Months after President Donald Trump decisively carried Pennsylvania, Democratic fortunes are already changing, with Democrats appearing to have won two special elections on opposite sides of the state Tuesday — one in a safe Republican state Senate district that Trump just carried by 15 percentage points, and one in a state House of Representatives district that just handed control of that chamber to Democrats.
The races are the latest in a series of overperformances by Democrats in state legislative races across the country, playing out as a referendum on the second Trump administration. And as far as the referendum goes, the state Senate race was an impressive victory for Democrats.
With all the votes counted late Tuesday night, Democrat James Malone appeared to have won over Republican state Senate candidate Josh Parsons by less than a single percentage point in Lancaster County, a largely GOP-held agricultural region west of Philadelphia.
“Obviously we are disappointed in the numbers,” Parsons posted on social media Tuesday night. “We are still reviewing them, but it appears we will come up a little short.”
The race, once expected to be a comfortable win for the GOP, got a flurry of last-minute attention after Elon Musk circulated a post on X about the race. Scott Pressler, a GOP voter registration activist who worked in Pennsylvania ahead of the 2024 election, said Republicans were losing the race and that the party wasn’t taking special elections seriously.
After Malone won the race, Pressler had a similar message: “I warned everyone. No one listened.”
The county is now one of the fastest-growing areas in the state. New developments and duplexes jut against the farmland. Since 2020, with the rise in remote work, thousands of families and younger voters have flocked to the area from Philadelphia and its suburbs, looking for more inexpensive real estate and a slower pace.
In 2024, Lancaster County Democrats made a major push to close the margins in the presidential election compared to 2020. Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and the former second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, each made visits.
At the same time, the Trump campaign put Lancaster County on its radar. It was where Trump held one of his final rallies, on the Sunday before Election Day, delivering a fully off-script message where he spent considerable time questioning the 2020 election results, and said he wouldn’t mind if someone shot at the journalists in attendance.
But after all the money and attention from both campaigns and local parties, the result was the same. Trump won the county 57% to 41%, the identical margin he beat Joe Biden there in 2020.
Stella Sexton, co-chair of Malone’s campaign and vice chair of the county Democratic Party, said they employed a strategy based on the Iowa Senate special election in January, where Democrat Mike Zimmer won by three percentage points in a district Trump had won by 21.
“The very next morning after that happened, I was like, ‘Well, shit, I want to learn exactly what they did,’” Sexton said.
A crucial part of that strategy: Don’t talk to Republicans. It might seem counterintuitive in the Iowa district where Zimmer won or the Pennsylvania district where Malone won over Parsons. But Sexton suggested it was common sense.
“In a short election, you don’t want to remind them to go vote, because there’s no time to persuade them,” Sexton said.
“Then the state parties started taking more interest,” she added. “And we just kind of kept building on that, kept building excitement, and kept telling people, ‘Hey, if we can move the margin in this race in Pennsylvania, it’s going to matter to people, people are going to notice.’”
Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, called the victory “shocking” and “historic.”
“To protect working Americans, Democrats like Senator-elect Malone are competing everywhere, and in special elections throughout the country, we continue to overperform as voters join us in fighting back against the Trump-Musk agenda,” Martin said in a statement.
“This is a shockwave to the system and the way Republicans have run our government. Republicans everywhere should be afraid,” he said.
GOP Rep. Lloyd Smucker, who represents Lancaster County, told NOTUS on Tuesday afternoon ahead of the vote he expected Parsons to win.
“Democrats are hoping to take advantage of a special election cycle where they’re hoping to generate more enthusiasm on their side, their whole model is based on increased turnout,” Smucker said. “But I think they’re misjudging the Republican electorate there. So I don’t have any concerns.”
Across Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County, Democrats also won — as expected — a safe Democratic state House seat.
While not competitive, the race drew attention from the national Democratic Party because the results would determine control of Pennsylvania’s lower chamber. Martin campaigned for Democrat Dan Goughnour in February, the first stop of his first state tour as the head of the DNC.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee also targeted the race.
“Against the backdrop of chaos in Washington, Democratic majorities are crucial for blocking extremism and prioritizing progress on the issues working families care about most,” DLCC President Heather Williams said following results.
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.