Pennsylvania voters on Tuesday will decide whether to keep a Democratic majority on the state’s highest court — the center of pivotal fights over voting rights, redistricting and elections — or potentially plunge the court into a partisan deadlock in a premier presidential battleground.
The outcome will affect how the state Supreme Court could again be called on to settle partisan battles over election laws ahead of next year’s midterm contests.
Democratic Supreme Court justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty and David Wecht are running in a retention election, in which voters are asked to vote “yes” or “no” on whether to give them another term.
Reelecting any of them would continue the Democratic majority, which is currently 5-2. Defeating all three could plunge the bench into a partisan 2-2 stalemate for two years if Pennsylvania’s politically divided government were to be unable to agree on temporary appointees to fill in. Supreme Court terms are 10 years, though age limits can shorten that time on the bench.
Traditionally, a retention campaign is an under-the-radar election.
But on Sunday night, President Donald Trump waded into the campaign, taking to social media to urge voters to “bring back the Rule of Law, and stand up for the Constitution” and reject “three Radical Democrat Supreme Court Justices.” He said they had, among other things, “unlawfully gerrymandered your Congressional maps, which led to my corrupt Impeachment (s).”
Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro responded on social media, saying Trump has “zero credibility when it comes to the rule of law” after he “ tried to throw out Pennsylvanians’ votes and overturn the 2020 election ” and “pardoned the people who assaulted law enforcement” in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In an era of increasingly polarized judicial elections, Republicans mounted a late-emerging campaign to defeat the justices. Democrats marshaled a reelection campaign with their allies and received help from Shapiro.
The campaign was on track to cost more than $15 million, far more than previous retention elections, but nowhere near the $100 million spent earlier this year in Wisconsin — a record amount for a state Supreme Court race in which a Democratic-backed candidate defeated a challenger endorsed by Trump.
Still, the stakes in Pennsylvania’s election are very much the same.
