All 3 Democratic Supreme Court justices win retention races
Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht survived an expensive election.
Courtesy of candidates and Commonwealth Media Services -- PA Supreme Court Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht.
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HARRISBURG — Pennsylvanians have voted to retain three Democratic state Supreme Court justices, granting them additional terms on the bench after an unusually contentious, multimillion-dollar election.
Republicans and their allies had hoped to defeat the justices and put their seats on the 2027 ballot, opening a path to flip the court. The Democratic majority has handed down critical rulings over the past decade, upholding mail voting and throwing out a congressional map that it found unfairly benefited the GOP.
Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht were on the ballot Tuesday. They were first elected in 2015 in a sweep that flipped the court from Republican to Democratic control.
The Associated Press called all three races at 9:53 p.m. Unofficial results show their margins are all around 27 points.
Superior Court Judge Alice Dubow and Commonwealth Court Judge Michael Wojcik also won their retention races on Tuesday. The Associated Press called those races shortly after 10 p.m.
Retention elections are typically low-interest, low-spending races that favor incumbents. Only one statewide judge has lost their retention election since 1968, when the state constitution was last updated.
These elections provide justices with another 10 years on the bench. However, Donohue will hit the state’s mandatory retirement age of 75 in two years. That means there will be an open, partisan election to fill the vacancy in 2027. (Chief Justice Debra Todd, a Democrat, and Justice Sallie Mundy, a Republican, will be up for retention that year.)
The last state Supreme Court retention elections were held in 2017, with Todd and Thomas Saylor, a Republican who has since retired, on the ballot. Spending on those races — from the candidates as well as from special interests via independent expenditures — was relatively low, totaling about $850,000.
Spending this year has well exceeded that total.
Campaign finance records show nearly $3.3 million has been spent by Dougherty or on his behalf through in-kind donations of goods or services like mailers through Oct. 20. That total is more than $2 million for Wecht and $1.8 million for Donohue.
In addition, a wide range of special interest groups — including Planned Parenthood’s super PAC, Democratic and Republican committees that receive national money, and a trio of groups tied to the state’s richest man, Jeffrey Yass — have spent at least $9.8 million as of Tuesday evening.
Anti-retention groups urged voters to “term limit the court” and “defend our democracy,” and highlighted high-profile decisions, including a ruling to overturn the conviction of comedian Bill Cosby on a technicality. A Yass-connected group sent out a mailer that accused the court of gerrymandering the state’s congressional map “to help Democrats win,” while highlighting a GOP-drawn map thrown out for unfairly benefiting Republicans.
Groups supporting the justices said that the state Supreme Court would defend reproductive health care in the state, and argued in ads that “billionaires” are “trying to buy our independent and fair courts.”
All three justices were recommended by the Pennsylvania Bar Association, which called them “fair,” “open to consideration of differing perspectives,” and “logical.”
Donohue worked as a civil trial lawyer and commercial litigator before being elected to the Superior Court of Pennsylvania in 2007. The Superior is one of two intermediate appellate courts in the state and largely focuses on criminal, family, and civil cases that are appealed up from the county Courts of Common Pleas.
Since her election to the state Supreme Court in 2015, Donohue has been the primary author on a number of high-profile decisions, including one in 2022 that upheld Pennsylvania’s no-excuse mail voting law, Act 77.
Dougherty began his career as an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia, then worked in private practice before he was appointed to the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas in 2001. He stayed in that position until his election to the state Supreme Court.
During this retention race, he has highlighted his work on a “statewide behavioral health initiative” that involved the establishment, last year, of an Office of Behavioral Health within the courts, and another program that created sensory-friendly courtrooms to accommodate people on the autism spectrum.
Dougherty also has notable family ties. His brother, John Dougherty, was the head of Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers for decades before he was sentenced to six years in prison for bribing a city council member and embezzlement. His son, Sean Dougherty, is a member of the state House, serving northeast Philadelphia.
Wecht served as register of wills and clerk of the Orphans Court of Allegheny County before being elected to the county’s Court of Common Pleas. He was then elected to the Superior Court in 2011 before his election to the Supreme Court.
Among the opinions Wecht has written as a Supreme Court justice were a contentious 2020 ruling upholding Gov. Tom Wolf’s pandemic powers, in which he argued that the “Pennsylvania Constitution does not empower the legislature to act unilaterally to suspend” the state’s disaster law, from which Wolf had claimed his authority.
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