‘Shock and disbelief’: Democrats’ victory in 36th state Senate race a major upset

• By Jaxon White/LNP | LancasterONline

It had been a running gag in Lancaster County politics these past few months that maybe county Commissioner Chairman Josh Parsons would flub the 36th Senate District race.

The sheer improbability of that suggestion made it funny.

Maybe Republican voters would take for granted their heavy advantage in the 36th and not turn out at the polls. (Unlikely.) And maybe anger at President Donald Trump would motivate Democrats to vote in droves in the special election. (Unlikely.)

But on Tuesday night, those jokes were no laughing matter for the GOP.

Come 10:15 p.m., James Malone, the two-term, part-time mayor of East Petersburg Borough, had pulled off the most significant political upset in Lancaster County history by defeating Parsons in a county that hasn’t elected a Democrat in the state Senate since 1889.

Some local Republicans on Wednesday whispered — others shouted — that Parsons’ polarizing personality drove many GOP voters away from the polls, or to choose Malone on their ballots.

Some cited the mail-in results showing Malone won 70% of the mailed ballots. The county’s stats Tuesday morning show only about 56% of those had been requested by registered Democrats and about 10% from independent or third-party voters, meaning some of the 34% of Republicans who requested a mail-in ballot wound up voting for Malone.

Couple Malone’s lead from mail-ins with a mere 29% turnout in a district of more than 184,000 registered voters, and Tuesday saw Parsons lose the race in a district that Trump won with a 15 percentage point margin in November.

Political pundits across the country were quick to add Parsons’ defeat to their list of indicators of dissatisfaction with Trump’s second term, connecting Malone’s success to Democratic gains in other recent special elections nationwide.

Malone bested Parsons by just 482 votes, as of Tuesday evening, in a district considered so deeply red that in 2022, Democrats didn’t even field a candidate.

Malone said Wednesday he was told his swearing-in is tentatively scheduled for early May, though he’d like to get to Harrisburg sooner. He will serve the seat until at least 2026, likely launching his reelection campaign within a year.

“We’re going to have to work really hard to put the platform on the ground … and prove to all of them that this was not just a small minority making a decision,” he told LNP | LancasterOnline.

There are still provisional ballots to be counted, and military and overseas ballots can trickle in before 5 p.m. on April 1, but the number of those ballots is too few to sway the outcome of the race.

The 36th’s former senator, Ryan Aument, whose resignation in December sparked the special election, won the seat with more than a 15 point margin in his 2014 and 2018 contested campaigns.

Aument, who did not endorse Parsons’ candidacy, did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Shock and disbelief’

Parsons, who had never lost a campaign since entering the public eye in 2011, was confident the race would break his way when he spoke to a reporter at his East Hempfield Township polling place Tuesday morning, despite Republicans — including Elon Musk and activist Scott Presler — raising doubts that Parsons could overcome Malone’s mail-in lead.

Many of Lancaster County’s top Republicans regularly gather on election nights at the Republican Committee of Lancaster County’s headquarters in East Hempfield Township to watch the live results as they’re reported.

In the room with Parsons and his campaign team Tuesday was state Sen. Chris Gebhard, whose 48th District covers a sliver of northeast Lancaster County. He chairs the Senate Republican Campaign Committee, which gave just over $4,600 to Parsons’ campaign this year.

“There was a lot of shock and disbelief amongst everybody in the room from the time I got there at about 9:30, until I left an hour and a half later,” Gebhard said. “It was a historic upset.”

He said the Lancaster County GOP seemed to focus its messaging in the lead-up to the election to mirror that of a contentious primary campaign, focused on driving the 36th’s 53% majority of Republicans to the polls to overwhelm Democrats’ early mail-in advantage.

That did not happen. Emblematic of that failure are polls in Republican bastions like Elizabethtown Borough and West Hempfield Township.

Malone won four of Elizabethtown’s five voting districts and five of West Hempfield’s seven — all of which broke for Trump in November. Malone won some of those precincts by just a few dozen votes, relying heavily on mail ballots that yielded sometimes twice or three times as many votes in his favor.

Yet Gebhard said Parsons’ loss was not a knock against his candidacy, or the county GOP’s ability to spread word about the special election. He said the result was likely a pushback against Republican control in Washington, D.C.

Others felt differently.

