HARRISBURG — This month’s election brought a massive power shift to Pennsylvania, with Democrats winning a rare trifecta to control the governor’s office and the state Senate and House.
What can we learn from this win? And what will Democrats do with their new authority?
Spotlight PA hosted a free virtual event Wednesday evening to break down the result, and answer questions about how Harrisburg might handle issues ranging from the minimum wage to campaign finance changes to cannabis legalization.
Spotlight PA Government Editor Katie Meyer moderated the discussion with reporters Stephen Caruso and Jaxon White. Residents from Elk to Blair to Montgomery Counties, among many others, joined. You can watch the full event and read highlights below. These excerpts have been edited for length and clarity.
What do Shapiro’s election results tell us?
Jaxon White: Pennsylvania really followed national trends. The Democrats did really well, right? And sort of riding that blue wave that people are talking about, Shapiro building off of his own name recognition and his own historic popularity at this point, he was able to win three more counties than he won in 2022. [They are] pretty red counties, historically speaking, like Montour, Washington out in Western PA, and Lancaster County.
Compared to the 2024 presidential results, he actually flipped 10 counties that Trump had won. So really, Democrats did really well. Shapiro did really well with that. And now his campaign can really run with that.
Stephen Caruso: One thing that I'm still kind of picking apart, and I'm doing some reporting on, is … how well he did in rural counties in particular. Lancaster is the one that really comes to mind. … It does seem like Shapiro has put a lot of time into the ag industry. … Bills that have passed to try and fight avian flu, aid for farm communities writ large, talking about tariffs, talking about the impact that has. And I think that was a trend we saw nationwide. Rural farming communities in particular voted for Democrats or were at least not as strongly Republican.
I have theories on [Montour County]. It's a small county. It has a big “meds and eds” population.
Interesting or surprising legislative races?
Caruso: What surprised me is just how well Democrats did in their marginal races.
Why Democrats are looking at a 13-vote [state House] majority is because they flipped a number of seats that I think looked good on paper, but them flipping would have required everything going right. And they ran the table in those districts. There are basically three Republican state representatives left in southeastern Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia [and its] suburbs, there is a single [GOP] state senator.
Katie Meyer: That's something that we've been talking about for many years: Democrats having this surge in the Philadelphia suburbs, really just almost vanquishing the historic GOP strongholds that had been the collar counties.
But the level to which that has happened now is again, as Stephen said, they’re almost gone.
What are the top priorities for Democrats?
White: Raising the minimum wage seems to be the No. 1 priority.
Meyer: $15?
White: Yes, but I've also seen some of them hedge it a little bit and say that it might be a little bit different, right? That it might be periodic, that it might be a year-over year-gradual increase to $15. It might be immediate.
But raising the minimum wage is definitely what Gov. Shapiro and the leadership teams have said is going to be their first bill of 2027.
They want to find some form of consistent funding stream for mass transit. … They want to codify abortion access into the state constitution. That one's also a little bit complicated because it's going to take two legislative sessions back to back, and then it gets put to a ballot referendum. So they would have to control Harrisburg for a little bit longer than just this one session.
They also want to increase opportunities for child sex abuse victims to sue their abusers after the statute of limitations runs out. And then broadly, they're saying they also want to increase housing access. That could be funding. That could be some other policies. But housing seems to be a major priority, sort of tying back to issues of affordability that a lot of them campaigned on.
Any anti-corruption, campaign finance, or ethics measures that seem possible?
White: The other day, I talked to Rep. Joe Webster (D., Montgomery). He's backed a lot of the campaign finance reform legislation, gift ban legislation, and he said Democrats have a real opportunity right now to advance those proposals to try and rebuild trust in government with people … If you look at some of the latest polling, it's one of the top issues among voters. It's what a lot of people told me at the polls on Election Day they care about.
Caruso: In general what I often hear in the building too is a sense of … pent-up distrust. No one wants to do unilateral disarmament, so to speak, and I think that sort of always complicates the path forward for good-government reforms in Harrisburg.
At the same time, I too talked to a lot of voters who said restoring trust in government is big.
Will there be increased school funding?
Meyer: Many people here probably know, Pennsylvania several years ago saw a Commonwealth Court ruling that said that our schools were unconstitutionally inadequately funded. The funding was very lopsided across the state, depending on where the schools were. They ordered the legislature to fix that. They didn't put a specific remedy on it, so it's been up to lawmakers to decide what to do. Advocates can go back to court if they think that the terms of this lawsuit are not being followed.
So what they have done is they calculated an adequacy gap, which shows how far under adequacy schools are … [but in the past as they added payments to address the gap], it was a compromise between Democrats and Republicans.
Democrats could decide that they want to put more money in. We also have a structural deficit though in Pennsylvania's budgets, and so finding billions of dollars is really hard, especially if you don't want to tap into the rainy day fund — crazy, I know. So I think that's going to be a real interesting challenge for Democrats: how much money they want to keep pumping into schools.
Will lawmakers legalize recreational cannabis?
White: We were talking about the structural deficit, right? Year over year over year, Gov. Shapiro has pitched wanting to legalize recreational marijuana to fill in some of that revenue.
So I think that's something that we should expect lawmakers to talk about over the next couple of years. But there's been so many different avenues to do that. There was a bill to sponsor a state store model, trying to balance big national corporations that sell marijuana versus like small farms wanting to enter the industry. There's a lot of nuance to the discussion that crosses partisan lines.
Want to know more? Spotlight PA’s government team also discussed what the results mean for Shapiro’s potential presidential campaign, the odds of Pennsylvania changing the state constitution to allow a progressive income tax, and which lawmakers will likely play a large role in shaping policy. You can watch the full event here.