Op-Ed: Pennsylvania has a big election, too
The following op-ed by Commonwealth Partners President and CEO Matthew J. Brouillette was originally published in The Wall Street Journal on October 20, 2025.
Before Texas Republicans raised redistricting ire and before California Democrats retaliated, Pennsylvania wrote the book on how to gerrymander.
In 2018 the Democrat-controlled state supreme court threw out a bipartisan congressional map that had been in place for three election cycles and unilaterally redrew congressional districts, handing Democrats a net gain of three seats in the House.
Now three of those justices—Democrats David Wecht, Christine Donohue and Kevin Dougherty—are up for retention on Nov. 4. They are accepting campaign help from Gov. Josh Shapiro, who appears in an ad for them.
A Democrat endorsing others is nothing unusual, but Mr. Shapiro isn’t simply a local Democrat. He’s also an appellant in a high-profile case pending before the justices for whom he is campaigning.
In that case, Mr. Shapiro seeks the authority to levy an energy tax on Pennsylvanians by entering the state into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a carbon cap-and-trade system, without legislative authorization. A lower court said the governor lacks this authority.
Justices Wecht, Dougherty and Donohue will soon rule on Mr. Shapiro’s appeal—once they’re done campaigning alongside him. If you think such a blurring of ethical lines bodes ill only for Pennsylvania, think again. Mr. Shapiro is up for re-election as governor next year, and he is widely considered a contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.
Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court has had a strong voice in the past two presidential elections. In 2020 it disqualified the Green Party candidate from the ballot in what was viewed as a win for Joe Biden. The court subsequently ruled that mail-in ballots received up to three days after Election Day must still be counted, despite existing law to the contrary.
In 2024 the court undertook a last-minute rewrite of state law to order that voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected could still vote provisionally. This prompted an unsuccessful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. In other words, in two consecutive presidential elections, the state Supreme Court has held sway.
In Pennsylvania, sitting justices don’t face typical re-election contests. Instead, they stand for retention, which asks voters to answer yes or no on whether each justice deserves another 10-year term. This year’s elections will determine if these same justices who invite campaign support from a powerful politician with a case before them will be on the court for the next decade.
The Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races and the New York mayoral contest have dominated recent election headlines. But on Nov. 4, pay attention to Pennsylvania. It could be the most significant of all.
Mr. Brouillette is president of Commonwealth Partners Chamber of Entrepreneurs.
Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash.