It’s history! If vote count holds, Democrats will lead Dauphin County for 1st time since at least 1919

Who says local politics are boring?

This week, Dauphin County residents – at least the nearly 65,000 who took the time to vote this fall – got themselves on the cusp of assigning majority control of the county’s board of commissioners to the Democratic Party for the first time since at least World War I.

At this writing, Democrat Justin Douglas holds a 42-vote lead over incumbent Republican Chad Saylor, with only about 250 votes, at most, still to be counted.

If he holds on through the final certification of the vote, he and incumbent Commissioner George Hartwick, the top vote-getter in Tuesday’s count, will deliver the Democrats a majority on the three-person board.

Let’s pause for a moment to consider what that means.

Since 1919, we as a nation have experienced economic depression, world wars, game-changing civil rights advances, and all kinds of political scandals.

There’s even been multiple political makeovers within each of the major parties, noted Sarah Niebler, a political science professor at Dickinson College.

Through it all, no matter which of those things was happening or how they impacted southcentral Pennsylvania, Dauphin County voters chose Republicans. PennLive verified this with a county-provided list of commissioners, by political party affiliation, that goes back to 1920.

It could be longer; party affiliations on the county’s list only go back to 1919.

In actuality, through most of the 20th century, Dauphin County – like much of the rest of southcentral Pennsylvania – had a rich Republican heritage.

In former Kutztown University professor Jack Treadway’s “Elections in Pennsylvania” book that studied voting patterns in the state through the 20th century, he found that Dauphin County voters posted average votes of 61.3 percent for Republican candidates in both gubernatorial and presidential elections.

And from the time of the Great Depression through the mid-1960s, Harrisburg was home to M. Harvey Taylor, a former President Pro Tempore of the state Senate and the leader of a local political machine that was considered one of the most robust in the state.

That, in Treadway’s categorization, was enough to earn the county a “strongly Republican” designation, historically. Even today, every other county in south central Pennsylvania has Republican majorities in the courthouse.

So what changed in 2023?

Well, the answer to that question requires a look at what changed in 2008.

Dauphin County Democratic Committee Chair Rogette Harris noted that Democrats became the lead party in terms of voter registration in the county that year, as Barack Obama was making his history-making run to become America’s first African-American president.

The party scored some significant local victories in that time, like the election of Rob Teplitz to a Dauphin County-anchored state Senate seat in 2012. And there were increasingly regular wins for Democratic candidates in statewide races.

But the Democrats were never able to convert that registration edge – which now sits at more than 11,000 voters – into wins at that county courthouse.

It was, Harris said, mission number one this fall, even if she wasn’t necessarily sure that it was going to happen this year.

(To be completely accurate about that record, Democrats have won a handful of county judgeships in that time; most recently when the now-retired Jeannine Turgeon was elected to the bench in 1991. But no one can remember Democrats winning any of the county row offices like district attorney or treasurer, either. That streak ended Tuesday, too, with the election of Bridget Whitley as the county’s clerk of criminal courts.)

According to day-after observations, Harris and other Democratic leaders believe forces above and below the county level converged to make things happen now.

For example, the most expensive race for a state Supreme Court seat in Pennsylvania’s history featured a barrage of advertising designed to make people concerned about the future of abortions feel like they had to stand up and be counted this year.

In Dauphin County, the Democratic candidate in that race, Daniel McCaffery, prevailed by 3,302 votes, or a margin of 5.16 percentage points.

And then, from the bottom up, spirited local government and school board races pushed Democratic efforts to new levels in many of the county’s largest municipalities, Harris said, including Derry, Lower Paxton and Swatara townships.

On the local level, that generated Democratic sweeps on the Derry Township school board and the Swatara Township board of commissioners, and the election of Pamela Thompson as the first Black woman to serve as a commissioner in Lower Paxton Township.

“The local races definitely drove turnout,” Harris said.

Finally, there was a candidate in Douglas, pastor of a Harrisburg church, who brought fresh blood and fresh energy to the race and spoke to issues like chronic mismanagement at Dauphin County Prison that the current board has seemed unable to correct.

“Prison reform was a central part of my campaign,” Douglas noted, which included a graphic billboard on heavily traveled Route 322 that highlighted 18 inmate deaths at Dauphin County Prison since 2019, the year of the last commissioners’ election.

“People care about that, and this campaign proved that you can be successful by running on issues that people care about.”

Harris said that was all supplemented by a bigger county party effort on mailing and door-to-door canvassing than in some recent cycles, even as Republican incumbent commissioners Mike Pries and Saylor sat out several pre-election candidate forums.

Now, it looks like modern political history is within reach.

Republicans, at least the few who were willing to comment on the sea change here Wednesday, were still scratching their heads about the result.

“That was quite striking to me when I realized what was happening yesterday,” said Sally Klein, who served as a county commissioner from 1987 through 1999, when Republicans held a better than 3-2 edge over Democrats in voter registration.

She wondered if it wasn’t a moment that was just way past due, given the changes in party identification.

“I think it really had to be party affiliation because there was not anything wrong with that team,” Klein opined about the result, noting the GOP commissioners have managed to run county government without a property tax increase for 13 years running.

Democrats, meanwhile, are savoring the moment, even if they have to wait a few more days to make it official.

“When did the M. Harvey Taylor era end in Harrisburg?” we asked one veteran political operative who agreed to talk only on a not-for-attribution basis.

“Yesterday,” came his immediate reply.

This post was originally published on this site