Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was helping his son fasten his tie at the governor's mansion in Harrisburg on Tuesday night, just as polls closed across the state, when word arrived that his race had already been called. He told his son the tie could go, and the two headed downstairs to celebrate a resounding reelection victory.
The good news kept coming for Democrats as the night unfolded. The party flipped both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House, won control of Pennsylvania's state Senate for the first time in decades, and grew its narrow state House majority by nine seats.
Shapiro's 22-percentage-point, 1.1 million-vote win over Republican challenger Stacy Garrity in the nation's quintessential battleground state has put him in the conversation about who should lead Democrats into a post-Trump era in 2028. According to national outlets, he has been on the phone since Tuesday with party kingmakers, including U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and former President Joe Biden.
The governor carried 10 counties that had backed President Donald Trump two years earlier, including Bucks County, and became only the second Democrat ever to win Lancaster County, after the late Bob Casey Sr. in 1990. He also flipped back Western Pennsylvania counties such as Washington and Beaver, and outperformed his 2022 result in 65 of the state's 67 counties, according to an Inquirer analysis.
Stephen Medvic, a pollster and political science professor at Franklin and Marshall College, said Shapiro's second victory on Tuesday, the help he delivered to fellow Democrats up and down the ballot, could matter even more for a prospective 2028 bid. Shapiro invested more than $10 million in the state party and state-level contests, targeted four U.S. House seats and the state Senate, and created a federal political action committee that could one day fund a presidential campaign. Democrats won all of those races.
Asked Thursday about 2028, Shapiro again deflected, noting he had won reelection only 48 hours earlier and was focused on setting a legislative agenda for the first Democratic trifecta in Harrisburg since 1993. He said he will keep using the PAC to invest in federal candidates “here in Pennsylvania and beyond.”
Medvic cautioned that it is difficult to separate Shapiro's influence from a national blue wave repudiating Trump, with Democrats winning from Texas to Kansas to Georgia. “If you can plausibly claim that you had an impact, you had coattails in some of these House races and Senate races, if you claim that effect and people sort of buy it, then it's real,” he said. The bigger test, he added, is delivering for voters, because “expectations are going to be pretty high.”
Pennsylvania Democrats readily gave Shapiro credit for the sweep. “Gov. Shapiro put it all out on the field and got this trifecta, and he didn't have to do that to win his own reelection,” said Montgomery County Commissioner Neil Makhija. “He could have just sat on $60 million,” Makhija added, referring to Shapiro's campaign fundraising haul.
Shapiro made the case for his own impact as well, pointing to the narrow margins in state Senate races Democrats flipped. “I went on TV for those candidates. I made the case for those candidates. I campaigned across this commonwealth for each of our candidates who had tough races, and they all won,” he said Thursday. Asked why counties that backed Trump chose him, he cited “a long track record of showing up there, listening, treating people with respect, and then delivering for them.” Looking ahead, he said: “We got the keys to the car now. We've got to go drive it, drive it steady, drive it forward in a way that makes progress for people.”
Republicans, for their part, blamed their drubbing on Trump's war in Iran despite fielding what Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward described as top-tier candidates. “There's no question the results of this election will have significant consequences for our commonwealth in the form of higher taxes, increased electric rates, power grid challenges, stagnating our energy potential and government interfering in our personal lives,” Ward said.
