Democrat James Andrew Malone narrowly won a special election for a Pennsylvania state Senate seat in a stretch of Republican-leaning suburbs and farming communities, scoring an upset in a territory that a Democrat hasn’t represented in the chamber for 136 years.
Malone’s victory over Republican Josh Parsons in Tuesday night’s special election might provide a light in the darkness for Democrats struggling to unify around a strategy to counter President Donald Trump and at each others’ throats publicly.
A top state Senate Democrat, Sen. Vince Hughes of Philadelphia, said Malone’s victory shows the value of Democrats talking to people about protecting Social Security and health care access amid the chaos and pain that Trump’s administration is sowing.
“As much anger that people have, they have anxiety too,” Hughes said. “And last night’s election sends a message that people are going to respond.”
The Associated Press called the race Wednesday after receiving information from county officials that there were fewer ballots left to be counted than the margin in the race.
Pennsylvania’s Republican Party chairman, Greg Rothman, said he didn’t think the first two months of Trump’s administration hurt the GOP in the race. Prices of gas and eggs are dropping and the federal government hasn’t cut Social Security or Medicare, he said.
Rather, Democrats did a better job at getting their voters to vote early by mail and Republicans ran a more traditional campaign employing door-knocking, mailers and phone banking that apparently didn’t work, Rothman said.
“We need to take this as a wake-up call to the Republican Party that we can’t be complacent and we can’t just run campaigns like we’ve always run campaigns,” Rothman said. “We need to embrace early voting.”
Sharif Street, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party chairman, said Trump’s performance in office certainly helped Malone and the GOP’s excuses that they got beaten in voting by mail is just “another way of saying that ‘people voting by mail voted against them.’”
A Democratic flip of that district is a major upset. Democrats say that Trump won the district by 15 percentage points in November’s presidential election over former Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump went on to win the battleground state of Pennsylvania by almost 2 points.
A Democrat last represented Lancaster County in the Senate in 1889, Democrats say. A Malone victory narrows GOP control of the state Senate to a 27-23 seat advantage.
Malone is the mayor of tiny East Petersburg, population 4,500. Parsons is a Lancaster County commissioner, military veteran and former prosecutor who boasted about having visited the White House four times and working with Trump staff on policy issues.
Parsons posted on social media late Tuesday that he was “disappointed in the numbers” and that “it appears we will come up a little short.”
The election comes amid Democratic infighting and a torrent of frustration and anger over Senate Democrats in Washington, led by Sen. Chuck Schumer, ensuring the passage of a Trump-backed spending measure that rank-and-file Democrats had opposed over provisions they said would give Trump broad discretion on decisions that are traditionally left to Congress.
Schumer said the bill’s passage avoided a government shutdown that would have been worse. Following the vote, internal dissension burst into the open, with tension unusually high following a November election in which Democrats lost control of the White House and the Senate, and failed to win the narrowly divided House.
