For the first half of our preview, covering Philadelphia, its suburbs, and Allentown, click here. This half of the preview covers Pittsburgh city offices and Allegheny County.
Allegheny County
County Executive
Dave Fawcett vs. Sara Innamorato vs. Michael Lamb vs. William Parker vs. John Weinstein
Allegheny County has produced cycle after cycle of wins for the left. In 2018, DSA members Sara Innamorato and Summer Lee defeated a pair of conservative Democrats in the state House; in 2019 progressive Bethany Hallam won an at-large seat in the county council, starting years of friction between the progressives and county executive Rich Fitzgerald; in 2020 progressives took more state House seats from moderate incumbents; in 2021, Ed Gainey unseated Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, and a progressive slate captured most of the county's judicial spots; in 2022, Summer Lee defeated not only the local establishment, but AIPAC and their millions in attack ads, in an open congressional race, and progressives won even more state House seats.
In 2023 the premiere contest is the County Executive primary, and progressives have their eye on the prize. State Rep. Sara Innamorato is a phenomenal candidate, and has the full arsenal of Pittsburgh progressives behind her: the SEIU Healthcare union, Summer Lee and her Unite PA organization, the unrelated grassroots organization Pennsylvania United, the Working Families Party, Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey and his political network, Sunrise, and Our Revolution. Her campaign has been a self-assured offer to Allegheny County voters of a government free from the influence of big business, developers, frackers, and nepotistic political machines.
John Weinstein has been elected Treasurer of Allegheny County every four years since 1998. The son of a powerful suburban Democratic party boss, John was only in his 20s when he was first elected to county office, and has patiently waited his turn ever since. Despite spending nearly all of his adult life in office, Weinstein rarely made headlines or advanced any initiatives of note. Partly that's the office—Treasurer is a famously quiet position, regardless of location—but much of it is his political disposition that led him to make friends with party bosses, insiders, and big donors rather than activist groups or simple voters. His campaign reflects that, carrying a message of experience and competency, to the point where if he had any desire to let voters know what he'd actually do as county executive, he hasn’t acted on it.
Michael Lamb can't help but be compared to John Weinstein. Lamb is, like Weinstein, an elected treasurer (the office is named Controller in Pittsburgh), though he served the city of Pittsburgh. He's also the son of a powerful politician, former Senate Majority Leader Thomas Lamb, though the family is now best known for Michael's nephew Conor. Unlike Weinstein, Michael Lamb was never content to stay put and wait for the time party leaders designated for him to advance. It didn’t take Lamb long after he was first elected Allegheny County Prothonotary in 1999 to run for mayor of Pittsburgh, in 2005…and then again in 2013. He found little success either time. In between, Pittsburgh was electing a new Controller, around the same time Allegheny County was doing away with his job, leading him to switch to his current office. A state auditor campaign in 2020 marked his third unsuccessful attempt to convince voters to elect him to a higher office.
With Weinstein running as the moderate party choice, and Sara Innamorato running in the progressive lane, Lamb is squeezed from both directions. Decades of fighting on the losing side of Pittsburgh factional politics makes it hard for Lamb to call in institutional favors; meanwhile, even if Innamorato weren’t a democratic socialist, Lamb couldn’t make a play for progressive voters even if he wanted to, not after backing anti-abortion social conservative Jack Wagner for mayor in 2013, or after supporting pension cuts that same year. Instead, Lamb is going the route of a liberal reformer, someone who will break from the calcified establishment that voters have been increasingly rejecting, without changing anything of importance.
The first sign that this election was getting away from the establishment was the Allegheny County Democratic Committee endorsement vote. The ACDC is a notoriously conservative body. Despite being made up of committee people elected in partisan Democratic primaries at the precinct level, the ACDC has historically been friendlier to Trump supporters than progressives. Notoriously, a challenge from progressive Jessica Benham convinced a moderate state house incumbent to retire in 2020, and the ACDC responded by passing over endorsing her for the primary endorsement in favor of transphobic Trump supporter Heather Kass. That endorsement was a step too far for the state party, which offered a rare rebuke to a county party over it. The ACDC supporting a primary challenger to Summer Lee that year is a less-remembered footnote. Lee won her primary 76% to 24%, and Benham beat Kass 42% to 15%. Given that track record, observers were shocked to see how close the margin of the endorsement vote was: Weinstein did win, but with only 39% of the delegates. In second was Sara Innamorato, at 32%.
