I am trying hard not to break my never-tweet-while-votes-are-still-being-counted rule but people, these Allegheny County numbers are... something else.
Like, in 2017 Dem PA Supreme Court nominee Dwayne Woodruff carried a net 55,000 vote advantage out of Allegheny County. Today Dem Supreme Court nominee Maria McLaughlin is already carrying a 70,000 net vote advantage out of Allegheny County, and 1/4 of precincts are yet to report
& in the face of incredibly contentious schoolboard politics—& some ugly campaign tactics—Dem candidates who are going to bring unprecedented racial/ethnic diversity are winning schoolboard races in northern & southern suburbs alike. Not winning all of them: but in *tough* places
It's also striking that while over the last decade statewide judges up for retention in PA have all been retained w/70-75% of the vote, this year they are running ~62% in counties as different as Allegheny (Biden+2) & Somerset (Trump+55). Some throw-the-bums-out vibes out there?
Anyway in some sense no surprises here. PA since Nov 2020 has looked like a fiercely divided+narrowly balanced state, & once the Philly collar counties' full votes come in I expect that will be confirmed by today's statewide races. The suburbs are just as split, on a tiny scale
So eg the once-firmly-Republican upscale suburbs of Allegheny County where Dems made unprecedented inroads in 2017 & 2019 saw not clear backlash but rather high turnout on all sides grinding change to a halt: w/split results on many boro councils & school boards
Meanwhile the steady march downballot of national political realignment continued apace in older & more rural regions of PA. Up until today's election, Trump+55 Somerset county had longtime incumbent Dem women as Treasurer and Prothonotary. That's no more.
There's just no question that the image of Democratic Party reaching a great many voters today is of radical socialists who embrace violent allies, while an incompetent president steers to econ disaster. Ask the couple who interrogated me at length about this at the polls today😶
More or less despite this, local Dems have (barely) prevailed in many races they could have lost. how? by nominating hyperqualified, charismatic, tireless, locally-rooted candidates, & supporting them with full-on shoe leather campaigns buoyed by now-experienced volunteer leaders
So, eg, she won👇. By less than 200 votes😳 timesonline.com/story/news/pol… 
within the middle-ring suburbs, local Dems' organically relational ground game proved able to rally support around "we're the sane ones here" frames
https://twitter.com/RyanDeto/status/1455737934418694145
👇add Bethel Park to the list of middle-ring Allegheny County suburbs where the sum total results of the backlash [anti-mask; anti-CRT; anti etc etc] and the backlash-against-the-backlash were narrow Dem flips rather than losses
https://twitter.com/TomDuerrPA/status/1455752049765801986
Meanwhile across the state in the Lehigh Valley, in Lehigh & Northampton incumbent Dem county execs (narrowly) held on, while a bunch of hard-fought county judicial race and suburban schoolboard races went narrowly against Dems rather than narrowly for them
I'll close w/a reminder that unless writing about politics literally pays your bills, using yesterday's election results to prognosticate about future national results, or to play "which Dem coalition members can I blame for Team Dem not #winning?" is a *choice*. Choose not to!
You can instead look around & ask: what are the political possibilities of the diff units I live within: town, schools, county, state rep? Given the baseline of where we are (not where I wish we were), what are feasible next goals? And who do I need to connect & work with to try?
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