‘Red Wave’ Continues to Fizzle: Pennsylvania Dems Flip State House for 1st Time in a Decade

As midterm election results continue to trickle in, they’re getting worse and worse for the right-wing seers and cable news pundits who predicted a “red wave.” Case in point: Democrats flipped the Pennsylvania state House on Friday, taking control for the first time in a decade. This comes after Democrats Josh Shapiro (the current attorney general) and John Fetterman (the current lieutenant governor) won their races for governor and U.S. Senate, respectively.

Over this past week, attorneys for Democratic and Republican candidates in close races have been haggling over remaining provisional ballots, largely in Bucks County’s 142nd and Montgomery County’s 151st state House districts. An attorney for both Democratic candidates in these races told Spotlight PA that Republicans’ strategy was to disqualify as many ballots as possible through “really ticky-tack challenges that are being filed opportunistically to try to disenfranchise Democratic voters.” That, apparently, didn’t work.

In a true testament to how every vote really does matter, around the end of last week, the Democrat in the 151st district was up by just 12 votes; at the start of this week, only a few hundred ballots remained to be counted. And now, with Democrats narrowly in control of the state House for the first time since 2010, they’ll be led by the chamber’s first woman speaker, Joanna McClinton.

For months, we were told this election cycle would be devastating for Democrats, who were supposedly focusing “too much” on abortion rights after the fall of Roe v. Wade.

But it turns out that abortion is a winning issue. Not only did Democrats maintain control of the Senate and stave off major losses in the House on the federal level, but results on the state level—which will play an outsize role in the post-Roe fight for abortion rights—were even more decisive. Besides Pennsylvania, Arizona elected a Democratic governor, attorney general, and secretary of state. Michigan reelected Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), along with Michigan’s Democratic attorney general who helped the state defeat a pre-Roe abortion ban, and Democrats also flipped Michigan’s legislature blue. North Carolina Democrats fought off a Republican super-majority that could have overridden the Democratic governor’s veto on abortion bans. Not to mention, abortion rights won on every ballot measure this year: in Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, Michigan, California, and Vermont, despite aggressive anti-abortion disinformation campaigns.

State-level and state-wide elections have never carried more significance for our health and right to bodily autonomy—and judging from the feedback from deeply purple Pennsylvania, voters know this.