Regardless of the margin, Weinstein is endorsed by the county party, and it's joined by the building trades union and the AFL-CIO. Not too long ago, that would have been the race. Of course, back then, they were functionally the entirety of labor's presence in Allegheny County politics. The SEIU is now a force to be reckoned with, and they, along with the teachers unions, are all-in for Innamorato. Innamorato's campaign also has a strong ground game of its own, working in conjunction with the grassroots groups that are, by this point, seasoned campaigners. The result is an interlocking team that can cover the county, even if Innamorato is ultimately likely to get more votes from Pittsburgh than outside of it.
For progressives, choosing a candidate meant consolidating the field. Liv Bennett, a progressive County Councilmember, was also a candidate for county executive, and found herself without support from the movement she had considered herself a part of, so she quit—not just the race, but the movement, endorsing John Weinstein. The process may not have been clean, but the result was that only a single progressive, Sara, would be on the ballot. The Allegheny County establishment can’t say the same. After the party, building trades, AFL-CIO, and a majority of establishment county politicians backed Weinstein, Lamb was undeterred and chose to continue his campaign, and caused a split in loyalties. Most damaging to Weinstein’s prospects was County Executive Rich Fitzgerald’s support for Lamb. While Fitzgerald and Weinstein haven’t gotten along for a while now, Weinstein was far from a natural Lamb ally, and the intensity of his support, including cutting an ad for Lamb and paying over $100,000 to air it, prevents the establishment from presenting a united front to voters.
To compound matters even further, during the first half of campaign season, Lamb and Weinstein saw each other as their main rival, a state of affairs that culminated in a pair of press conferences in late March, where Lamb and Weinstein accused each other of ethical misconduct. During the critical introductory period, Sara Innamorato was able to stay above the fray and define herself positively. On top of which, the two men fighting over who represented the worst of entrenched political interests may have even turned what could have been a liability for Innamorato—her youth and relatively recent entry to politics—into a strength.
Of course that state of affairs couldn’t last, and after a poll released by Weinstein backers showed Innamorato leading 32% to Weinstein and Lamb’s 20%, panic set in among the establishment. The home stretch of this election has been a flurry of attacks, mostly from Weinstein, who has nearly lapped the field in fundraising thanks to hundreds of thousands of dollars from the building trades unions, but also thanks to major Republican donors, including $100,000 from investor Eric Yonke, $50,000 from Rosebud Mining CEO James Forrest III, and $30,000 from the Casillis, a wealthy local family in the construction business. It wouldn’t be fair to let the biggest GOP checks Weinstein cashed overshadow the dozens and dozens of Republican donors sending him contributions of merely $500, $1,000, or even $10,000; those are simply too numerous to list here, and Weinstein’s campaign is utterly dependent on them. It isn’t the 2000s anymore, when Republicans were able to compete at the countywide level, something the Republicans writing checks to Weinstein finally grasped.
Despite being flush with money, Weinstein’s campaign is drenched in flop sweat. They clearly realized too late the threat that Innamorato represents, and are now pushing out red scare ads and text messages, the last-ditch fallback of a campaign that doesn't have an oppo file ready. It doesn't help that they lack the subtlety to make themselves sound like anything other than Republicans attacking a Democratic general election opponent in doing so. Take Weinstein's first real attack ad against Innamorato, which not only calls Innamorato socialist at two separate points, it makes the baffling choice to broaden the ideological targets, imploring voters that "we can't allow the failed progressive agenda that's destroying our city, to destroy our county," a message so tone deaf about how Democrats talk to each other that when the campaign posted it to Twitter, they turned off the ability to reply after multiple users appeared to believe Weinstein was the Republican nominee.
