On the Pennsylvania Senate Special Election

A brief autopsy of everything you won't be surprised about.

I didn’t expect to touch on the special election for Pennsylvania’s 36^th State Senate District, but nevertheless, here I am. First thing up – I’m not here to tee off on anyone in particular, but rather to let you see numbers and let your mind get to work.

Josh Parsons wound up losing the district, which Trump won by roughly 15 points in 2024, to Democrat James Malone by a measly 482 ballots – less than one percentage point. In special elections, there are headwinds present for the party whose president is in the Oval Office. It is a fact of political life, and the only way around those headwinds is to have an overwhelming advantage, like Republicans do in the two Florida districts with U.S. House specials coming up on April 1. Anyone with common sense should find it likely for Parsons to struggle to meet Trump’s margins given the circumstances, but wouldn’t likely bet on him to lose.

The 36^th District is heavily Republican by party registration and lies entirely in Lancaster County (R+19.5% in November 2024), which features a mix of urban, suburban, and rural voters as a whole. Parsons, a Lancaster County commissioner, didn’t post big margins on the Election Day vote, which tells me that even if he should have won, he would have massively underperformed. I’ve heard mixed reports from party brass about candidate quality, but yes, I’m surprised to lose a district with that heavy of a Republican advantage with Trump floating on such a strong approval rating, too.

The entire ordeal is being blamed on low turnout, particularly low Republican turnout. I don’t doubt it, with election fatigue setting in and the other side fired up, so low turnout kept it close enough to produce a mail ballot margin like this:

Malone (D) 8,869

Parsons (R) 3,547

So, Malone took mail ballots by 42.3% when factoring in those that went to the libertarian candidate, or by a margin 482 bigger than Parsons won day-of voting. This is despite mail-in balloting representing less than a quarter of the vote overall.

Audit the Vote PA Analysis

Toni Shuppe’s Audit the Vote Pennsylvania organization created the slide above showing the partisan breakdown of mail ballot requests and returns, and the final mail vote counts in favor of Malone and Parsons. Malone wound up with 1,745 more mail votes than Democrats who returned ballots, and even more votes than Democrat ballots sent out. Parsons, the Republican, had 816 fewer mail votes than GOP ballots returns, and 1,904 fewer than mailed out.

The only way vote tallies like this are possible is for a major Republican defection to Democrats to have occurred, and for Malone to have crushed it with the smidge of non-partisan mail ballots in the field. This is particularly interesting because Pennsylvania continues to have a 2 to 1 switch rate favoring the GOP among voters changing parties with every weekly release of voter registration data statewide. This is a similar situation to that of Kari Lake’s Senate race in 2024, in which Trump won at the top of the ballot statewide, but all those Trump-loving Republicans and outsider supporters supposedly wanted Ruben Gallego and his warmongering, open-borders stance in the Senate. It is a possible outcome, not a likely one, yet very hard to disprove as having occurred since voters are allowed to vote for a candidate of the other party (or split tickets in the case of the Arizona race).

Act 77 legalized no-excuse mail-in balloting in Pennsylvania, which now operates Automatic Voter Registration. In a heavy Trump district, Republicans got 81.3% as many votes as mail ballots returned for their candidate, and Democrats 124.5% for their guy. Keep in mind, Parsons has been elected multiple times by the same voters in Lancaster County, and in November 2023, an off-year election, had the most votes ever for his position. Are votes being tossed in the trash (which would lower turnout, wink wink) over the early voting period, or swapped out? You can’t tell, and it is like that by design. Until voters do away with extended periods of early voting and late counting, and mail balloting is reserved for deployed military members and the legitimately disabled, we will continue to scratch our heads at puzzling outcomes like this. Elections must be transparent, trustworthy, and verifiable by the citizenry, who vote by precinct and tabulate ballots under supervision and with uniform standards.

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Seth Keshel, MBA, is a former Army Captain of Military Intelligence and Afghanistan veteran. His analytical method of election forecasting and analytics is known worldwide, and he has been commended by President Donald J. Trump for his work in the field.