“This is a race that Republicans should have won. Period,” said Shelley Castetter, a longtime GOP strategist in Lancaster’s southern end who had worked with Aument in the past.

Citing several cases of Parsons’ harsh language and inflammatory rhetoric, she said his loss was just as much about his poor likability as a candidate as it was about national politics.

Many of Parsons’ campaign materials boasted his public opposition to Lancaster City Council’s “Welcoming City” immigration ordinance and Lancaster Public Library’s hosting of a Drag Queen Story Hour last year. Some local Democrats blame his speaking out about the latter event for attracting attention that led to a bomb threat that shut down much of downtown Lancaster.

Parsons also sparked outrage from some of the county’s local GOP chairs last year when he and fellow Commissioner Ray D’Agostino funded mailers supporting challengers to members of the Republican Committee of Lancaster County who opposed his wife’s endorsement for a county judge race in 2023.

His public criticisms against LNP | LancasterOnline, claiming it is a biased news organization, and his belittling of a reporter were the subject of a Washington Post column last year.

“(Parsons) has ruled with an iron fist,” Castetter said, noting that those who oppose Parsons rarely speak out against him.

“Instead, they will just quietly not support him,” she said.

On the campaign trail, Parsons also missed a key opportunity to reach out to independent or moderate voters by ignoring invitations from the county League of Women’s Voters to participate in a forum earlier this month with Malone and Libertarian candidate Zachary Moore.

Kirk Radanovic, chairman of the county GOP, said in a statement he expects “a lot of finger pointing to rationalize the defeat.”

“Today, I’m calling on all Republicans in Lancaster County to unite,” Radanovic said. “Republicans who sit on their hands or home on Election Day, elect Democrats. Republicans cannot be complacent.”

Radanovic also warned Malone that “his days are numbered in Harrisburg.”

A ‘hopeless’ campaign

Democrats maintained throughout Malone’s campaign this year that they were simply looking to close the margins with Republicans in this race to prove a point to the GOP and build momentum heading into this year’s municipal elections.

“When we started this race back in January, there were a lot of people that were hopeless,” Malone’s co-campaign chair, Stella Sexton, said Wednesday. “We just didn’t have time for that feeling.”

Sexton, also vice-chair of the county Democratic committee, and other county Democrats led frequent door-knocking campaigns around the 36th, which covers 25 municipalities spanning much of northern Lancaster County.

She said backlash to Trump’s efforts to reshape the federal government, largely through slashes executed by top adviser Elon Musk to public services, was “really the only thing” that Democrats heard about from voters early on in the campaign.

Other special elections across the country, like one in Iowa that saw a Democrat, Mike Zimmer, flip a Republican state Senate seat in January, emboldened county Democrats to push harder for the 36th seat.

Franklin & Marshall College political science professor Stephen Medvic said the Democratic Party’s advantage in special elections could carry into later elections if dissatisfaction with the Trump administration grows among the electorate.

“Even though a bunch has happened since the Iowa special election … some of this is kind of baked in,” Medvic said. “It’s about turnout differential, and it’s about enthusiasm among the opposition party.”

Lancaster County Democrats’ efforts this year attracted plenty of cash to Malone’s campaign. And some of Pennsylvania’s top party members backed Malone’s candidacy.

On Monday, U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio of western Pennsylvania helped canvass for voters. And as polls opened on Tuesday, a robo-call recorded by Gov. Josh Shapiro was placed to households in the 36th District encouraging them to vote for Malone.

Malone’s victory will not loosen the GOP’s grip on the state Senate majority, and statewide, Republicans are using that fact to downplay the impact of his win.

But the win sends a signal to Democrats in deeply red parts of Lancaster County who for generations have viewed their votes as an exercise in futility.

For Democrats like Kevin Astree, 45, of East Hempfield Township, voting in the special election was entirely about the slim chance they could see some rare representation in the General Assembly.

“I feel like things are just trending in the wrong direction currently,” Astree said. “And I just want to do my part to try to correct that.”

Even third-party voters had reason to feel energized by the results. Though the 480 votes Moore secured would not have swayed the election in Parsons’ favor, the Republicans’ loss of those votes widened the margins, making Malone the clear winner.

“I’m not going to shy away from the fact that I may be one of the most hated men in Lancaster County at this point by the Republican voters,” Moore said. “I’m not going to apologize for trying to go out and represent the Libertarian values.”