Michael Lamb has also finally turned his sights on Innamorato, and he at least knows he needs to target his ads towards Democrats, but that doesn't mean he's found a more compelling line of attack. The sole attack ad he could afford to get on the air faults the representative for not passing any legislation, apparently hoping that voters don't think about the Republican majority in the House that persisted until a couple months ago, or about how much legislation a city controller is responsible for.
Both Lamb and Weinstein are now getting their hands dirty, but once again, Innamorato has managed to hold herself above the fray, sort of. Innamorato, as a campaigner, likes to focus on herself and avoid touching on other candidates as much as possible. Unlike her main competitors, she hasn’t run any negative ads from her own campaign, relying instead on the Working Families Party, which has run nearly $400,000 of ads for her, including a spot that not only goes after Weinstein and Lamb for their campaign donors, but tries to tie them together as two sides of the same establishment coin.
It’s not just the poll numbers; Innamorato is riding into election day looking like the woman to beat. Bernie Sanders endorsed her on May 3, her campaign has been bragging about a ground game no one can match, and the Post-Gazette (who we will not be linking to while the strike is ongoing) just published an article under a headline calling the race “really Sara’s to lose”. By no means will the old Allegheny County establishment be gone if Sara wins, but it could well and truly be overthrown on Tuesday. And that’s a big deal.
Controller
Corey O’Connor (i) vs. Darwin Leuba
Then-Controller Chelsa Wagner was elected to a judgeship in 2021, which led to the eventual appointment of Pittsburgh City Councilmember Corey O’Connor (son of former Mayor Bob O’Connor) to the office in the summer of 2022. Even though O’Connor is a member of the establishment faction in the context of Pittsburgh politics, he’s sufficiently non-hostile towards the progressives, and unlikely to enough to truly fuck up the meager responsibilities of the office, that there was no appetite to challenge him. Just about every progressive officeholder and union joined with the establishment wing to acquiesce to his reelection.
The only opposition to O’Connor comes from O’Hare Township (pop. 9,000) Auditor Darwin Leuba. His big pitch is more aggressive reviews of UPMC’s property taxes, and voting for more humane policies as a member of the Jail Oversight Board (which the Controller is). His campaign is run on $20,000, a hope, a prayer, and endorsements from Pittsburgh Sunrise and Pittsburgh DSA. He’s not going to win, but he is worth a vote.
Treasurer
Erica Rocchi Brusselars vs. Anthony Coghill
Yes, Pennsylvania counties elect both a Treasurer and a Controller, for reasons we cannot begin to understand. With Weinstein finally out, the county is getting its first new treasurer in decades. The smart money is on that new treasurer being Anthony Coghill, a second-term Pittsburgh city councilor. Coghill represents the city’s most conservative neighborhoods in the south hills, and was the moderate choice when he first won the seat in 2017—a feat he managed on his fourth try, and only after he took over the local ward organization. Coghill is a piece of work—it takes a special kind of guy to flatly say he doesn’t see affordable housing as a concern and, without qualifiers, opposes spending on it. He’s also been a stalwart defender of the county party's endorsement process, denying the reality of Trump supporters among precinct committeepeople, right after they endorsed a Trump supporter for state house. Shamefully, when progressive county councilor Bethany Hallam attempted to attend his press conference about the matter, he attacked her past as a drug addict.
A much better Treasurer would be Erica Rocchi Brusselars, chair of Pittsburgh’s 23rd Ward (East Allegheny), actuary, and former volunteer with the Abolitionist Law Center. Brusselars is aligned with the progressive faction of Pittsburgh politics, and her campaign has done some work with Innamorato’s, even if Innamorato hasn’t endorsed in this race. For that matter, most progressive groups haven't, with the Pittsburgh AFT brand and a single SEIU local (for social workers, #668). This is all despite Brusselars managing to swing the official party endorsement because Coghill entered the race too late. The lack of progressive help may be because she’s running a less ideological, more technocratic campaign, or because if Coghill wins he’s out of Pittsburgh’s hair and somebody else’s problem, a motivation that’s less crazy than it seems in Pittsburgh politics—Bethany Hallam once supported her foe Nick Futules for a state House appointment so that he’d be out of the Council. Regardless of why, Coghill has benefited from the building trades going hard for him, while Brusselars has largely had to go it alone in a campaign that takes most of its funding from her and a couple relatives.
