crossing their fingers, but are no less shocked than the rest of us at the results.” Voter files to tell analysts exactly who voted, who stayed home, and what parties they belong to are not yet available yet. The information can at least partially reveal whether the Democratic win was due more to stronger turnout among Democrats, or whether Republicans and independents voted heavily for the Democrat.
But early signs point to a combination of both. Lara Putnam, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh who studies election data, was able to glean some insight about voter behavior from mail ballot returns. The state tracks the parties of voters who request the ballots, and Putnam said mail returns showed “some number of registered Republicans who voted in advance through absentee ballot for the Democratic candidate.
” Malone “could have won every registered Democrat and every registered independent, and he still got more votes than that” in mail returns, she said. That squares with an observation from Nicholas, which was that Parsons, the Republican candidate, “was turning more people off than on.” While Malone was relatively unknown, Parsons was a firebrand.
A county commissioner since 2016, he is a vocal Trump supporter who has publicly feuded with the local newspaper, and focused his campaign on his record of keeping taxes low, opposing mail voting and COVID-19 lockdowns , and fighting local libraries over visits from drag queens . “You started to hear rumblings about two or three weeks out that maybe things weren't going as planned,” Nicholas said. “If you're the party that is in control of the district, you want a very quiet special election.
And what we kept hearing is that this was kind of more of a Josh Parsons-specific repudiation than a Republican one.” Malone said he also felt he benefited from the commissioner being controversial, even within Parsons’ own party. “Some of them explicitly told me that they were very pro-Trump, they were Republican for 45 years .
.. but that they felt that their state leadership was ignoring them when they chose Josh Parsons, and that they did not want him at the state level,” Malone said of his supporters.
But, he added, there was also “a smorgasbord” of other reasons he felt he received support. Democrats, he said, were often inspired to volunteer for his campaign and vote in big numbers because “they wanted something that they could do that was legal and positive and a statement against what they saw as issues in Washington at the federal level.” Independents, he said, often talked about discontent with the current state and county status quo.
A low-turnout special election A spokesperson for Parsons didn’t return a request for comment on this story. But Michael Straw, communications director for the Pennsylvania Senate Republican Campaign Committee, said he doesn’t think anyone should read too much into this one Democratic victory. Special elections, he said, “can be volatile.
” “Low turnout in one Senate district doesn’t give an indication of where the majority of the Pennsylvania electorate stands,” he added. “Senate Republicans received 250,000 more votes than Democrats in competitive Senate races in a high-turnout election last November. When more of the electorate makes their voice heard, it's clear that they prefer having a check on Governor Shapiro’s failed policies and maintaining good governance in the Senate.
” Malone will be in office only a little over a year before he must seek reelection. He’s already thinking about 2026, saying he’s anticipating that “it's going to be a harder race, simply because I'm expecting that [Republican] leadership in Harrisburg will pay more attention to the people on the ground.” Nicholas agrees.
He thinks his party has good odds of flipping the seat back. “The Democrat will not be a cipher,” he said. “In a regular, off-year general election, turnout will be in the 70% [range] .
.. Republicans are going to run someone different than they did this time.
” In a recent analysis of the Lancaster race , data journalist G. Elliott Morris wrote that two different electorates vote in a presidential election versus a special one. “By definition, the general electorate is full of voters who are much less engaged than those that also turn out for specials,” he wrote.
And in this particular moment in American politics, the most engaged voters seem to be Democrats. An analysis the New York Times performed before last year’s election found Joe Biden was the preferred candidate among people who had recently voted in midterm and primary elections. People who had voted only in recent presidential elections or not at all preferred Trump.
Positive midterm signs for Democrats These turnout trends indicate Democrats could do better in the relatively lower-turnout 2026 midterms than they did in 2024, according to Morris. And that doesn’t even factor in timely political forces, like backlash over Trump’s tariffs, or whatever else might happen over the next year. All of this, Morris noted, is beginning to look a lot like Democrats’ successful election efforts in 2017 and 2018, in the wake of Trump’s first victory.
He’s not the only one making that observation. Wolgemuth, the central Pennsylvania operative, has been watching early elections in Florida and Wisconsin where Democrats overperformed expectations . “It seems that in the current moment, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are simply much more effective at turning out Democrats than they are at turning out Republicans,” he said.
Still, the overall outlook is complicated for Democrats. As the party has made reliable voters a central part of its base, Putnam noted it has also suffered a loss in numbers: Democratic voter registration has long outstripped Republican registration in Pennsylvania, but it has cratered in recent years . This doesn’t mean Republicans are picking up all disaffected former Democrats.
Putnam said Republicans are gaining registrations in the western and northeastern parts of the state. But in the southeast and south-central regions, both major parties are losing vote share — though Democrats are losing more — and voters are instead registering as independent or other. Putnam believes a contributing factor to this shift is a policy change in which people are automatically prompted to update their voter registration when at the DMV.
“We shouldn't be super surprised at what happened in Lancaster County,” Putnam said. “That's an area where people have been signaling ..
. just at a minimum, discontent with the Republican as well as Democratic Party, with this sort of slow move to become less of a Republican stronghold and more an area where there are a rising number of independent voters.” Jalen Nix, executive director of the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, has closely watched both of these dynamics — his party’s dipping registration numbers, and its recent propensity to do better in lower-turnout elections.
He thinks both point to the same issue: Democrats need to appeal to voters who feel less invested in politics, or who are disenchanted by both major parties. Nix took over the campaign committee recently but also worked on the Lancaster race in his previous role with the state Democratic Party, and he told Spotlight PA that he and other operatives “understand that there's a lot of work that needs to be done among working-class voters.” “We're going to continue trying to expand our base towards working-class voters, towards low-propensity voters,” he said, referring to people who infrequently vote despite being eligible.
“I think across the board, you're seeing a lot of people starting to wake up, starting to say, ‘Hey, these [federal funding] cuts are affecting me. I know somebody who's been laid off. I have no idea what my 401k looks like, I was planning on retiring in a few years.
’” Republicans have their own concerns about their party becoming a bigger tent — one that includes less engaged voters who might not turn out when Trump isn’t on the ballot. “It seems concerning,” Nicholas said. “I mean, how many of the podcast bros are going to take a moment off from flexing at the gym to come vote in an off-year election?” 90.
5 WESA partners with Spotlight PA, a collaborative, reader-funded newsroom producing accountability journalism for all of Pennsylvania. More at spotlightpa.org .
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