ok, a few more minitakes. 1) It's not going to draw much noise bc it doesn't fit national tea-leaf reading or intra-Dem point-scoring BUT: The pace at which PA elected officialdom is diversifying is quite something, including now in big towns in non-diverse counties
We saw this already in 2018 & '20 on the GOP side, w/ women & some non-white candidates running & winning state legslature seats & statewide office. (I think hardcore Dem/progressive activists may underestimate how much this shapes/moderates the GOP image among regular voters...)
One might have been concerned that PA Dems would embrace "casting against type" in a parallel/mirror way & double down on only nominating white men. I'll sidestep the question of whether insiders tried (ymmv) but Dem primary electorates were having none of it in May 2021
in the face of a weirdly🧐 large number of general election write-in campaigns by displaced soon-to-be ex incumbents, multiple Black women mayors were elected in PA yesterday: as were Black councilmembers & school board members, in quite a few places for the first time.
For instance!
Kenya Johns, Beaver Falls' 1st Black mayor & 1st woman
Rita Frealing, 1st African American & 1st woman mayor of Gettysburg
Safronia Perry, 1st Black woman on Carlisle Boro Council
Lillian DeBaptiste 1st Black woman mayor in West Chester (daughter of longtime mayor)
Kenya Johns, Beaver Falls' 1st Black mayor & 1st woman
Rita Frealing, 1st African American & 1st woman mayor of Gettysburg
Safronia Perry, 1st Black woman on Carlisle Boro Council
Lillian DeBaptiste 1st Black woman mayor in West Chester (daughter of longtime mayor)
... Wanda Williams, Harrisburg (second Black woman mayor)
Corey Thurman, first African American elected to Central York School board [& top vote getter!]
David Ward, New Castle's first Black council person
& of course, Ed Gainey, Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor🥇
Corey Thurman, first African American elected to Central York School board [& top vote getter!]
David Ward, New Castle's first Black council person
& of course, Ed Gainey, Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor🥇
Meanwhile, Karen Mallah was one of three Democratic women elected to the Camp Hill School Board last night, in the face of a vicious campaign of false CRT claims & more (read @ByJohnLMicek here👇) and WAIT penncapital-star.com/commentary/how…
This 2011 article👇informs us that Karen Mallah's mother immigrated to Brooklyn from Costa Rica in 1962—& while your humble tweeter here is a sorry excuse for an expert on PA politics, I am, bizarrely, a legit academic expert on Afro-Costa Rican migration pennlive.com/midstate/2011/… 
...& can tell you that Ana Mallah's move was part of a distinctive wave of Black women's labor migration from Limon in the early 1960s that wrought socio-economic mobility from lean opportunity (& left visible imprnt on Costa Rica's demography 40 ys later) ccp.ucr.ac.cr/bvp/pdf/simpos…
... part of a pattern of transnational kin support that has helped Afro-Costa Rican women achieve the highest rate of university degree attainment of *any* group in Costa Rica, even in the face of the entrenched racial stereotypes they have routinely faced...
(Further testament to PA's diversity finally getting reflected in candidates for office: I also got to geek out w/ @Nicola4J this fall about her S. London/Flatbush/St Andrews parish family ties, incl the Panamanian & Cuban travels of an earlier generation) uncpress.org/book/978080787…
Anyway the extraordinarily well-qualified Karen Mallah, 1st person of color to run for Camp Hill school board, powered to victory yesterday along w 2 fellow Dem women in rapidly changing Cumberland County in central PA (Trump+18 in 2016; Trump+11 in 2020) pa.emergeamerica.org/twenty-six-wom…
Also just elected to school board, in the 90+% white Tredyffrin Easttown School District in Chester County: the also extraordinarily well-qualified Dr Yolanda Allen preservingexcellence.com
Beaver Falls & Easttown PA are very differnt places, & the Black women just elected as leaders of each are very different too. Which is kind of the point! PA has suddenly reached the (overdue) point where there's not a lone Black political profile or route: there are lots of them
Seems like some reporting on these newly elected candidates & how they navigated the stoked-high conflict-ridden terrain of education in the era of COVID, "CRT" etc would be a great complement to the 5,000 thinkpieces about Youngkin/McAuliffe we are about to endure?🤨
Jumping back to update this thread with the observation that not only did Judge Lori Dumas outrun all other statewide Dem judicial candidates this year, as final mail in ballots are counted it looks increasingly likely that she will in fact win
So what if the insta-conventional wisdom, based on misleading exit polls & failure to wait for mail in ballots to be tallied [shades of 2018 here?] is really getting all the lessons here... wrong?
What if the story is: even with a beleaguered Joe Biden in the White House, Democrats' post-presidential-year performance in PA looks remarkably similar to 2017
And what if the story is also: unlike in 2017 & 2019, when PA voters had the chance to elect African American Democrats to statewide courts & failed to do so, in 2021 it was an African American woman judge who carried the electorate for PA Dems statewide?
...in the same year in which African American judge candidates were the four top vote recipients among 10 Allegheny Court of Common Pleas candidates [Note: *Not* city of Pittsburgh: countywide, in a county where Donald Trump got 40% of the vote in 2016] pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/ana…
(That clacking you hear is a thousand pundits rewriting graphs 1, 2 & 9 very quickly)
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