District Attorney
Stephen Zappala (i) vs. Matt Dugan
We meet again, Mr. Zappala. The 2019 DA race was the one contest the Allegheny County left well and truly botched by backing Turahn Jenkins, who had some fantastic positions on criminal justice—as well as some horrific past statements on LGBTQ people, which surfaced during the campaign. Jenkins tried to distance himself from those comments without ever really denouncing them. Stephen Zappala won that primary 59-41, but by then, progressives were already on plan B, an independent candidate in the general election. It was such a clear last-ditch, desperate effort that his eventual 57-43 victory (as the nominee of both major parties) only underscored how beatable he’d been, and for good reason.
Zappala was first appointed to the office during the tough-on-crime 90s, a dark period in criminal justice he’s never left. Black residents are massively over-incarcerated in the county, and Zappala’s office exuberantly pursues drug possession crimes. His capriciousness is legendary—when a Black attorney criticized his office for racial disparities, Zappala announced to the public that he wouldn’t be allowing any plea deals with that attorney’s office. When chief public defender Matt Dugan launched his campaign for this primary, Zappala allegedly extended that same policy for the entire public defender’s office, though someone evidently told him how bad it would look to retaliate against a political opponent using the poor of the county as pawns, and Zappala never copped to it.
Matt Dugan, the county’s top public defender, has been running a stronger, more disciplined operation than Zappala’s challengers of the past, his campaign manager getting replaced after a DUI notwithstanding. Dugan wants to end cash bail, and invest more in diversionary and social services. Dugan has managed to unite not only most progressive politicians in the county, but many less traditionally anti-establishment groups who have a real problem with Zappala as well. He even won the county party endorsement, an absolutely shocking result considering their history.
After, of course, the executive race, this is the second-most high-profile contest in Allegheny County. Dugan as benefitted from over $700,000 in spending from the Pennsylvania Justice and Safety PAC, primarily funded by George Soros. Unusually, they’re not acting as just an outside spending group, but contributing in-kind, which allows them to pay to make and air ads while Dugan still takes responsibility for the content—for instance, this hard-hitting attack ad accusing Zappala’s office of persistent racism, attacks that a more positive candidate like Sara Innamorato wouldn’t have officially gotten her hands dirty with.
It reflects the reality of running against an incumbent: your very presence in the race is a de facto attack on their job performance, and there’s no use running a positive campaign. Even still, Dugan hasn’t launched the most striking negative ad against Zappala; that would be the Working Families Party, who is running a spot saying Zappala “fills our jails with Black children, without making us safer”. Zappala has responded by feeding into conservative fears about Geroge Soros, and running an ad attacking Dugan’s “dark money” campaign, while trying to reassure voters that he isn’t anti-gay or anti-choice, the latter of which is an actual concern, given that he once prosecuted a woman for how she handled her miscarriage.
Court of Common Pleas
Andy Szefi (i) vs. Patrick Sweeney vs. Anthony DeLuca
Andy Szefi is only an appointed incumbent, so this is functionally an open race, and it is very much anyone's game. Patrick Sweeney is a public defender, which is an almost universal good sign in judicial races. Teachers unions, Sunrise, and Stonewall Democrats supporting him is also a good sign, but he's distinctly not of the progressive movement, and there's a reason for that. His big policy idea is to reduce jail overcrowding by not punishing minor parole violations with a stay in jail. It’s a good idea, but small potatoes compared to the power of a countywide judgeship.
