Few states’ elections are as important these days as Pennsylvania’s.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the swing state was one of several where President Donald Trump tried to overturn the election results with a wave of unsuccessful lawsuits. In fact, Pennsylvania saw more election lawsuits in the last cycle than any other state, according to a Democracy Docket analysis. Because it’s both large and evenly split, pollsters consistently rank it as the single state most likely to tip a presidential contest.
It might be an off-year for federal elections, but there’s still a handful of states holding state elections this year that could have major national consequences. And Pennsylvania, once again, is at the forefront. Next month, voters will head to the polls for a contest that could have huge implications for the future of fair elections in the Keystone State — which means for the next presidential election, too.
They’ll decide whether or not three Democratic state Supreme Court justices should keep their job for another 10 years. The highly contentious race is generating national attention — along with deceptive mailers funded by a conservative mega-donor that lie to voters about the justices’ record in blocking a GOP gerrymander.
Democrats currently hold a 5-2 majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. But with three Democratic justices — Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty and David Wecht — up for retention, Republicans see an opening to flip control of the state’s highest court in 2027, right before the next presidential election.
Voters will be asked to vote yes or no on whether to retain the justices. If any justices aren’t retained, a conventional election to name their successor would take place in 2027.
Since the court flipped to Democratic control in 2015, it has issued a string of rulings that, together, have gone a long way to protect fair elections in the state.
After the 2020 presidential election, the court blocked Trump’s multiple attempts to overturn his election loss. In 2018, the court’s majority struck down a Republican gerrymander, which at the time voting rights experts said was one of the most egregious in the country — adopting a new, fair map in 2022. And the majority upheld the state’s no-excuse mail-in voting law in 2022, which protected access to the ballot box for some 8.7 million registered voters.
Should Republicans gain a majority on the court, they could reverse those rulings, and use other voting or redistricting cases to jeopardize fair elections in the Keystone State.
As a result, millions of dollars from national groups are pouring into the election.
“All of our politics, I think, are now national,” Lauren Cristella, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Pennsylvania government watchdog Committee of Seventy, told Democracy Docket of the upcoming election. “We’re injecting a lot of national issues that we’ve seen around elections and controversies around mail-in voting into this election. The hyper-partisanship that we’re seeing at every level of government, we’re seeing it play out in this race as well.”
A right-wing blitz of dollars and disinformation
The deceptive mailers started arriving at voters’ homes in early September with a shocking message: “The liberal Supreme Court gerrymandered our congressional districts to help Democrats win.”
The mailer features a congressional map of Pennsylvania with two oddly shaped districts in the eastern and western parts of the state circled in red, seemingly to show where the court carved them out to help Democrats win.
But according to reporting from Spotlight PA, the map featured in the mailer is from 2011. The court, including all three Democratic justices up for retention, tossed out that map in 2018 as a Republican gerrymander.
The mailer reportedly came from Commonwealth Leaders Fund (CLF) — a PAC with ties to Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire who has a long history of using his immense wealth to fund far-right political causes in his home state.
Another CLF mailer tells voters to “vote no to term-limit the PA Supreme Court.” Cristella said that’s an attempt to deceive voters who might not know the intricacies of how Pennsylvania judicial elections work, and might think they’re voting for term limits, which are generally popular.
“It’s adding to the noise and the confusion,” she said. “It’s a low-information race in general. People aren’t very familiar with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. And they’re not very familiar with the fact that we elect judges. And it’s a retention race, so you have to explain to people what a retention race means and what the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ of it all means. And then on top of that, you have groups like the Commonwealth Leaders Fund out there spreading absolute lies and misinformation. And people have no idea what to believe.”
A campaign of manipulation
Pennsylvania Republicans are pulling out all the stops for a no vote. At a state party meeting in Harrisburg in June, the prominent conservative influencer Scott Presler reportedly led a training on voter registration with an eye on the upcoming vote.
Presler has promoted QAnon, and organized Stop the Steal rallies after the 2020 election. He was on the Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021, and has called that day’s insurrection “the largest civil rights protest in American history.”
“They allowed Gov. Wolf to shut down Pennsylvania during COVID. Dougherty, Donahue, Wecht did that,” Presler told the state GOP meeting. “They also allowed mail-in ballots to come three days after Election Day. If you want justice and you want accountability, then you vote ‘no’ to these people. If we get a simple majority vote, you will remove three Democrats from the Supreme Court in one single election. That has never been done.”
State Supreme Court races used to be sleepy affairs. But that’s changed in recent years as the political climate has become hyperpartisan and divided. At the beginning of the year, for example, the Wisconsin Supreme Court election became the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, thanks to Elon Musk’s meddling.
Cristella said the current political climate “adds a lot of noise and a lot of confusion to people who are already overwhelmed, exhausted and, quite frankly, apathetic.”
That makes it easier for well-funded right-wing groups and provocateurs to get involved in judicial elections and use the current political climate to manipulate people into voting for something they might not be fully informed about.
“You’ve got a state government that is approaching four months late on a budget that feels dysfunctional, a national government that just shut down,” Cristella said. “It’s not screaming, ‘Trust us, engage, be enthusiastic participants.’ Add this new level of partisanship and deceptive tactics and lies, it makes it all the much harder.”