The GOP’s stance on abortion and LGBTQ issues may have cost them the election in Philly’s suburbs

Democrats’ resounding wins Tuesday in local elections in the Philadelphia suburbs showed their recent electoral success there wasn’t a fluke.

Four years after Democrats swept to power in some of Philadelphia’s collar counties for the first time ever, they were reelected to governing bodies in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties. The party also won a contentious school board race in Pennsylvania’s third biggest district that Democrats said amounted to a repudiation of GOP policies banning “sexualized content” in library books and Pride flags in classrooms.

At the top of the ticket in the race for Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Democrat Dan McCaffery ran up big margins in the Philadelphia suburbs over Republican Carolyn Carluccio, a Montgomery County judge who the GOP had hoped would make inroads in the collar counties.

Taken together, Tuesday’s results suggest that heading into the 2024 presidential election in swing state Pennsylvania, suburban Democrats remain more energized than Republicans. That trend runs counter to the typical dynamic in off-year elections, when the party that doesn’t occupy the White House tends to be more motivated. That thesis didn’t hold up in last year’s midterm elections in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, thrusting abortion access into the center of the political debate.

“Right now, it’s the abortion issue that’s ruling the day,” said Frank Agovino, chair of the Delaware County Republican Committee. “Even at the local level, they’re blaming Republicans. We’re not making our case like we should be.”

Democrats say that’s only part of the story. “In conjunction with abortion is the other layered-in kind of Republican social agenda that is just so repellent to the country,” said Kunal Atit, campaign manager for the Bucks County Democrats. “Voters in the largest swing county in the most important swing state uniformly rejected that.”

In bellwether Bucks County in particular, Republicans had hoped to build on gains they made in the last municipal elections in 2021, when the GOP won several row offices.

But Democrats Bob Harvie and Diane Ellis-Marseglia held onto their 2-1 majority on the commissioners board after campaigning on election integrity and support for abortion protections.

Though local officials hold little sway over those protections, Harvie and Marseglia had highlighted a letter they sent the U.S. Supreme Court urging justices to consider protecting the sale of mifepristone, a medication crucial to many abortions.

Republicans, meanwhile, ran a tough-on-crime campaign and promised to combat the opioid epidemic. But by 11 p.m. Tuesday evening, the party’s shot at winning back its long-held majority had cracked, and the GOP instead returned its incumbent commissioner, Gene DiGirolamo, back to the board seat reserved for the minority.

“We had a great group of candidates who worked really hard,” said Patricia Poprik, chair of the Bucks County Republican Committee. “Unfortunately, they got caught up in a national environment that was not favorable for Republicans.”

Voters in Bucks County were also motivated by conflicts over LGBTQ representation animating campaigns for several school boards. In Central Bucks, Democrats swept five seats and won control of the board after the GOP-led board banned “sexualized content” in library books and Pride flags in classrooms.

Democrats also won a majority in neighboring Council Rock School District, propelled by voters “who wanted to be sure our schools did not become the next battleground for the far right,” said Rebecca Tillet, chair of the PAC supporting the Council Rock Democrats.

Republicans had argued that schools had become too permissive in the teaching of issues like race and gender. “The troubling aspect for Republicans was that in the last cycle it looked like they were making up some ground they had lost and it quickly dissipated,” said Charlie Gerow, a GOP strategist based in Harrisburg, who ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor last year.

Atit, the Bucks Democrats’ campaign manager, said the results showed voters’ discontent with “MAGA extremism.”

“We believed that ‘22 was a reaction to the Republican culture war across the country. We saw no reason why that was going to change in ‘23,” Atit said. “Nothing fundamentally has changed about the country in a year.”

Democrats also benefited from a strong showing at the top of the ticket by McCaffery, who put abortion rights at the center of the Supreme Court race.

Unofficial results showed McCaffery far outperformed the 2021 Democratic nominee for the high court, Maria McLaughlin, in the suburbs.

For example, McCaffery had an 11-point edge in Bucks County with 55% of the vote, according to unofficial results. By comparison, McLaughlin got just 49% of the vote in Bucks two years ago when she lost to Republican Kevin Brobson.

And in Carluccio’s home county, Montgomery, McCaffery led by 30 points — 10 points better than McLaughlin’s edge. Montgomery County GOP chairman Christian Nascimento said the Democrats’ negative advertising “turned her into Doug Mastriano.”

“Having known her, the messaging defined her in a way that was unrecognizable to me,” Nascimento said. But, he added: “I think we’ve got to talk about [abortion] in a different way, in a way that’s more compassionate and more inclusive.”

That may be easier said than done. “Carluccio has a great resume, bipartisan appeal. It didn’t work because the Republican brand is so toxic and unreliable on people’s core rights and the issues they care about,” said Tommy McDonald, an admaker and Democratic consultant who worked on McCaffery’s campaign.

Agovino, the GOP chair in Delaware County, said Democrats had done a “masterful job” of linking the party’s larger stance on abortion with local candidates, some who the chairman said did not necessarily hold the same outlook.

For example, Agovino cited Carluccio’s message to voters leading up to the election that as a justice she would follow Pennsylvania law — which allows procedures up until 24 weeks of pregnancy.

Democrats won big in Agovino’s county after three incumbent council members and its district attorney claimed reelection Tuesday evening, thwarting the party’s chance of retaking power it lost in 2019 for the first time since the Civil War.

As the GOP looks ahead to 2024, party leaders called for introspection.

Agovino said the party needs to persuade more voters to cast mail ballots — something GOP leaders across the country have been urging since the 2020 election. Agovino and others acknowledged it’s a challenge to get voters to look past Trump’s unfounded and false claims of rampant fraud.

“There’s still a hesitancy in the Republican base we’ve got to address,” Nascimento said.

Agovino said that tactic could help the GOP increase turnout in the future. He said registered Republicans in Delaware County requested at least 9,000 mail ballots — but only around 6,000 were cast for party candidates, signaling that some Republicans may have cast votes for Democrats this year.

“We’re still playing catch up and still trying to figure it out, get Republicans to embrace it,” Agovino said of mail-in voting. “Some have, but we still got a ways to go.”

To avoid further losses, Agovino said, his party will have to perform better with younger voters and women. That includes Republican women, Agovino said, some who have soured on their own party’s abortion stance.

“Republicans are gonna have to look very, very closely at how we — maybe not win — but how we do much better in the suburbs,” Gerow said. “We’ve got some soul searching to do and some new planning that has to be done and part of that is we have to do a better job at messaging the abortion question.”

Staff writers Julia Terruso and Maddie Hanna contributed to this article.