He shines mainly in comparison to his opponents: Anthony DeLuca, a former prosecutor and the cousin of the late state Rep. of the same name; and Szefi, former county solicitor. There’s an odd and hard to parse divide here in the county establishment. Szefi has more politicians supporting him, including Rich Fitzgerald, but most of the establishment unions are backing DeLuca. While Szefi has run a pretty straightforward campaign, DeLuca has been up to some tricks, from focusing on abortion rights in a way that seemed to misrepresent the office’s power in the matter, to listing unions that were supporting Sweeney as supporting himself because he was backed by their parent union.
County Council At-Large
Bethany Hallam (i) vs. Joanna Doven
We’ve got one word for you: flop. The Doven campaign has been one massive flop. Bethany Hallam became the leader of progressives in county government four years ago when she unseated incumbent John DeFazio for the Democratic at-large council seat. The establishment faction has been at her throat since then, calling for her resignation over tweets, attempting to censure her for cursing, and generally blocking her bills.
The revenge of the moderates comes in the form of Joanna Doven, a PR professional who worked in the office of former Pittsburgh mayor Luke Ravenstahl. How did her campaign launch go?
After only days in the race, someone tipped off local queer magazine QBurgh about her Twitter history, which included several Tweets in support of Marco Rubio’s presidential bid, and some transphobic statements on top of that. Doven’s response was one for the record books: she took to twitter, and in a 25 tweet thread, accused Hallam of being drunk, “doing egregious, sexual acts live on camera”, sexual assault, dealing drugs, and “sid[ing] with insurrectionists”. She then concluded by defending her record on gay marriage by saying a Pittsburgh gay activist, Jim Sheppard, would vouch for the Ravenstahl administration. When he responded by accusing her, with documentation, of delaying Ravenstahl’s support of gay marriage, she told him to stop “bullying” her, before refusing to respond further. A few days later, she posted that she had a gay friend.
She did eventually provide elaboration on those claims, and it didn’t help her case any, mostly proving that Hallam was, as Hallam has been very open about, seriously addicted to heroin in the early 2010s. She also referred back to that censure attempt, and claimed that Hallam had “assault[ed] somebody on the board verbally”. (The “assault” in question: Hallam calling him a “prick”.) Doven lost the party endorsement 60-40, a margin that feels like it shouldn’t even be possible, but that didn’t prevent her from receiving a large amount of financial support from (say it with us) the building trades unions. County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, who has feuded endlessly with Hallam, is Doven’s highest profile endorsement, though a few other establishment politicians are quietly supporting her as well. Doven’s substance-free campaign may have led to some of the most generic ads we’ve ever seen, but in the closing weeks of the campaign she simply hasn’t managed to make herself visible and noticed in the way she’d hoped. Apparently there’s only so much attention you can get from calling your opponent a drug-dealing rapist.
County Council District 10 (Central and East Pittsburgh, East Hills)
DeWitt Walton (i) vs. Eric Smith vs. Carlos Thomas
District 10 is drawn to elect a Black representative, and includes some of Pittsburgh’s most reliably progressive neighborhoods, such as Oakland and Highland Park, as well as working class suburbs. These are the voters that powered progressive victories of late, including Summer Lee’s win in PA-12 last year. DeWitt Walton has not gotten the memo. Not only has he been a shaky-at-best vote on the County Council, he’s a surefire ally of the establishment, including the Lee race, where he backed Irwin. Lee may have her revenge this year: Unite PA is backing Carlos Thomas, chair of the Pittsburgh NAACP chapter. His progressive campaign may be zero-budget, but has gotten people’s attention, and Walton’s community support isn’t especially deep. Complicating things is 13th Ward Committeeman Eric Smith, who may soak up some non-Walton votes.
County Council District 11 (East and South Pittsburgh)
Paul Klein (i) vs. Dennis McDermott
Paul Klein is part of the county establishment, though his voting record leans more liberal than theirs usually do. That’s probably a result of the district: mostly in the city of Pittsburgh and containing two colleges, it would never tolerate a conservative, but it’s also comprised of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city, including Squirrel Hill, so progressives have yet to get a foothold in there. You’ve gotta start sometime, and Pitt grad student Dennis McDermott is doing just that. He’s an organizer with Food and Water Watch, and has been active in leftist politics for several years now, which has garnered him the support of DSA, Sunrise, Unite!, and of course Food and Water Watch. He’s running on fighting polluters, reforming the county’s jails, and restoring transit services that have been cut. It’s been a quiet race, and most expect Klein to prevail.
