(File Photo: Source for Photo: FILE – A sign on a door at The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania is pictured at the Capitol in Harrisburg, Pa., Feb. 21, 2023. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — There are no $1 million giveaways to voters, cheesehead hats or even candidate debates. Elon Musk is nowhere to be found.
Yet the stakes in the Pennsylvania election this fall are very much the same as they were in Wisconsin last spring: partisan control of the highest court in a crucial presidential swing state.
In November, Pennsylvania voters will decide whether three state Supreme Court justices — all Democrats — should keep their seats for another 10 years on a court that has been at the center of pivotal fights over voting rights, redistricting and elections.
Spending is nowhere near the $100 million spent in Wisconsin — a record amount for a state supreme court race, much of it fueled by groups aligned with billionaires Musk, who briefly worked in President Donald Trump’s Republican administration, and George Soros, a donor to liberal causes.
Even so, both parties in Pennsylvania are pouring in money for campaign fliers, digital and TV ads and get-out-the-vote efforts.
The state’s supreme court has a 5-2 Democratic majority, so an across-the-board loss for Democrats on Nov. 4 could leave the court in a partisan 2-2 stalemate for two years, including through next year’s midterm elections.
Motivating voters for a ‘retention election’
A big difference from Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race earlier this year is that Pennsylvania’s doesn’t feature candidates running against each other. Instead, it’s what is called a retention election, in which voters are asked to vote “yes” or “no” on whether to give the current justices another term. The incumbents aren’t identified by party affiliation.
The traditionally under-the-radar election, with a late-emerging organized campaign by Republicans to defeat the justices, has Democrats worried. Educating their voters and getting them to the polls during an election with major races are top priorities.
“It’s a full campaign,” state Democratic Party Chairman Eugene DePasquale said. “The bigger challenge on that isn’t so much getting people to vote ‘yes.’ It’s just even getting some people to understand what a retention vote is, because this is really the first time it’s ever been heavily contested.”
The three justices — Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty and David Wecht — are backed by the Democratic Party in their bids for retention.
Should all three lose, their seats would become vacant in January and leave the court deadlocked with a 2-2 partisan split until voters fill the open seats in 2027 — unless Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and the state Senate can agree on temporary fill-in appointees.
Complicating it is that the Senate is controlled by Republicans, who might see an advantage in letting the court remain deadlocked.
That means the court might be unable to settle cases involving voting and election laws through the 2026 midterm elections, when the governor’s office and a handful of contested congressional seats will be on the ballot.
In recent years, the court has made major decisions around voting and elections, necessitated in part by a politically divided and often stalemated state government.
The justices in 2018 threw out a GOP-drawn map of Pennsylvania’s congressional districts as unconstitutionally gerrymandered and, four years later, again drew the boundaries after a stalemate in government.
The court also turned away GOP challenges to Pennsylvania’s expansive vote-by-mail law, which became a focal point of Republican efforts to overturn Trump’s loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Republican justices dissented.
Spending is exceeding any previous retention race
With a month to go before Election Day, spending has exceeded any previous judicial retention election in Pennsylvania.
In 2017, two justices spent just shy of $1 million combined and had no organized opposition during an election in which turnout was less than 20%. Counting money that has been reported or verbally committed, spending in this year’s election is on pace to exceed $10 million.
While not all of the spending or sources of money have been disclosed publicly, big donors include trial lawyers and labor unions on the Democrats’ side. Spending also is coming from a group associated with billionaire Jeffrey Yass, Pennsylvania’s wealthiest person, for the Republicans’ campaign against retention.
The justices have been campaigning around the state, mostly in front of friendly audiences, and lining up endorsements from Planned Parenthood and organized labor.
Democrats and their allies were first on the airwaves with a TV ad and are trying to hammer home the justices’ support for abortion rights, voting rights and labor unions in an ad campaign that advances them as defenders of the law against powerful people and corporations.
“We protected access to abortion and your right to vote, even when the powerful came after it,” the justices say in a new TV ad. “All Pennsylvanians deserve freedom and fairness.”
Republican messages target Democratic voters
With mail ballots set to go out soon, Republicans are beginning to spend on an effort to convince voters that 10 years on the state’s highest court is enough.
Many of their ads are targeting registered Democratic voters with anti-establishment messages that use language typically associated with progressives who oppose Trump.
“This fall you can defend democracy and force an election for a new Supreme Court,” says one TV ad that ran most heavily in Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold.
Fliers landing in the mailboxes of registered Democrats carry similar messages. In yet another twist, one flier accuses the justices of drawing the heavily criticized congressional districts that they actually threw out in 2018 as unconstitutionally gerrymandered.
A group that typically acts as a conduit for campaign contributions from Yass, who runs the Wall Street trading firm Susquehanna International Group and has an estimated net worth of $65 billion, is sponsoring TV ads and fliers.
The group, Commonwealth Partners, didn’t respond to inquiries about the spending.
Another billionaire looms large in the election
Yass-funded groups have spent millions of dollars each of the last four years in Pennsylvania elections to help Republican candidates, including more than $10 million each in 2022’s GOP gubernatorial primary and 2024’s election for attorney general.
Beyond Pennsylvania, Yass is one of the biggest contributors to national conservative causes and, through his company, is an investor in Trump’s social media company. Yass’ firm also is a major investor in TikTok owner ByteDance, and this year, Trump’s super political action committee, Maga Inc., reported that Yass gave it $16 million.
The campaign also has drawn national party interest.
The Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee have each pledged $500,000.
A page on the Republican National Committee’s “Swamp the Vote” website is devoted to urging Republicans to vote “no,” and the Republican State Leadership Committee reported spending about $500,000 on digital ads and text messages.
It said defeating the three justices “would spur a seismic momentum shift in Pennsylvania that would create an opening for more conservative policy victories in the state.”
Borrowing from Democrats’ strategy in Wisconsin, where Musk personally campaigned in the closing days of the April race, DNC Chairman Ken Martin said in a statement that “MAGA billionaires” are trying to buy the nation’s courts.
“The stakes couldn’t be higher in these judicial retention races, especially in the run-up to critical races across the Commonwealth in 2026 and winning back the White House in 2028,” he said.