Pittsburgh
Controller
Mark DePasquale vs. Rachael Heisler vs. Tracy Royston
With Michael Lamb running for executive, Pittsburgh is going to be electing a new Controller. Most establishment forces, including the county party and organized labor, are supporting Rachael Heisler, the Deputy Controller. Naturally, she’s a good bet for anyone who wants continuity with the previous administration in the office, but her previous job, senior advisor at the (Republican-led) leading deficit hawk group Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, should give people pause about what that continuity would actually mean.
Progressives, including Summer Lee and her Unite! organization, are instead backing Tracy Royston, who served briefly as County Controller, in the period between her old boss Chelsea Wagner being sworn in as judge, and Corey O’Connor being made the permanent appointment. Royston’s shoestring campaign is entirely a volunteer effort, which is probably not enough to compete with the power of a well-funded establishment candidate. It might, however, be enough to compete with the power of two well-funded establishment candidates.
Conservatives could have gotten behind Heisler and guaranteed a business-friendly moderate in the position, but they’ve decided to push their luck with Mark DePasquale instead. DePasquale is perfect for any voter looking to keep the office in the hands of a political dynasty: in addition to Mark, the DePasquales have produced Eugene, who was state Auditor 2013-2021 and a Blue Dog congressional candidate in 2020, and Jeep, a City Councilor 1971-1989 with a well-deserved reputation as an asshole. Mark, funded by the police union and Republican donors, is explicitly promising to be nicer to groups with power and money. He won’t win, but he may peel off enough conservative voters from Heisler to make the threshold for victory something Royston can achieve.
Council District 1 (North Hills)
Bobby Wilson (i) vs. Steven Oberst
Bobby Wilson unseated moderate incumbent Darlene Harris in 2019 and has been a fantastic councilmember ever since, but the moderate faction isn’t going to just give up on the seat, which is how we get tax preparer Steven Oberst, who wants to “Take the handcuffs off the police” so they can “clean up the homeless problem”, the reactionary suburban politics you’d expect, along an aim to make the city’s laws “more fair for the landlords” of which he is one. Not even the building trades are bothering with Oberst, while Wilson has a wide coalition, from progressives to establishment unions.
Council District 5 (Squirrel Hill, Hazelwood)
Barb Warwick (i) vs. Laura “Lita” Brillman
Neither candidate in this primary would be a bad councilmember—Laura “Lita” Brillman is an “unabashedly queer” woman running on a progressive platform, but in her brief time on the Council, Barb Warwick has fully embraced the city’s left, and has been embraced by them in turn—she’s the candidate of DSA, Unite!, WFP, and the SEIU, and Brillman hasn’t made a case for what she’d do better than her.
Council District 7 (Lawrenceville, Highland Park)
Deb Gross (i) vs. Jordan Botta
Neither candidate in this primary would be a bad councilmember—Jordan Botta is a gay man running on a progressive platform, but in her two terms on the Council, Deb Gross has fully embraced the city’s left, and has been embraced in turn—she’s the candidate of Unite!, DSA, WFP, and the SEIU, and Botta hasn’t made a case for what he’d do better than her.
Wait, this all sounds familiar somehow…
Council District 9 (Eastern Pittsburgh)
Khari Mosley vs. Khadijah Harris
Incumbent Ricky Burgess managed to white-knuckle it through a series of increasingly close reelections, but he managed to miss the filing deadline this year, inadvertently creating Pittsburgh’s only open Council seat, a contest between two candidates who were intending to run against him. Far and away the favorite is Khari Mosley, director of 1Hood Power, husband of judge Chelsa Wagner, and friend of Mayor Ed Gainey. Harris Financial Services owner Khadijah Harris is also running, but she faces tremendously steep odds.